Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism 9780804787307

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Five Long Winters

Five Long Winters the trials of british romanticism

John Bugg

s ta n f o rd u n i ve r s i t y p re s s s ta n f o rd , c a l i f o r n i a

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bugg, John W., 1972- author. Five long winters : the trials of British Romanticism / John Bugg. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-8510-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 2. Politics and literature—­England—History—18th century. 3. Authors, English—18th century— Political and social views. 4. Romanticism—England. 5. Great Britain—Politics and government—1789–1820. I. Title. PR448.P6B84 2013 820.9'35841073--dc23 2013026238 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/14 Adobe Garamond Pro

This book is dedicated to my mother, Geraldine O’Shea.

Contents

Figures

ix

Acknowledgments

xi



Introduction: The Repressive 1790s



1. Plots Discovered: Coleridge, Godwin, and the 1795 Gagging Acts

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2. Close Confinement: John Thelwall and the Romantic Prison 

49

3. Hell Broth: The Trials of Benjamin Flower 

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1

4. “By force, or openly, what could be done?”: Godwin, Smith, Wollstonecraft, and the Gagging Acts Novel

109

5. “I cannot tell”: Wordsworth’s Gagging Acts

137

Afterword

167

Notes

173

Bibliography

215

Index

239

Figures

1. The Royal Extinguisher or Gulliver Putting out the Patriots of Lilliput!!!, by Isaac Cruikshank, 1 December 1795

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2. The Modern Hercules or A Finishing Blow for Poor John Bull, by West, 17 November 1795

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3. Talk of an Ostrich! an Ostrich is nothing to him; Johnny Bull will swallow any thing!!, by Isaac Cruikshank, 13 December 1795

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4. Retribution; Tarring & Feathering; or the Patriots Revenge, by James Gillray, 26 November 1795 

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5. A Lock’d Jaw for John Bull, by West, 23 November 1795 

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6. “Order for permitting John Thelwall the use of Paper Pens Ink and Books,” 30 May 1794

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7. Front page of the Cambridge Intelligencer, 27 July 1793

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8. MUM!, by William O’Keefe, 3 December 1795

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9. “Wollstonecraft.” Detail, letter from Horace Walpole to Hannah More, 24 January 1795 10. London Corresponding Society, alarm’d,—Vide, Guilty Consciences, by James Gillray, 20 April 1798

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Acknowledgments

My greatest debt is to Susan Wolfson, whose influence on this book’s argument, and on my ways of thinking and writing, is evident on every page. Starry Schor guided my development as a critic, both through the model of her own work and through the incisive feedback she provided. At Princeton it was also my pleasure to work with Eduardo Cadava, Uli Knoepflmacher, Deborah Nord, Jeff Nunokawa, and Tim Watson, among many others. Work on this book was supported by a fellowship at the Columbia University Society of Fellows in the Humanities, where I benefited from interdisciplinary conversations with Eileen Gillooly, Kevin Lamb, Will Slauter, David Novak, Joanne van der Woude, and (too briefly) Karl Kroeber. I am also grateful to Saree Makdisi and Michael Meranze for inviting me to share parts of my first chapter at the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18thCentury Studies. Kenneth R. Johnston has generously exchanged work on Pitt-era Britain with me and has provided invaluable feedback, as have ­Judith Thompson, Jon Mee, and Peter Manning. I have also benefited from conversations with Jack Cragwall, Nick Roe, Mark Canuel, Mark Crosby, Alan Vardy, and David Fallon. My colleagues in the English Department at Fordham University have been instrumental in the completion of this book. I am especially thankful to Sarah Zimmerman for the care and insight with which she read and commented on various sections. I am also personally and professionally grateful to Eva Badowska, Frank Boyle, Ed Cahill, Lenny Cassuto, Daniel Contreras, Heather Dubrow, Mary Erler, Maria Farland, Moshe Gold, Chris GoGwilt, Susan Greenfield, Connie Hassett, Glenn Hendler, Julie Kim, Lawrence Kramer, Stuart Sherman, Phil Sicker, Vlasta Vranjes, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne. My students at Fordham, both undergraduate and graduate, have provided me with an opportunity to think more broadly and rigorously about the Romantic era, and I have benefited from their questions,

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ideas, and the many helpful discussions we have shared. I am also grateful for the help of wonderful research assistants Rachael Hilliard, Mary Anne Myers, Liz Porter, and James Van Wyck. Archivists provided generous help at various stages of this project, including Elizabeth Denlinger and Charles Carter at the New York Public Library’s Pforzheimer Collection, Susan Odell Walker at Yale’s Lewis Walpole Library, John Logan at Princeton’s Firestone Library, Maria Molestina at the Pierpont Morgan Library, and Jeff Cowton at the Wordsworth Trust, as well as the research librarians at the Bodleian Library, the Huntington Library, Cambridge University Library, the British Library, the National Archives (Kew), the Friends House Library (London), and the public records offices of Cambridgeshire, Hampshire, Manchester, Nottinghamshire, Sheffield, Shropshire, Perth, and Worcestershire. It has been a pleasure to work with Emily-Jane Cohen and Emma S. Harper at Stanford University Press. For the time and resources necessary to research and write Five Long Winters, I am grateful for faculty fellowships from both Fordham University and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Finally, I wish to thank Keri Walsh, my best reader, my darling, my love. An earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared in European Romantic Review 20.1 (2009): 37–56. I wish to thank Taylor & Francis, Ltd. for permission to reprint material from this article.

Five Long Winters

Introduction The Repressive 1790s

Five Long Winters argues that the repressions of the government of William Pitt had a constitutive role in the formation of early Romantic-era writing. At stake in my argument is a reinvestigation of a model of the period’s literary history that might be called the excitement-to-apostasy arc: the notion that the outbreak of the French Revolution inspired a burst of democratic energy in British culture in the early 1790s, but that this excitement speedily dissipated as the Parisian scene grew violent, turning most supporters of the revolution into its opponents with the guillotining of King Louis XVI in January 1793. In this narrative, those hardy souls who continued to support the revolutionary cause went underground, while many familiar writers turned to aesthetic escapism or reactionary conservatism. But this account presupposes a climate in which writers felt able to write (and find publishers for) anything they pleased, and that within this Habermasian dream a wide swath of previously progressive writers suddenly chose to abandon their political ideals. I reassess this version of literary history both for what it misses and for what it loses. What it misses is the counterevidence: few Romantic-era writers changed their thoughts about reform politics with the execution of Louis XVI. Many were wary of

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the new Jacobin leaders in France, but they did not alter their progressive principles, nor did they abandon their desire for reform at home. What did shift was the manner of their public discourse: the most important political change that British writing underwent in the 1790s was in its form, and it is this change that I chronicle. This brings me to what has been lost. Both well- and lesser-known writers of the period, while publishing work that cautiously engaged the historical moment, were more forthcoming about their sustained political commitments in their diaries, letters, and other unpublished writing. This archive steadily beats with the democratic pulse of the early 1790s, and casts a powerful illumination on the work that these authors did choose to publish during the latter half of the decade. The exclamations of fear, the confessions of self-censorship, the urgings to caution in these manuscripts help us to recognize the political charge of the poetics of gagging that marks so much early Romantic-era writing, from provincial journalism to the high lyric mode. For a long while the notion that Romantic poetry elides its political moment focused new historicist criticism, but new attention to the repressions of the British government, and to the broader rise of counterrevolutionary pressure as the 1790s unfolded, has asked us to think about the lives and works of early Romantic writers in a new way. Kenneth R. Johnston, for instance, has been tracking a “lost generation” of authors, scientists, educators, political activists, and others whose lives were forever changed (and in some cases ended) by government repression and its attendant cultural pressures.1 There have been individual studies of most of these “lost” figures, Johnston notes, but to comprehend the full reach of Pittite repression we must measure the “aggregate of individual consequences” by collecting their stories into a generational portrait.2 This attention to the cultural consequences of Pitt’s “Reign of Terror” has not come out of nowhere. Although in The Making of the English Working Class E. P. Thompson’s quarry was radical will rather than its petrification—and so from this perspective he downplayed the effectiveness of the repressions of the Pitt ministry—in later reflections he came to focus on the force and impact of state repression.3 Thompson’s “­Disenchantment or Default?” revised his earlier skepticism, for instance, about Coleridge’s reason for refusing to help John Thelwall find a cottage at Nether Stowey. Pointing to Coleridge’s explanation that “even riots & dangerous riots might be the consequence” if Thelwall were to move to the West Country, Thompson wryly comments that “the author of a recent book, The Making of the English Working Class, tends to sneer at the

