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It is high treason in British law to imagine the king's death. But after the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, everyone in Britain must have found themselves imagining that the same fate might befall George III. How easy was it to distinguish between fantasising about the death of George and imagining it, in the legal sense of intending or designing? John Barrell examines this question in the context of the political trials of the mid-1790s and the controversies they generated. He shows how the law of treason was adapted in the years following Louis's death to punish what was acknowledged to be a "modern" form of treason unheard of when the law had been framed. The result, he argues, was the invention of a new and imaginary reading, a "figurative" treason, by which the question of who was imagining the king's death, the supposed traitors or those who charged them with treason, became inseparable.
Capturing Dorothy Hartley’s point that there was "a dislocation of the food supply" during the Industrial Revolution, which occurred through the enclosure movement, the poor laws, the game and corn laws (qtd. in Consuming Fictions 8), this section would begin with the date of Thomas Malthus’s "Principle of Population" (1798) to capture voices invoked during the lead up to the Reform Bill of 1832.