Knowable geographies? The reporting of incendiarism in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English provincial press

Extant copies of provincial newspapers are the most important source for understanding both the form and geographies of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century protest. Such sources have, however, received remarkably little in the way of critical reflection. In relation to long-running debates about the supposed transition from overt forms of protest to covert forms in the 1790s such uncritical attention has tended to produce oversimplified geographies and has obscured the complex nature of the resort to protest. This article seeks to shed light onto these issues through the specific case-study of arson, the most important of all forms of covert protest. Through an examination of fire pathology, the mechanics of reporting, geographies of newspaper publishing, and the spatialities of reporting, this article suggests that histories of arson are flawed not only because of the difficulty in determining the precise cause of fires but also because of the complex webs of newspaper publication and reporting which left large areas of countryside under-or un-reported.