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sincerity of Coleridge’s professions at this point. If he had speculated less, and carried his research a little further, he would have been of a different opinion. Coleridge was sincere. The riots could have happened.”4 Taking seriously the testimonies of Coleridge and many others that they were living amidst intense political pressure, Kenneth Johnston, John Barrell, Nicholas Roe, Judith Thompson, Michael Scrivener, and others have brought fresh attention to the cultural significance of the coercions and persecutions of the Pitt ministry.5 Five Long Winters joins this critical effort, arguing that in order to account for the presence in early Romantic writing of as much silence as there is speech, as much fragmentation and stuttering as there is transcendence, we need to shift our attention to the second half of the decade, from the era of Paine’s Rights of Man to the era of the Gagging Acts. We find a reading lesson for this mode of attention in political prisoner John Augustus Bonney’s poem “Ode to Liberty,” which he composed while in solitary confinement in the Tower in 1794.6 Bonney writes in the voice of a bird singing of revelation and concealment: I mourn’d all night, and chirp’d the live long day. Nor, cruel mortals, think the strains I sung, Were such as fall from pleasure’s blissful tongue: E’en when my notes in sweetest accent spoke, They veil’d a heart oppress’d and almost broke. (66–70)

Bonney’s rhyme of “broke” and “spoke” shows how a break in speech can carry a poetics of its own. Even if the song were to cease, the very silence carries meaning: Sometimes the relic of a former note, May faintly issue from his joyless throat, But soon “expressive silence” will declare, He wants his native freedom of the air. (89–92)

With the quotation marks Bonney may be recruiting to his plight James Thomson’s paradox of “expressive silence” from his 1730 “Hymn” (itself an echo of Milton’s “darkness visible”) to claim for silence the status of language. But the immediate reference is William Godwin’s novel Caleb ­Williams, published just as Bonney and his fellow activists were being hauled off to jail—or as Godwin put it, “‘Caleb Williams’ made his first appearance in the world in the same month in which the sanguinary plot broke

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out against the liberties of Englishmen.”7 The phrase “expressive silence” appears in Godwin’s novel as Caleb comes to a recognition about his fate amidst the unrelenting surveillance of Ferdinand Falkland. “I was his prisoner,” Caleb realizes, “and what a prisoner! All my actions observed; all my gestures marked. I could move neither to the right nor the left, but the eye of my keeper was upon me.”8 Scrambling for self-direction amidst the terror of this eye, Caleb comes across Falkland’s brother-in-law Forester, who, Caleb reports, “observed a strange distance in my behaviour, and in his goodnatured, rough way reproached me for it.” But if Forester’s eye is benign, Caleb has already learned to deflect any manner of observation: “I could only answer with a gloomy look of mysterious import, and a mournful and expressive silence.”9 This is not foundational “silence,” but a communicated reticence full of import, and an implied backstory for the mournful gloom. Setting the phrase “expressive silence” in one scene (the plight of a songbird, yearning for freedom), and releasing it through quotations into Godwin’s surveillance nightmare, Bonney sketches the plight of political prisoners in their need for communicatory caution. Reverberating with his own attempts to find a form of self-expression from his prison cell, Bonney’s charge that we recognize and listen to “expressive silence” guides my investigation in Five Long Winters of the forms of literary expression that developed across the repressive 1790s. My book’s title comes from Wordsworth’s subjective chronometry in the opening lines of “Tintern Abbey,” as he writes that although it has been only “five summers” since he last visited the Wye valley, this time has passed with the feeling of “five long winters.” These lines are familiar for their collation of Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic subjectivism, but they also register a shared epochal sense of the painful passage of time in an era of political repression. In my focus on this repressive milieu, and on the importance of discourses of sedition and treason in particular, the way to my study has been paved in part by John Barrell’s Imagining the King’s Death. With detailed attention to the 1794 treason trials, Barrell situates the Romantic keyword “imagination” within debates about what could be named treasonous activity according to the ambiguities of the 1351 treason statute (still active during the 1794 trials). Barrell exposes a culture of literary interpretation in the courtroom, with the defense ingeniously arguing that by reading “treason” where none was explicit, it was the prosecution that was guilty of “imagining” the king’s death. Thomas Erskine managed by such arguments to win acquittals for the activists charged with high treason in 1794. Barrell

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closes his study with the appearance of the 1795 Gagging Acts, legislation intended to shut the loopholes of the 1351 treason law. When Barrell brings down the curtain in late 1795, the play of opposition would seem to be over, but there is an important sequel that is the focus of my study: if Thompson, Barrell, and others have taught us about the raucous radicalism of the first half of the decade, other forms of politically engaged writing emerged in the following years, including ironic celebrations of the Pitt ministry, the circulation of political keywords across an array of ostensibly nonpolitical genres, and the recurrence of tropes of gagging and silencing, broken communication, and fractured speech. The five long winters at the century’s end are marked by an aesthetic of suppressed communication, one registered in both metaphoric and iterative modes, as writers invented various ways to depict politically enforced “silence.” Critical history has hardly overlooked the concept of silence in ­Romantic-era writing. The period’s expressions of silence have most often been read as gestures of the ineffable (whether theological, ontological, or linguistic), which in Mario Praz’s famous 1933 account becomes a virtual synonym for Romanticism itself: The essence of Romanticism consequently comes to consist in that which cannot be described . . . the poet ecstatic in front of a forever blank page, the musician who listens to the prodigious concerts of his soul without attempting to translate them into notes. . . . How many times has the magic of the ineffable been celebrated, from Keats, with his “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter” to Maeterlinck, with his theory that silence is more musical than any sound.10

In the magic of the ineffable we can make out something of T. E. Hulme’s notion of Romanticism as “spilt religion,” in this case with the discourse of ineffable divinity transposed onto a secular metaphysics of otherworld­ liness.11 The silences of Wordsworth, writes Paul de Man of “The Boy of Winander,” “have a strangely superhuman quality as if they, too, could only occur on the far side of death.”12 Deconstruction’s pursuit of the relationship between ontological and linguistic thresholds developed a continuum of silence as the sign of the ontologically or linguistically unsayable. This version of Romantic silence, brilliantly studied by David Ferry, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, Frances Ferguson, and others, is less my concern in Five Long Winters than socially embedded silence, formations and portrayals of interruptions in social communication. Attention to a

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historically situated version of Romantic silence was initiated by readings of what several critics found to be denials or displacements of politics in a cluster of canonical Romantic works. Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology, Marjorie Levinson’s Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems, David Simpson’s Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination, and Alan Liu’s Wordsworth: The Sense of History sought to expose a “Romantic ideology” that operates through a rhetoric of evasion and a poetics of transcendence.13 While I share historical terrain with much of this work, my study is guided by a conviction that the aesthetic practices of the 1790s, especially the politics of form, are not a garrison from social woes but an arena of engagement. Reports of the “apostasy” of writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Godwin—their turn from radical politics to the consolations of nature and the lyric, and to increasingly reactionary positions—are familiar to us, but what has been missed is the shaping influence of the Pitt ministry’s program of surveillance, intimidation, and prosecution. It is against the severity of repression, and not the myths of transcendence, that we need to measure the poetics of silence in Pitt-era literary culture. Rather than enactments of ontological or linguistic thresholds, or betrayals of political apostasy, the silences I trace are dramatically contingent, socially implicated, and deeply purposeful. This mode of silence in ­Romantic-era writing forms a grammar of its own, and in the chapters that follow I examine a variety of figurations of performed or registered breakdowns in communication. Perhaps most directly related to the conditions of repression are representations of characters who are afraid to speak, who have stories to tell but are wary of telling them. Second, and closely allied to these studies of fear, are works in which characters or narrators make silence itself the focus of their discourse. Third, incorporating these two modes of silence but extending into other scenarios we find dramatic depictions of people who cannot seem to understand one another—the curious adult-child dialogue in Wordsworth’s “Anecdote for Fathers,” for instance. Finally, we have moments in which alternative modes of communication become necessary, when gestures or non-verbal utterances take the place of linguistic exchange. These four overlapping strategies for inscribing social silence form a poetics of gagging that sketches the national climate as the repressive atmosphere intensified across the 1790s. This process of intensification did not follow a clean line of acceleration, though there was a gradual accretion of repressive initiatives across the decade. The inaugural action was the May 1792 Royal Proclamation Against

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Seditious Writings, issued to prevent the distribution of “wicked and seditious” material, otherwise known as Paine’s Rights of Man. Not a new piece of legislation, the Proclamation was rather an official broadcast in parliament (and widely published) that “divers wicked and seditious writings have been printed, published, and industriously dispersed, tending to invite tumult and disorder.” Local magistrates were ordered to discover “the authors and printers of such wicked and seditious writings.”14 The Proclamation did have juridical consequences, including the arrest and imprisonment of several booksellers, but its primary function, as a nonlegislative initiative, was to effect social division by generating anti-democratic sentiment and forcing local authorities to take action against their own neighbors. It was time to choose sides. This dynamic is shown as neighborly intervention in Hannah More’s Village Politics (1792), in which a tradesman who has been reading Paine is convinced by his loyalist friend to abandon the cause of democracy. The more spectacular, real-life version of this effort came in the orchestrated burning of Paine effigies in late 1792 and early 1793. Staged as community purification rituals, these bonfires served to warn the gathered crowds about the consequences of democratic thought, as though Paine’s effigy were a criminal swinging on the gallows. The message was not subtle. “At Felton,” Frank O’Gorman reports, “the effigy was hung with an obliging sign: ‘Tom Paine, a sower of sedition and libeller of our happy and enjoyed Constitution—Britons beware of his democratic principles and avoid his merited fate.’”15 The Proclamation, More’s Village Politics, the effigy burnings: all were part of an effort to alienate democratic sentiment, an effort that defined the ministry’s legislative strikes as the decade unfolded. To examine the bundle of repressive legislation passed across the 1790s is to find an early instance of what Jürgen Habermas has described as the technologies of manufactured consent characteristic not of the eighteenth century but of modernity. For Habermas, it was eighteenth-century Britain that famously modeled an ideal public sphere, in which the rational-critical debate that flourished in extraparliamentary venues helped to steer government decisions.16 But as I discuss in Chapter 3 (on newspaper culture), Habermas’s historical arc elides the four decades between the French Revolution and the Reform Act—the repressions of the Pitt era are especially troublesome, even for Habermas’s stylized account, for here we see a determined and unrelenting effort to manufacture consent at the heart of the era Habermas means to enshrine against a fallen modernity.

