| Sumario: | Between 1818 and 1824, radical printer and publisher Richard Carlile made a determined effort to disseminate copies of Thomas Paine's banned text The Age of Reason in England. Despite strict censorship laws and harsh legal penalties used to curtail previous publishers of this title, Carlile employed a number of creative techniques that kept Paine's deistic writings in print and in circulation during the Regency period. These included republishing public domain court documents and reading The Age of Reason in its entirety into testimony during his trial for seditious libel, making it part of the public record. Copied from trial transcripts and reprinted in cheap pamphlet form, Carlile's editions of The Age of Reason would sell an impressive 20,000 copies in these formats. He managed to provide widescale access to a work that had been successfully suppressed by the British government since its original publication in 1794. My paper argues that Carlile's approach to subverting censorship of The Age of Reason should be viewed as an early instance of what is today known as the mass "leaking" of a restricted document. His unconventional publishing methods, network of collaborators, and use of technology to distribute this work place Carlile at the vanguard of document leaking, making his contribution an important but often overlooked episode in Regency print culture. My study places Carlile's work in a new context and contributes to recent scholarship, including work put forth by Andrew Franta and Russ Castronovo, that seeks to identify parallels between modern surveillance state controversies and similar events from the Romantic period. Like the massive document leaks of our day, Carlile's publication set a new standard for law-breaking innovation in the pirate publication industry.
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