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Perhaps the most influential moment in modern letters, the Romantic period not only straddled the age of democratic revolutions, abolition, mass media and industrialization, it ushered in the modern concept of Literature and its social role. Among the most pressing issues of Romantic poetry were those related to representing, speaking for and speaking to an imaginary creature called The People, not wholly commensurate with that other imaginary creature, The Nation or its Citizens. So for instance, the Ballad revival of the period brought into print the ancient songs of “the folk,” but the movement was riddled with fakes and forgeries. Rising literacy inspired working class poets, women and ethnic minorities to reshape the English language through poetry. Yet at the same moment, literary gentlemen began to produce their own version of a marginalized and dispossessed “people.” All these efforts can be set against a State effort to introduce the first national census, to account for all subjects of the crown. A struggle over who “counts” in the realm of literature clashed with fights over political institutions and the new science of political economy.