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In Keywords, Raymond Williams reminds us that “consensus,” from the Latin con + sentire, implies the sense of a shared feeling, a common sentiment.17 This notion of national consensus guides Linda Colley’s argument in Britons that against the hostilities of the French and under the paternal eye of aristocracy the British public came to feel together as a nation.18 ­Colley’s version of national self-conception transposes Benedict Anderson’s paradigm from the realm of mediated contemporaneity to that of shared threat, with Britain as a fortress-nation forged by the Napoleonic wars.19 The force and frequency of state engineering behind this “shared feeling,” however, should not be underestimated. Colley might show us John Bull waving a flag, but we must not occlude the bayonet at his back. The government’s legislative guarantors of consensus took several forms across the decade. The 1793 Aliens Act, aimed at tracking foreigners who entered the country, brought the program of social bifurcation to the level of citizenship.20 Shades of anti-Gallicism also fell across the 1793 Traitorous Correspondence Act, which was meant to restrict and monitor commerce between Britain and France, though as Mary Favret points out, the term “correspondence” in its title was exploited by the loyalist press to generate alarm over Britain’s internal enemies.21 The Public Advertiser proclaimed that the bill’s introduction warranted its urgency: “This measure is a proof that Ministers are vigilant at their posts; and we doubt not that they have good reasons for what they are about, as there are wretches in this country who would seize all opportunities in order to furnish our foes with intelligence.”22 Favret suggests that this strategic misreading of “correspondence” may have been part of the ministry’s larger intent: “Fox and others fumed that the name was chosen for its effect on the people, ‘with no other view than to disseminate through the country false and injurious ideas of the existence of a correspondence between some persons and France.’”23 These initial strikes in 1792–3 sought to polarize political opinion by inculcating the belief that “wretches,” disenchanted and revolutionized, were ready to betray their own nation. All was now in place for the momentous suspension of habeas corpus in the spring of 1794. This was the boldest repressive measure thus far, and it was received in its full historic and symbolic import. Though versions of the protection offered by the writ of habeas corpus were popularly traced back to the Magna Carta, its precise bearing on juridical process was first registered in the 1679 Habeas Corpus Act, which ensured that to keep a suspect in custody a warrant must be made available that gave the cause of and evidence for the arrest.24 By the eighteenth century, habeas corpus was known

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variously as the Great Writ of Liberty and the Palladium of Liberty and was viewed (as it is today) as the foundational and always tender meeting place of personal liberty and state security. One nineteenth-century account testifies to the public fear occasioned by the 1794 suspension: [A]ny subject could now be arrested on suspicion of treasonable practices, without specific charge or proof of guilt: his accusers were unknown; and in vain might he demand public accusation and trial. Spies and treacherous accomplices, however circumstantial in their narratives to secretaries of state and law officers, shrank from the witness-box; and their victims rotted in jail.25

This summary captures the widespread concern that informers could always be found to fling charges but not necessarily to testify in court—hence the ease of imprisonment, and with habeas corpus suspended, the difficulty of exoneration. The sense of peril created by this dynamic heightened attention to what Whig parliamentarian and playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan in the Commons called “the most destructive of all weapons, the perjured tongues of spies and informers.”26 For John Thelwall, lecturing after his acquittal and release from prison, the danger was clear: “[E]very key hole is an informer, and every cupboard ought to be searched, before you un­bosom the painful story of your wrongs, lest you should be brought unhappily within the iron fangs of—LAW (I think they call it) not for what you have uttered only, but for what the perjured hirelings by whom we are so frequently surrounded, may think fit to lay, upon the slightest suggestion, to your charge.”27 If the immediate effect of the suspension of habeas corpus was to allow the ministry to hold Thelwall, Hardy, Bonney, and other reform leaders in prison indefinitely, in broader terms it eroded Britons’ sense of both personal liberty and social trust. Concern quickly spread, and people became nervous about the language they used. William Words­worth’s older brother, London lawyer Richard Wordsworth, wrote to warn the poet to “be cautious in writing or expressing your political opinions. By the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Acts the Ministers have great p ­ owers.”28 Exchanging ideas a few weeks later with William Matthews about the prospect of launching a new opposition periodical, William Wordsworth revealed that the suspension was still on his mind: “[A]mongst the partizans of this war, and of the suspensions of the habeas corpus act, amongst the mighty class of selfish alarmists, we cannot obtain a single friend.”29 Habeas corpus itself, meanwhile, had no dearth of friends: a cluster of publications addressed the suspension, offering historical overviews, present pleas, and terrifying

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prophesies.30 From his cell in the Tower, and already vexed from his fruitless requests to have the charges against him presented in writing, Bonney composed “Suspension,” a poem that roams across the word’s multiple referents: suspended law, prisoners “suspended” in their elevated cells to warn the public, lives suspended at the whim of ministers. This initial burst of attention to habeas corpus emerged with the 1794 suspension, and further outrage greeted the ministry’s proposal to extend it in 1795.31 The acquittals in the 1794 treason trials showed that no dark plot to overawe the government was afoot. By what jurisprudence, then, could an extension be argued? This was the keynote of a forceful essay in The Cabinet, a reform journal published out of Norwich. Though the 1794 acquittals were widely cheered and brought new energy to the reform movement, The Cabinet meditated in more sober terms on the damage wrought in the lives of the accused, who were now, as Secretary at War William Windham had sneered, little more than “acquitted felons.” “What rational hope of success can the ‘acquitted felon’ entertain,” The Cabinet asked, “ruined in his business by a long imprisonment, beggared by the expenses of a long trial? and where are his means to carry on a legal conflict with administration, which has the secret committee of both houses of parliament to draw its plea of justification, and the treasury to pay the costs and damages?”32 At stake was the suspension of the entire judicial process—“when the tribunals of justice are closed, when the voice of the law is forbidden to speak, and government becomes the fabricator of the crime”—and in this sense every Briton had become if not an acquitted then an imminent felon: “If ministers will listen to the perjured tale of spies and informers, or if they think proper to charge me with treason, what security have I against their designs?”33 The Cabinet was startled by what it perceived to be the public’s apparent timorousness and complaisance: “To be terrified at the slightest movement of liberty, and to view with indifference the widest stretch of power, seems to be the characteristic of modern Englishmen.” This portrait of a government claiming the “widest stretch of power” uncannily forecast the legal and cultural storm just then on the horizon. In response to the 1794 acquittals and the subsequent resurgence of the democratic movement, in the fall of 1795 the ministry introduced the Treasonable and Seditious Practices Bills (popularly known as the “Gagging Acts”). This legislation was greeted as a new level of draconianism by radicals, moderates, and even a few members of Pitt’s own party. The 1795 Gagging Acts mark a historical caesura, as the

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loud Paineite radicalism of the first half of the decade gave way to a period of nervous and muffled discourse, one that lasted until the brief respite provided by the stirrings of Amiens and the resignation of Pitt at the dawn of the nineteenth century.34 Even as the Gagging Acts escalated the climate of fear, the ministry continued to pass further legislation, both to contain local eruptions of unrest and to prevent larger accumulations of oppositional sentiment. Of particular force were laws relating to the military, meant to ensure that what Shelley would later prophesy in The Mask of Anarchy—that day when the military “turns to those who would be free” and joins the people against governmental force—would never arrive. Paramount was the Incitement to Mutiny Act, a response to the 1797 naval mutinies at Spithead and Nore. Its full title, “An Act for the better Prevention and Punishment of Attempts to seduce Persons serving in His Majesty’s Forces by Sea or Land from their Duty and Allegiance to His Majesty, or to incite them to Mutiny or Disobedience,” indicates the law’s intention to inoculate the military against the spread of radical discourse from organizations such as the London Corresponding Society (LCS) and the United Englishmen.35 This act was part of a broad effort to cordon off soldiers from civilians, an intent dramatically materialized in the ministry’s barracks-building program from 1792 onward (military quarters were set up near industrial centers to prevent or manage popular unrest while keeping the soldiers isolated from the people). Of the cluster of other laws meant to forestall Shelley’s prophesy, most effective in manufacturing consent was the 1798 Defence of the Realm Act, which authorized the government publicly to drum up a list, community by community, of all those willing to serve in the military in the event of an invasion.36 E. P. Thompson has said of this moment that when Wordsworth and Coleridge left Britain for Germany in September 1798 “they were ­hopping the draft.”37 Thompson’s canny quip misses an important aspect of the legislation, however: this was specifically not a draft. Rather than mandating military participation, the government asked for “volunteers” willing to fight should an invasion occur. The Defence of the Realm Act, in other words, was a public inquiry into loyalty, and an attempt to further the social marginalization of internal dissent, rather than a straightforward preparation of a ready defense. The capstone of the government’s program of consensus management came in a cluster of acts targeted at political sociation passed at the decade’s end. In 1799, the Act for the More Effective Suppression of Societies Established for Seditious and Treasonable Purposes (some-

