Copies recorded at Bodley (first four only), BL (unverified); Yale (five issues) and Chapel Hill (five issues).
A sensational anti-Napoleon propaganda news-sheet which describes the supposed horrors committed by the French and which ran for just five issues
Part of an enormous campaign of eye-catching and horror-inducing broadsides and public announcements which appeared in the summer and autumn of 1803 warning the British public of the threat of invasion. There are many hundreds of broadsides but Ring the Alarum Bell is unusual in that it styles itself as a periodical setup to warn and protect the English public. Many of the surviving broadsides and handbills used references to famous literary works in order to powerfully get across the message of the imminent threat of invasion and similarly this periodical takes its title from a line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The two issues offered here focus on the atrocities committed in the Vendée in 1793 and 1794 and state:
“The Republican French Troops ripped up Women’s Bellies and carried Infants on the Points of their Bayonets, violated the young Women, and then cruelly mangled their dead Bodies.”
The slew of broadsides and handbills and this (admittedly) short-lived journal were no doubt designed as much to stamp out domestic revolutionary sentiment as much as they were a genuine warning of the threat of invasion.
Each issue of Ring the Alarum Bell is priced“ 1d-9d. a Dozen, or 6s per Hundred, for Distribution in the Country, which is particularly recommended.
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