1/2 Penny Middlesex - Newgate / Symonds

Symonds, Winterbotham, Ridgway, and Holt were radical booksellers operating out of London during one of the most politically charged decades in British publishing history. The token was struck in the immediate aftermath of the Treason Trials of 1794, when several of their associates — including members of the London Corresponding Society — faced charges of seditious conspiracy. Advertising oneself on circulating copper during that climate was a deliberate act of commercial defiance.

The Newgate connection is not incidental. Ridgway had actually been imprisoned there in 1793 for publishing Paine's Rights of Man.