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times referred to as the Corresponding Societies Act or Unlawful Societies Act) aimed to stamp out what was left of the LCS. It applied not only to members of political societies, but of equal importance, to any person who “shall directly or indirectly maintain correspondence or intercourse with any such society or club, or with any committee or delegate, representative or missionary, or with any officer or member thereof.”38 Members of political societies had become internal exiles. Meanwhile, to monitor workingclass collectivities specifically, the ministry brought in the “Combination Acts” of 1799 and 1800, which outlawed labor organization. How necessary was this battery of legislation? Historians have debated the question of just how “radical” Britons were in the years following the French Revolution, and correspondingly, how commensurate the government’s counterrevolutionary efforts were.39 Assessments of the validity and sincerity of the Pitt ministry’s fears and motivations will continue, for as Barrell has observed, there seem to have been both “panic stricken” and “coldly malevolent” versions of counterrevolutionary alarm across the 1790s, and a plausible case can be made for either interpretation.40 Unless a box of wildly uncircumspect letters is pulled from the floorboards of 10 Downing Street, we cannot know for certain the precise calculations behind the government’s repressive program. But this is not my concern. My remit is the cultural reverberations of the actions that the government did take, actions that altered the course of British literary history. What matters for literature is that a generation of authors felt the force of “Pitt’s Terror,” and across the decade they watched in horror as writers, printers, and booksellers were arrested, imprisoned, transported, and bankrupted, and they shaped their writing, thematically and formally, under these circumstances. The government’s actions were both less organized and more destructive than has often been assumed, and it was this mix of incompetence and wrath that rendered the threat so unnerving. High-profile writers and activists were arrested for casual words tossed off in pubs or coffee shops. At other times, fiery speeches or pamphlets passed by without prosecution. There seemed no coherent pattern in the ministry’s actions, and so no clear sense of how daring one’s language could be: any politically engaged or even politically inflected discourse could lead one to prison. My examination of the formations of literary culture in this chilling atmosphere shares with studies of censorship history an interest in how authors variously shape their works during eras of severe repression. Literary criticism has tended to regard censorship in one of two ways, guided either

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by Whiggish notions of a long-historical struggle between repression and liberty, or more recently, by a sense of the instability of the distinction between censor and critic. The classic statement of the traditional approach is F. S. Siebert’s Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776: The Rise and Decline of Government Controls. As his subtitle indicates, Siebert’s argument follows a generally progressivist narrative of gradual liberal amelioration. The focus on an agon between force and freedom in works such as Siebert’s has brought with it a catalogue of the statutes, office holders, and victims of censorship: the Star Chamber’s grotesque punishments of William Prynne, Václav Havel’s prison letters, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. A second approach to censorship emerged in the mid-1980s to question the traditional mode’s circumscription to cases of direct prohibition. The “new censorship studies” drew on Michel Foucault’s model of power (especially its mid-1970s version in Discipline and Punish) to comprehend censorship in terms of a broad dispersal of force that restricts discourse in myriad ways. Along the same lines, Pierre Bourdieu shifted the focus from legislation to field, arguing that censorship preconditions any discursive event, and so we need not myopically concentrate on “explicit prohibitions, imposed and sanctioned by institutional authority” because censorship is itself “constituted by the very structure of the field in which the discourse is produced and circulates.”41 For British literary studies, Annabel Patterson’s Censorship and Interpretation has been most influential in the emergence of this new approach. Attending less to the “law and the formal institutions and mechanisms whereby the press, or the pulpit, or the theatrical companies were supposed to be made subject to state control,” Patterson turned instead to study “censorship in the broadest sense, as a cultural experience of limitation and threat, on the writerly psyche and its products.”42 Patterson’s work has been followed by a flowering of critical attention to censorship, some of which goes further to distance itself from “old” censorship studies by critiquing the naïveté of any attempt to identify specific censoring agents.43 As Michael Holquist has put it, to be “for or against censorship as such is to assume a freedom no one has. Censorship is.”44 Yet for all its power of sociological analysis, this notion of censorship as a fully dispersed power determinative of all discourse risks ignoring differences of degree and kind in the work of regulation. Patterson herself cautioned against the costs of such dissolution when she later addressed Hans-Georg Gadamer’s claim in Truth and Method that severe political repression differs only in degree from the constraints faced by writers always

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and everywhere, the “intentional or unintentional pressure that society and public opinion exercise on human thought.”45 Wary of such flattening, Patterson warned that “however much we have learned about the modern tyranny of opinion, about hegemony, or the workings of the unconscious, this does not permit us to forget that there have been and continue to be times and places” in which “political censorship is so pervasive that it rises to the forefront, at least among intellectuals and to an extent all literate people, as the central problem of consciousness and communication.”46 Patterson’s caution is worth keeping in mind. As the chapters that follow make clear, I share with the new censorship studies a sense that there is more to the pressure on discourse than an index librorum prohibitorum, and that restrictions on British writing did not disappear in 1695 with the lapsing of the Licensing Act. While I primarily focus on authors who were documented targets of state surveillance and prosecution, my larger claim for repression’s constitutive role in early Romantic writing depends on a conception of censorship as profoundly reticulated. But I also agree with Patterson’s insistence that reticulation need not imply dissolution. If the older approach to censorship has become unfashionable, its concerns are not dispensable. It is important to recognize that constraint on discourse is not always and only an affair of ontology. There are times and places in which people go to jail for what they write. The birth of British Romanticism was one. Working with the insights of both traditional and new censorship studies, I attend to important pieces of legislation as well as to the dispersed practices and techniques that extend the province of what we understand as regulated discourse. The broad expanse of this regulation in the 1790s is illustrated by the cases of Gilbert Wakefield and William Cowper, a public instance of the brutal punishment of an oppositional writer on the one hand, and an episode of self-silencing known only to a handful of people until its recovery in the twentieth century on the other. Wakefield’s fiery opposition and Cowper’s studied recusal mark two extremes of engagement with repression in the 1790s. Wakefield, a Cambridge graduate, classics scholar, and impassioned reformer, penned a radical address to the Bishop of Llandaff (Richard Watson) that landed him in prison.47 Wakefield’s 1798 pamphlet was written, as was Wordsworth’s heated but ultimately unpublished Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff five years earlier, in response to one of Watson’s reactionary publications, his Address to the People of Great Britain.48 Decrying the allied corruption of church and state, pacifist Wakefield was convinced that peace would never come

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as long as Pitt held power. The distractions and alarms of military conflict, he argued, were all that kept the prime minister and his supporters in office: “How then can they be supposed desirous to accelerate that period, when they shall be despoiled of their power, and left naked to popular indignation, after so long and unbridled a career of wickedness, and such a multitude of enormous crimes?”49 Wakefield’s unguarded language led not only to his own imprisonment but also to that of booksellers Joseph Johnson, Jeremiah Jordan, and John Cuthell, whose shops stocked Wakefield’s tract.50 John Aikin, writing a few years later, supposed that Wakefield was targeted because the ministry wanted a high-profile example: “From that systematic progress in restraining the free communication of political opinions which may be traced in the acts of the late ministry, it is not unreasonable to conclude, that a victim to the liberty of the press, of name and character sufficient to inspire a wide alarm, was really desired.”51 For Charles James Fox, the imprisonment of Wakefield signaled the end of reform discourse. “The liberty of the press I consider as virtually destroyed by the proceedings against Johnson and Jordan,” he wrote to Wakefield on 1 March 1799, “and what has happened to you I cannot but lament therefore the more, as the sufferings of a man whom I esteem, in a cause that is no more.”52 Wakefield was dead by 1801, victim to the typhoid he contracted at Dorchester Gaol. If writers such as Wakefield were brave (or reckless) enough to speak out as late as 1798, others had begun to feel cowed earlier in the decade.53 Not immune to the pressures of the era, even those already in retirement resorted to further self-censorship, as the fate of one of William Cowper’s poems illustrates. On 12 June 1793, Cowper received a letter from journalist and printer Richard Phillips, sent from Leicester Gaol, where Phillips was imprisoned for selling Paine’s Rights of Man.54 Urging Cowper to read the reports of his case, Phillips solicited a “song or sonnet” of support, one he hoped might be popularly distributed.55 Cowper was sympathetic but cautious, and replied that he did not understand how he could write anything “that would not expose me to the evils by which you are so great a sufferer,” for a “tame composition, in short, would not serve you, and a spirited and vehement one might ruin me.”56 Skeptical of both the unfolding of the French Revolution and the measures of the British government, Cowper had the temper of a moderate Whig, and was careful in his correspondence.57 On 10 June 1792 he wrote to William Hayley about a letter he had received from the radical bookseller Thomas Clio Rickman: “He is a violent overturner of thrones and

