April 2026 Update: Re-Discovering Ritson, Reynolds and Robin Hood

AWW:   When we last touched base in 2020, your books on Joseph Ritson and G.W.M. Reynolds was still on the horizon. Both have since come out. I’ll get to Ritson in moment. But first with Reynolds, I see you’ve renamed your blog after him. What is the continuing appeal about Reynolds?

SB:       There were a couple of reasons for the name change. The website was originally titled Here Begynneth a Lytell Geste of Robin Hood… and was devoted solely to essays connected with my PhD research on Robin Hood. Over time, however, my reading and writing began to extend beyond Robin Hood into wider areas of literary and historical interest. Besides this, there were already a good number of excellent websites dedicated exclusively to Robin Hood—your own Bold Outlaw site, the IARHS blog, and the International Robin Hood Bibliography, among others—so a renaming seemed appropriate.

           I chose Reynolds’s News and Miscellany in imitation, and homage, to George W. M. Reynolds. In his own miscellany Reynolds championed many different kinds of writing—fiction, journalism, social commentary, and essays—and that breadth is something I wanted the site to reflect as well.

           Reynolds’s continuing appeal for me lies chiefly in the fact that he used his platform to speak out against social injustice. He was a radical, certainly, but unlike some nineteenth-century thinkers, he did not bury his politics in dense political and economic theory. He addressed common readers directly, and he did so in a form they would actually read and buy: the serialised novel. That combination of literary energy, political commitment, and accessibility is what still makes him such an interesting figure for me and an increasing number of Victorian history and literature scholars.

AWW:     I think some Robin Hood scholars (myself among them) had a sort of quick summary view of Ritson: cantankerous, vegetarian, revolutionary radical. But your Discovering Robin Hood book gave a much more complete picture of the man. I’d have thought a supporter of Thomas Paine and also the French Revolution would have supported the American revolution. But you show how his position shifted over time. What’s the most surprising thing you discovered about Joseph Ritson?

SB:        Yes, the quick summary view is one that I encounter frequently, not only in Robin Hood scholarship but in eighteenth-century studies and Romanticism more broadly. It is not wholly wrong—Ritson was cantankerous, vegetarian, and at times politically radical—but it does not do justice to the complexity of the man.

            One of the most surprising things I discovered was just how reactionary Ritson had been in his earlier life. He came to Thomas Paine quite late, only in 1791, and there is no evidence that he had read Common Sense when it first appeared in 1776. Before that, his politics were in many respects decidedly conservative: he was a Tory, sympathetic to the Jacobite cause, and hostile to the Hanoverian regime. Only gradually did this position soften. By the 1780s he could even speak affectionately of George III as “our gracious King,” and this seems to have gone hand in hand with a slow movement towards Whig politics.

            It was really his visit to France in 1791 that seems to have crystallised a more openly revolutionary outlook. Even then, however, his most fervently radical statements are concentrated in the years 1791 to 1793, after which the tone becomes more muted. And even at his most radical, Ritson was not quite as democratic as we might expect today. He was sceptical of many working-class reformers campaigning for the vote, advised his nephew not to associate with them, and made clear to at least one anti-revolutionary correspondent that, whatever political changes might come, private property should remain intact. He was therefore no proto-socialist, nor anything like a redistributionist in the modern sense.

            But perhaps the greatest irony of all was historical rather than ideological. In his professional capacity as High Bailiff of the Liberty of the Savoy, Ritson was effectively the equivalent of a sheriff. So, we are left with the wonderfully paradoxical fact that one of the very types of men Robin Hood is supposed to have opposed was, in Ritson’s case, also one of the chief preservers of the outlaw’s legend.

AWW:    Ritson and Robin Hood have come back into your professional life. You’re editing a new edition of Joseph Ritson’s Robin Hood collection. One that seems to collate the original 1795 edition with the later editions edited by his nephew Joseph Frank, and add in some ballads left out by Ritson. How did this project come about?

SB:        Robin Hood and Ritson have indeed come back into my professional life in a very significant way. After a PhD on Robin Hood, a trade book on the subject, and then a biography of Ritson himself, I felt that a brief rest was in order. That reset was probably necessary, both intellectually and emotionally. In a sense, I have since “rediscovered” both Robin Hood and Ritson, and my appreciation for each has only grown.

            The idea for the edition first arose in conversation with my late PhD supervisor, Professor Rosemary Mitchell, in 2018. At that point we were discussing possible post-PhD projects. I was weighing up whether to turn my thesis into a monograph, but I was uneasy about doing so. It had served its purpose well as a doctoral thesis, and the argument remains accessible to anyone who wants it, but I was not convinced it should become a monograph simply for the sake of having one. I remember saying to Rosemary that, one day, I would like to produce a critical edition of Ritson’s Robin Hood. Her reply was that such a project would be an immense undertaking—something like a ten-year job. As it turns out, she was almost exactly right: as of 2026 the manuscript has been submitted to Routledge, has passed peer review, and is now awaiting production.

            The project became still more necessary while I was researching Discovering Robin Hood, my biography of Ritson. In the course of that work, I became increasingly aware of the significant textual and ideological differences between the 1795 first edition and the 1832 edition edited by Ritson’s nephew, Joseph Frank. The later edition incorporates expanded headnotes derived from Ritson’s subsequent research, yet Frank also toned down some of his uncle’s anti-religious remarks in both the main text and the notes. It therefore seemed to me that what was needed was a kind of master edition: one that would collate the original 1795 text with the later editorial state, while also restoring ballads omitted by Ritson.

            There was also a practical scholarly reason for doing it. References to “Ritson’s Robin Hood” are far from standardised in modern scholarship: depending on the bibliography, one finds citations to 1795, 1832, 1885, and sometimes even to the 1820 children’s abridgement. A properly edited critical edition seemed necessary not only to clarify the textual history of the work, but also to give scholars a more stable point of reference.

            Finally, I wanted to continue Ritson’s mission of providing ALL the ancient poems, songs, and ballads, so I’ve included any Robin Hood ballads I could find that were not in Ritson’s collection, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as newer Victorian productions that appeared late in the tradition.