In 1817, police arrested more than twenty pressmen. So began a decades-long run of hundreds of prosecutions against radicals for blasphemy, which prosecutors viewed as an easier sell to middle-class juries than seditious libel, although such charges were usually included. Yet the first accused blasphemer to be brought to trial, William Hone, was no crucifix-smashing rabble rouser. Rather, he was an obscure bookseller and antiquarian with an irreverent sense of humor whose cheap, politically barbed parodies of religion were deemed too incisive for the lower ranks. The Crown badly miscalculated
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