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Kingdoms, and foolishly thinks to recommend himself to me by telling me that he is so. He adds likewise that Mr. Paine often dines with him.—Will it not be best to leave his letter unanswer’d?”58 Phillips’s own letter to Cowper remained unanswered, but he would not give up; his next attempt enclosed copies of the Leicester Herald that held accounts of his arrest and prison ordeal. Phillips’s complaint was that he was convicted for selling Paine’s Rights of Man before the work was declared libelous.59 He protested this proactive restraint in a pamphlet he wrote from prison: “[N]o Man can suppose, with the smallest Shadow of Equity, that a Retailer is culpable, till the Principal is found Guilty.”60 And he was no less mystified by the caprice of the prosecution: “[L]et it be clearly understood, that every Publication of Paine’s was to be had upon Application at the Shop of every Bookseller in this Country, at the Time they were sold by the Printer of this Paper. Why then is he to be Subject of a Prosecution, while the equal Offence of all his Brethren is overlooked?”61 Cowper changed his mind, at least for a moment. After reviewing the case, he composed “A Sonnet Addressed to Mr. Phillips now in confinement at Leicester”: Phillips—the Suff ’rer less by Law than Pow’r,   Though prison’d in an adamantine hold,   Might bear a heart as free and uncontroll’d In his dark cell, as in a Summer’s bow’r. The sly accuser, who at such an hour   When all suspicion sleeps, like Him of old,   Eve’s tempter, wreath’d in many an artful fold Conceals his drift with purpose to devour— He is the pris’ner; and those bars within   That hoop his sorry vitals round about Dwells one, who never shall compassion win   From Just and Good, ’till Judgment calls him out. Thou, then, less deeply at thy wrongs repine; Scorn is thy meed, Commiseration thine.62

Cowper’s distinction that not British law but “Pow’r” had imprisoned Phillips was a familiar refrain in the early 1790s (versions of this discourse extend up through the 1794 acquittals, before the 1795 Gagging Acts convinced many reformers that the law itself had been turned tyrannous). Having written this sonnet for Phillips, Cowper was uncertain of what to do. On 18 June he sent a copy to his friend Samuel Rose, reporting that Phil-

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lips’s “case is singularly hard” and enclosing issues of the Leicester Herald. “Touched by the hardship he seems to have suffer’d,” Cowper explained, I have composed a Sonnet in his favour, but Government is so jealous and rigorous at present that I fear’d to send it till some wiser man than myself should assure me that I might do it safely. I therefore subjoin it for your opinion, and beg that if you have any doubts yourself you will consult some Legal friend who may ascertain the matter.63

Rose confirmed his wariness. Five days later Cowper wrote to tell Phillips that “an able lawyer” had advised him against publication, warning of the dangers of such an effort.64 Withheld from publication during his lifetime, Cowper’s sonnet on the imprisoned journalist did not appear in print until 1921. Wakefield’s and Cowper’s responses to repression—a fiery political pamphlet, a poem nervously written and withheld from print—instance two poles of engagement in the repressive 1790s. But between these poles, a literary practice of strategic, oblique opposition would take shape. It is this space, between recklessness and recusal, that is the terrain of Five Long ­Winters. I begin with the national debate generated by the appearance of the new treason and sedition bills in November 1795. My first chapter examines these laws not merely as pieces of legislation but as cultural phenomena. Introducing the bills, the ministry offered every Briton the chance to be a critical investigator, a hermeneutic agent charged with uncovering dangerous secrets. In this way Pitt responded to calls to extend the franchise with a different offer to take part in governmental affairs: using the allure of the secret, he attempted to generate an imagined community of patriotic detectives. But refusing this effort to substitute surveillance for suffrage, public intellectuals and ordinary Britons united in protest against the Gagging Acts. I examine the representational practices that shape the responses to Pitt’s legislative strike during six weeks in late 1795 (after the appearance of the bills but before they passed into law) by Coleridge, Godwin, Thelwall, Peter Pindar (John Wolcot), James Gillray, Thomas Beddoes, and others. Despite this loud public outcry, the Gagging Acts received royal assent on 18 December 1795, and the “deathlike silence” that Coleridge shuddered to predict in his assessment of Pittite repression did indeed descend on the nation.65 This is why Thompsonian readings of Romantic cultural history have often taken 1795 as a terminus, as we see the raucous energy of the radical 1790s effectively quashed at last. Yet if we shift our audit from loud radicalism to other, more oblique modes, we find a variety of politically engaged writing endur-

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ing in the aftermath of the Gagging Acts. My next two chapters examine two sites for this endurance: prison verse and newspaper journalism. Paying special attention to three prison poets of the 1790s, John Thelwall, James Montgomery, and John Augustus Bonney, my second chapter investigates the significance of incarceration for Romantic-era culture. Although John Howard called attention to the British jail system in the 1770s, prison conditions commanded broad notice two decades later, when writers, editors, journalists, and booksellers experienced the horrors of incarceration. This targeted imprisonment was the dire muse of a variety of writing— poems, essays, broadsheets, and newspaper reports—that exposed readers to life inside a jail cell. A visible presence in Romantic-era print culture, the prison is a key site and resonant metaphor in the work of Coleridge, More, Wordsworth, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and many others. The repressions of the Pitt ministry were felt not just in urban centers but even in the far reaches of rural life. Following this movement from the Tower and Newgate to the poetic retreats of the West Country, I track the migration of the prison poem from the solitary cell to the practices of what M. H. Abrams called the “greater Romantic lyric” to show how the shape of the prison poem endures in the Romantic lyric, registering political history in poetic form. Tracing a different narrative of formal and discursive endurance through the darkest moments of the decade, Chapter 3 examines the fate of progressive journalism across the 1790s, with a focus on Benjamin Flower, a steadfast critic of the Pitt ministry who edited the Cambridge Intelligencer from 1793 to 1803. Flower’s paper, styled a radical “hell broth” by the Anti-Jacobin Review, published early writings by Coleridge, Thelwall, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Henry Crabb Robinson, among others. But after a half decade of oppositional journalism, Flower at last found himself in Newgate in 1799. While the work of Lucyle Werkmeister and others has taught us much about newspaper culture in the early years of the decade, I attend to the status of the press in the post–Gagging Acts era. Tracking the plight of Flower and his influential newspaper as the ministry’s surveillance and intimidation tactics became more aggressive and more focused, I examine the narrowing scope of activity available to oppositional journalists in the later 1790s. The strategies of Flower and other newspaper editors can be lost in analyses that regard the era’s news in terms of either bold radicalism or propagandistic loyalism. We might be tempted to bring a similar bifurcation to the novels of the 1790s, which have often been parceled into one of two modes,

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“Jacobin” and “anti-Jacobin.” But in Chapter 4, I propose a different way to think about this literary landscape by examining novels that are concerned less with sounding political expatiations than with portraying discursive constraint. Godwin’s Caleb Williams, written after the conviction of Daniel Crichton and published during the sweeping arrests of many of Godwin’s activist friends, shapes a narrative as focused on secrecy and obfuscation as it is on reform discourse.66 Charlotte Smith’s Marchmont, published five years after her revolutionary novel Desmond, and in the wake of the Gagging Acts, extends Godwin’s work not only to portray a social landscape haunted by surveillance and persecution, but to embed this sense of terror in the structure of the novel. This formal registration of repression is also at the heart of Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (composed in 1796–7 and published posthumously in 1798), which markedly departs from her writing of the early 1790s. “I utter my sentiments with freedom,” Wollstonecraft had declared at the opening of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with a voluble optimism that defines the tract. But five years later, what changed as she felt the dark clouds of absolutism descend was not only her sense of the politically possible, but also her interest in the forms that politically engaged discourse might take. The Wrongs of Woman is a virtuosic exploration of the rhetoric of apophasis, arriving to us in an array of stutters, elisions, truncated utterances, and paranoid whispers. While it might be expected that the writing of some of the era’s most visible political thinkers would bear the imprints of Pitt’s repressive regime, this hush also extended to the dells of Alfoxden. In my final chapter I trace the career of silence in Lyrical Ballads. Historicism has taught us much about the contemporary political issues with which Wordsworth’s poems are concerned (vagrancy, prostitution, poverty), yet less attention has been paid to the political register of these poems’ formal effects. I tell a new story about the politics of Lyrical Ballads in Chapter 5, one in which some of what is said, and much of what is given in “expressive silence,” registers the climate of the Gagging Acts era. Published amidst the darkening atmosphere of 1798, the year that saw the decade’s highest number of arrests for sedition—an annus mirabilis for government spies—the political texturing of Lyrical Ballads strategically engages this world of prosecution and paranoia. The rhetoric of locked jaws and silenced communities that marks the protests against the Gagging Acts by Coleridge and others is deeply impressed on Wordsworth’s Alfoxden poems in fractured dialogues and coerced discourse. Examining this poetics of troubled utterance, I call

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attention to Wordsworth’s use of rhetorical devices that characterize much late-1790s discourse: praeteritio and occupatio, expressions of the disruption of expression. My argument in each of these chapters assumes an understanding of literary form as a site not just of historical registration but of political engagement. This mode of reading is informed by Susan Wolfson’s charge that we take seriously the idea of a “contextualized formalist criticism” that recognizes that the information communicated by form necessarily includes the “social and political critiques” of writers very much aware of their works’ formal events.67 Historically and politically engaged criticism of the Romantic era has sometimes taken it as almost axiomatic that literary works function, in Fredric Jameson’s phrase, as “formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions.”68 But to attend to the performances of stifled expression in early Romantic writing is to demand a reassessment of this critique. What we encounter are not “formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions” but formal engagements with unrelenting political repression. These engagements come into sharp focus when we shift our attention from the bold political discourse of the radical 1790s to the poetics of silence of the repressive 1790s. This is the story I tell in Five Long Winters.

ch ap te r

one

Plots Discovered Coleridge, Godwin, and the 1795 Gagging Acts Be padlocks plac’d on ev’ry BRITON’s tongue. —Peter Pindar, The Convention Bill (1795)

Mr. Pitt is determined that there shall be no discontent. At least he is determined, that discontent shall not declare itself, and that no clamours shall be heard. He shuts up every avenue, of open consulting, of political publications, and of private conversation. —Godwin, Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills (1795)

Truth should be spoken at all times, but more especially at those times when to speak Truth is dangerous. —Coleridge, Conciones ad Populum (1795)

In late 1795 speaking truth became especially dangerous. Over four centuries earlier a treason law had been established—25 Edward III (1351)—to protect the monarchy from armed attacks, particularly attempts at usurpation. This broad law remained in effect until 1795, when the Pitt ministry launched a legislative strike on printed and spoken discourse. The government claimed good reason for rewriting the treason law. On 29 October 1795, a riotous mob greeted the king on his way to parliament and in the commotion a window in his carriage was shattered. The loyalist press was quick to report the event as an attempted assassination and to demand a legislative reaction. A pamphlet titled A Warning Voice to the People of England broadcast that “the nation,” in response to the tumult, has “called upon the powers of government to relieve the public mind, to exert the due authority of law.”1 A week later, the Treasonable and Seditious Practices and Assemblies bills appeared in answer to this orchestrated outcry, redefining “treason” from an act of war to an act of culture.2 The country took notice. The revolution in the relationship between law and culture that the legislation threatened

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triggered a singular moment, what E. P. Thompson has called “the last, and greatest, period of popular agitation.”3 The six weeks between the introduction of the Gagging Acts and their royal assent (6 November–18 December) saw a flood of essays, poems, satirical prints, speeches, petitions, and newspaper reports. Contributions to the debate included Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s impassioned The Plot Discovered; or, An Address to the People Against Ministerial Treason, John Thelwall’s urgent lectures, William Godwin’s deftly calculated Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills, the satirical verses of Peter Pindar (John Wolcot), and the strikingly radical cartoons of James Gillray and others.4 Uniting this panorama, the legislation’s galvanizing jolt recalls the effect, a half decade earlier, that Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France had on radical voices.5 Burke, however, regarded British radicals as no more than “half a dozen grasshoppers” who issued an “importunate chink,” and if they made “the field ring,” it was not enough to call down legislation to silence them.6 The 1795 Gagging Acts were another matter. The statute targeted those who traded in language. The Gagging Acts underwrote by threat of death the broader program of surveillance and prosecution that the Pitt ministry pursued across the 1790s, and the immense response to the new laws indicates that they were viewed as the most chilling of the ministry’s juridical strikes. This chapter examines the strategies that writers used to engage the Gagging Acts and the tropology that emerged as they began to figure a culture of enforced silence. At the heart of what follows are two remarkable documents of oppositional engagement, Godwin’s Considerations and Coleridge’s The Plot Discovered. In order to warn the country about the Gagging Acts, Coleridge left his place of retirement in Somerset to return to political activism in Bristol. By 1795 he had already read widely in Locke, Berkeley, Thomas Reid, Lord Monboddo, and John Horne Tooke with interest in the natural language debate, but the government’s effort to legislate the boundaries of discursive possibility turned Coleridge’s focus to the constitutive relationship between language and community, a turn that had a lasting influence on his work.7 Coleridge’s writings of late 1795 begin to establish the coordinates for his later theologically inflected sociolinguistic theory, as the young writer and lecturer addressed the profound threat of the Gagging Acts. Godwin, still smarting from ministerial animosity to Political Justice (1793) and especially Cursory Strictures (1794), found the calculated ambiguity of the new legislation particularly alarming: “There is no case to which this bill may not be stretched,” he warns in ­Considerations,

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“there is no offence, present or future, definite or indefinite, real or fictitious, that it may not be made to include” (137). Godwin’s Considerations counters this elasticity with a slippery rhetoric of resistance, drawing on strategies that evoke his novel of the previous year, Caleb Williams. Coleridge and Godwin shared a sense that the threat was most blatant in the government’s plan to monitor all discourse, public and private. They warned of the isolation and social degeneration that would result—Coleridge foresaw a vibrant nation hushed into “deathlike silence” (PD, 289). Given this funereal forecast, it is no surprise that challenges to the acts recruited gothic rhetoric: “[T]he cadaverous tranquility of despotism,” shuddered Coleridge, will smother the country, and “the black moveless pestilential vapour of slavery will be inhaled at every pore” (289). More remarkable, however, is that the Gagging Acts also introduced Britons to William Pitt’s gothic period. If by 1797 the Canning circle at the Anti-Jacobin (with Pitt’s support) was reveling in satire, in 1795 Pitt preferred the tropes and tricks of the popular gothic, particularly the narrative dynamics of secrecy and revelation. In his presentation of the Gagging Acts, Pitt was writing a gothic tale in juridical drag, and no trope generated so enticing a narrative as secrecy.

Secret Designs They for the most part avoided keeping papers for fear of discovery, and they used cyphers or mysterious words in the few writings that passed between them. —An Account of the Present English Conspiracy Taken From the Report of the Secret Committee

The rhetoric of secrecy that fueled Pitt’s proposal harnessed a broad contemporary interest in surveillance and privacy, a preoccupation that emerged across several literary genres. The atmosphere of Eliza Fenwick’s novel ­Secresy; or, the Ruin of the Rock (1795) is cued, for example, by an epigraph from Twelfth Night: “Disguise! I see thou art a Wickedness, / Wherein the pregnant Enemy does much.” Writers slipped the word onto title pages: A Secret History was the subtitle of Ann Yearsley’s 1795 historical novel The Royal Captives, playwright Thomas Morton deployed hidden documents and overheard dialogue in Secrets Worth Knowing (1798), and enterprising printers exhumed religious pamphlets from the seventeenth century that dwelt on secrecy, such as Rev. John Corbet’s Self-Employment, in Secret, which J. Ferraby reprinted in 1795.8 The politics of this gothic lexicon come into sharp focus in James Boaden’s play, The Secret Tribunal, which premiered at

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Covent Garden on 3 June 1795.9 In the central action, heroine Ida faces the Wirtemberg “Tribunal,” to whom the fate of anyone, we are told, may be consigned. Because the play’s depiction of state repression clearly echoes the fraught atmosphere of the 1794 treason trials, an indemnifying prologue was retrofitted to remind audiences that the scene of tyranny is fifteenth-century Germany, no matter how familiar things may seem. “­Britain! rejoice!—The envied pow’r is Thine,” playgoers are assured, To punish malice, and to thwart design. Open as day our Courts judicial move, And RICH or POOR their equal influence prove; REJOICE! Your UPRIGHT JURIES make you free, Bulwarks of FAME, of LIFE and LIBERTY.10

This is either utopian ideal or heavy sarcasm in Pitt’s Britain, and the lines strain under the political burden they are asked to support. Even as the notion of “thwart[ing] design” evokes announcements of foiled republican plots, the praise of “UPRIGHT JURIES” cheers the system that helped secure acquittals in the 1794 trials.11 But the boast that “Open as day our Courts judicial move” cannot help but accuse present-day Britain. With the suspension of habeas corpus on 23 May 1794, prominent reform leaders were imprisoned without trial, and the terror of juridical obliquity amplified the suffering. “We are no longer Freemen,” warns Coleridge in Conciones ad Populum, using a reiterated first person plural to indicate a shared crisis: It is an insult to tell us that we cannot suffer Death at the pleasure of a Minister, as is the case under arbitrary Governments—Suffer death! we can be torn from the bleeding breast of domestic affection—we can be thrown into foul and damp dungeons—we can hear of the death of a dearly loved Wife, heartbroken by our Imprisonment—till overpowered by disease and wounded sensibilities we sink into the Grave.12

Coleridge’s scenario of violence, extreme pathos, and the violation of sentimental domesticity is no less dramatic than Boaden’s Secret Tribunal. Whether in fifteenth-century Germany or Coleridge’s Britain, the government may invade homes, destroy families, and end lives at the “pleasure of a Minister”—for Coleridge and many others, Britain’s legal system was hardly as “Open as day.”13 Coleridge’s gothic idiom sounds the fear felt across the country as surveillance and prosecution became synonymous with the ministry. Private correspondence was routinely perlustrated, and in some cases the government

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went much further. In May 1794, agents raided the homes of several reform leaders, confiscating their papers and books. Along with his entire library, Thelwall lost several works still in draft. “Every manuscript was seized,” he would later report, “upon whatever subject—Poems, Novels, Dramas, Literary and Philosophical Dissertations, all the unpublished labours of ten years’ application.”14 This surveillance of public and private discourse was pervasive and unrelenting. “Every coffee-house is filled with party hirelings and venal associators,” Thelwall warned, while anonymous letters are sufficient to blast the peace and destroy the personal security of the best and worthiest members of the community. . . . [E]ven your own house and your own table furnish no longer a sanctuary and an altar where it is safe to offer the free incense of friendly communication [and] the very domestic who eats your bread stands open-mouthed, perhaps, behind your chair to catch and to betray the idle conversation of your unguarded moments;—when every skreen conceals some myrmidon of oppression, lurking, like a beast of prey.15

From the hearth and beyond, no one is safe from surveillance. This panoptical warning is not hyperbole: Thelwall cites the example, among many others, of the satirist Charles Pigott, who was imprisoned, with fatal consequences, for a coffee house utterance.16 Appalled by the fate of those such as Pigott, and alert to infiltration by government agents, the corresponding societies felt besieged by what Thelwall referred to as the ministry’s “system of Spies and Informers.” “System” is an apt term here, for the modern concept of a centrally coordinated network of salaried spies was coming into shape in the mid-1790s, following an important change in governmental structure. In 1794, the War Office took over foreign intelligence work, allowing the Home Office to concentrate on domestic security.17 And espionage paid well: when the pursuit of treasonous or seditious activity was at issue, the S­ ecret Service fund was an open coffer, so that from the 1780s to the mid-1790s its expenditures soared seven hundred percent.18 Amidst a failing economy, famine, and war, domestic spying was a boom industry in 1790s Britain. As an indication of the modernity of this system, the phrase “His Majesty’s Secret Service” makes its first appearance in 1799 (the earliest mention of the organization that would develop into the MI5).19 By this time, William Wickham could hail domestic espionage as a point of national pride: It would be sufficient for Your Grace to take Mr. Pitt for one half hour only into the Office and shew him the different Official Books, Secret as well as

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Public. . . . A mind like his could not fail to see that without bustle, noise, or anything else that can attract Public Attention, Government possesses here the most powerful means of Observation and Information, as far as their Objects go, that ever was placed in the Hands of a Free Government,—that in observing Foreigners resident here, much curious information respecting the ill intentioned of Our Countrymen and Concerning Foreigners resident abroad, has been, and must continue to be indirectly obtained.20

Wickham not only puts this information on display for the prime minister, but also implies that the system is validated by Pitt’s own surveillance: he is the über-surveyor whose authority justifies the entire structure. Wickham had good cause for claiming that Pitt would commend the Alien Office’s work, for secrecy’s appeal to the prime minister was public knowledge. Pitt was accused of “establishing a system of espionage, arming the mind of each man against his neighbor,” and of using “his agents” to torment those who “raise their voices against his measures.”21 The first minister’s surveillance even rattled a few Tories, such as Lord Garlies (John Stewart), who felt the need to write to Pitt on 1 January 1795 to apologize for attending a political meeting at a pub, explaining that he had understood that such gatherings were frequented by both loyalists and reformers. Garlies’s apology is sheepishly tendered, for he realizes that Pitt occupies “the Fountain of Information” and would by now know of his night out.22 Pitt was notorious for surveilling not only public houses but also private exchanges. In a letter to Grenville, Burgess writes about a set of letters that were once in his possession: “Mr Pitt desired me to give them to him. I accordingly did so, & he locked them up in one of his own Boxes: since which time I have not seen them.”23 This image of Pitt controlling discourse through a mechanism of locks would come to focus the public response to the Gagging Acts.

“A Lock’d Jaw for John Bull”: Reading the 1795 Gagging Acts Are you willing to grant to that government, whose measures have avowedly brought you to the brink of famine, the power of telling you when you may meet? When you shall shun each other? When you may speak, when you must be silent? —Circular Letter to all the Patriotic Societies in Great Britain

It was one of the ministry’s canny strokes to position the Gagging Acts as an invitation to public patriotism. Faced with swelling agitation for reform at mid-decade, Pitt offered an alternate mode of political participation: his parliamentary speeches of late 1795 encouraged the public to join the

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­ inistry in discovering the “secret plots” of the LCS and the Society for m Constitutional Information (SCI), and even of their own neighbors. Adding enticement to encouragement, Pitt presented the Gagging Acts in parliament gift-wrapped in a language of secrecy and disclosure. He began by linking the LCS to the 29 October attack on the king’s carriage. Claiming the group’s immense outdoor meeting at Copenhagen Fields on 26 October as the provenance of the riot three days later, Pitt declared that “means must be found to repress the spirit which gave birth to so daring an outrage.”24 This figure of a generative spirit materializing in violence was pure gothic, imaging a sinister plot that meant to “undermine and subvert the constitution” (PH, vol. 32, col. 363). Legislative action was urgently needed, argued Pitt, to stop revolutionaries from abusing the right to peaceful assembly, even more so because “the peculiar construction of the corresponding societies,” in which “divisions and sub-divisions” were quietly spreading throughout the nation, provided “not only the means of secret communication, but also of prompt execution of their designs” (PH, vol. 32, col. 361). For Pitt, this declaration of the societies’ creeping reticulation trumped any call for evidence. “Need I prove the necessity of such a precaution,” he challenged, “at a moment when there exist societies hostile to the authority and existence of parliament? Those societies, meeting under the specious pretext of parliamentary reform, and the right of petitioning, have employed a language which sufficiently shows how far these were their real objects” (PH, vol. 32, col. 524). “Specious pretext” implies a suspicious subtext, a secret plot of discursive activity and political activism to be quashed by the Gagging Acts. Leading the ministry’s charge that the reformers’ secret designs were legible in their publications, the Tory MP Mornington issued a sustained attack on the radical press. To influence “the lower classes of the people,” he warned, the LCS, the Society of the Friends of Liberty, and the London Reforming Society were “circulat[ing] in different channels to the people” myriad “cheap publications.” In a sequence of escalating infinitives, he collated representation with action. The publications aimed to excite the poor to seize the landed property of the kingdom; to stir up the soldiery to mutiny . . . to represent the administration of justice as corrupt from its very source . . . to mark the nobility as a degraded race, and to invite the people to strike them from their seats . . . to recommend regicide . . . to decry the established church and constitution, till they had wrought the people to that pitch of frantic rage, that would inevitably end in their

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pulling down the pillar of the state, and burying the whole fabric in one undistinguishable mass of ruin. (PH, vol. 32, cols. 331–2)

This catalogue of the “true” aims of radical print culture, ending in Samsonian apocalypse, triggered a prosecutorial zeal within the parliamentary body itself. Mornington’s mention of the “printer” of one tract prompted chants of “Name him, name him . . . from all parts of the House” (PH, vol. 32, col. 332). Complying, Mornington revealed that the culprit was the radical writer and bookseller Richard “Citizen” Lee.25 This performance of accusation and revelation, even more than forwarding an argument for the legislation’s urgency, revealed how a charged language of secret plotters could create a community of energized investigators, and how a loyalist discourse of “naming” could be marshaled in the service of national security. Pitt’s fashioning of this zealous community surpassed even Mornington’s parliamentary stagecraft: “the whole people of England” were chanting along for the ministry to “avert the ruin” threatened by the plotters (PH, vol. 32, col. 273). Pitt’s specter of secret plots, coupled with his assertions of nationwide support, merged in his proposed solution: through various means “a watchful eye” was to be kept over all political activity (PH, vol. 32, col. 274). The Gagging Acts required, for example, that in advance of a meeting in which political issues were to be discussed, a notice listing the location, day and time, and topics of discussion, and signed by “seven Householders,” be published in a newspaper and made available to authorities. Such notices would allow government agents to attend any meeting, vested with discretionary power to shut down the assembly at any moment—if conveners should linger, they were to be hanged.26 This call for countrywide surveillance was trumpeted by the loyalist press. Supporting the ministry’s warnings about the circulation of hostile discourse, loyalist pamphleteers argued that the standing medieval treason law was no longer sufficient because its framers could not have presaged the advent of print culture. “The people were at that time,” reasons one tract about the state of society in 1351, “so restricted and confined in their means, that they had no medium between cherishing disloyalty in secret, and showing themselves in battle array against the crown.”27 Now, however, radicals are able to foment treason through the medium of print, and so the Gagging Acts, the tract argues, are needed to vanquish this new threat. Britons are urged to be “ever awake, watchful, and guarded” against the “desperate designs” of reformers, and to “form, from one end of the kingdom to the other, a connected and

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determined body of protectors of the constitution.”28 This vision of a “connected and determined body” echoed the ministry’s plan to forge an imagined community through invitations to join the government’s surveillance network. It was a concerted effort to replace the popular rally of “No war!” with a new chant: “Name him!” “The masterpiece of a modern politician”—this was Coleridge’s assessment of Pitt’s plan.29 Coleridge was most troubled by the insidiousness of Pitt’s effort to “mould the sufferance & subjection of the People to the length of that foot which is to tread upon their necks,” prophesying that the ultimate issue of this molding would be a surveillance tantamount to imprisonment: “poor John Bull under the custody of a state Argus.”30 This vision of Pitt is captured in Isaac Cruikshank’s The Royal Extinguisher, in which the prime minister appears as a giant Gulliver about to lower a snuffer titled “For Preventing Seditious Meetings” over a group labeled “Copen­ hagen,” referring to the LCS’s 26 October 1795 meeting at Copenhagen Fields (Figure 1). During the parliamentary debates over the Gagging Acts, Fox too envisioned an Argus-haunted land, in which “there were to be wit-

Figure 1.  The Royal Extinguisher or Gulliver Putting out the Patriots of Lilliput!!!, by Isaac Cruikshank, 1 December 1795. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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nesses of every word that every man spoke,” with the effect of obliterating privacy of utterance: “people are to be prevented from discussing public topics publicly: they are to be prevented from discussing them privately” (PH, vol. 32, col. 280). But far from ensuring the safety of the state, “if you silence remonstrance and stifle complaint, you then leave no other alternative but force and violence” (PH, vol. 32, col. 282). Fox’s warning that the Gagging Acts would deliver Britain to “the eve of a revolution” was seconded by Edward Stanley, who charged the ministry with returning to the rhetoric of paranoia it used in the attempted “annihilation” of reform societies in 1794, an attempt that had unveiled merely a “conspiracy without conspirators.” To redress this failure, Pitt was now attempting “by one blow to quash the very existence” of democratic activity (PH, vol. 32, col. 289). Stanley implied that just as the 1794 plot claims were spurious, Pitt’s new charges of “secret designs” signified nothing more than ministerial fantasy. “It was not difficult to see the views with which these pretended plots were brought forward,” concurred Sheridan; “[m]inisters wished to raise groundless alarms” (PH, vol. 32, col. 336). Even the “attack” on the king’s carriage, Stanley proposed, was a false-flag operation, concocted by the Pitt ministry and carried out by the “immense army of spies” who had disbanded after the 1794 acquittals and for whom the surveillance of reform leaders had been so lucrative (PH, vol. 32, col. 296). Coleridge too believed that the attack was carried out by “spies and informers,” and even suspected that the most violent speeches at LCS meetings were delivered by agents provocateurs who had since been remunerated for their “secret services” (PD, 287, 298). The real “secret plots,” according to popular belief, actually belonged to the Pitt administration itself. The ministry’s fear of the consequences from a failing economy and a growing body count from famine and war made the eruption of these “national emergencies” seem scripted for the introduction of repressive measures. Aware that only the protections of office prevented his assassination, Pitt admitted that “[m]y head would be off in six months were I to resign.”31 Rather than the attack on the king’s carriage, it was Pitt’s résumé of incompetence that was popularly credited for the legislation’s appearance. An oppositional pamphlet entitled A Dialogue upon the Two Bills Now Depending in Parliament (1795) argued that because Pitt’s foreign and domestic missteps have spread “dissatisfaction at the measures of Government,” he must “pretend that the King and the Constitution are now in so much danger, that it is absolutely requisite to change the ancient laws.”32

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This narrative of Pitt’s desperation is captured in two satirical cartoons from November 1795. In The Modern Hercules: A Finishing Blow for Poor John Bull, the prime minister holds a club over Bull, who is tottering under various burdens—“Pensions, Subsidies, Tax, Taxation, and Debt.” Pitt aims the “Convention Bill” club, which will be the “finishing blow” for a public already weighed down by the government’s fiscal mismanagement (Figure 2).

Figure 2.  The Modern Hercules or A Finishing Blow for Poor John Bull, by West, 17 ­November 1795. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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A similar visual grammar appears in Talk of an Ostrich!, which depicts Pitt literally gagging John Bull with the legislation (Figure 3). Using the butt of a rifle to enforce his law’s “acceptance,” Pitt exclaims, “What it sticks in your Throat does it? Oh I’ll ram it down I warrant you, and when it is once past, you’ll easily digest it: you must not be Obstinate Johnny; when Laws are made you have nothing to do but to Obey them!!!”33

Figure 3.  Talk of an Ostrich! an Ostrich is nothing to him; Johnny Bull will swallow any thing!!, by Isaac Cruikshank, 13 December 1795. Ostriches were popularly credited with the ability to swallow any object (OED). © Trustees of the British Museum.

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But John Bull was obstinate. Talk of an Ostrich! projects Bull’s angry, accusatory look, backed by a bulk capable of overwhelming Pitt at any moment. The very real resistance of Britons was demonstrated in a massive campaign to block the legislation’s digestion. The Morning Post ran the text of the bills on its front page and debates raged nationwide. Panicked loyal­ ists in Perth sent parliament an “emergency” petition “in opposition to another which is just now signing by a disaffected part of the Inhabitants” warning that this had been “signed by a few violent Democrats; a number of low people, and a very considerable number of Boys.”34 This motley collective’s plea, the loyalists urged, should not “be considered as the sentiments of the respectable part of the Inhabitants.” Racing to reach parliament first, the loyalists could not supply a fuller petition, for they “did not think it prudent to delay longer than this evening.” This scene of competing petitions was replayed across the country, with ninety-four opposing the Gagging Acts, bearing 131,284 signatures, and sixty-five in support, with 29,922 signatures.35 One of the oppositional petitions came from Norwich, where a speaker implored the gathered audience, “[Y]ou have not only the right, but it is your sacred duty, to inform your representatives of your opinion.”36 To ensure that such opinions were fully informed, he read the legislation aloud, and a round of “hissings” announced “the hall’s abhorrence of the bills.” But this soon gave way to impassioned speeches. “Every man is bound,” an opponent of the legislation proclaimed, “by an attachment to the government and constitution of his country . . . to resist by every legal means the present bills.”37 He pointed out that even the present meeting could not happen should the legislation pass, for in that case all assemblies “must be under the controul of a venal magistrate, who is to be the sole judge of the legality of what we say,” and “resisting the arbitrary will of a venal servant of the crown shall subjugate the offender to immediate death.”38 Another convener concurred, warning, as Fox had in parliament, of the provocation to violence: “[W]ho will not STRIKE when they are likely to be hanged or transported for speaking.”39 Yet for all this alarmed admonition, many opponents simply could not believe that the iron legislation would actually pass. “In every part of the country the congregated voice of Englishmen will be uplifted to frustrate the artifices” of the ministry, Thelwall was certain, convinced that the legislation signified only Pitt’s panic—“It shows you that intimidation has taken possession of his mind; that his heart begins to fail”—and that his removal from office was imminent.40 Thelwall was not alone in predicting

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that the legislation would fuel Pitt’s own political undoing. James Gillray’s 26 November 1795 cartoon Retribution envisions the outraged opposition issuing the very revolution Pitt feared (Figure 4). Gillray depicts Sheridan and Fox tarring and feathering the prime minister, who wears a noose flung over a Terror-inspired lamppost (as though to indemnify himself,

Figure 4.  Retribution; Tarring & Feathering; or the Patriots Revenge, by James Gillray, 26 November 1795. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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Gillray added a note to the post, “Fate of the Sedition Bill,” clarifying that he is predicting not the prime minister’s but the legislation’s death). Talk of an Ostrich! has Pitt gagging John Bull, but here it is Fox who silences Pitt with a brush entitled “Remonstrances of the People,” warning, “Nay & you’ll stop Our Mouths, beware Your Own.” Fox’s tar cauldron, foreground right, is labeled “Rights of the People” and is heated by the burning of Pitt’s legislation. If Gillray’s print suggests the reaction that Pitt might be forced to face, other illustrations used carceral imagery to render the government’s own violent enforcement of public silence. Evoking the “Iron Muzzle” images of the abolition movement, West’s A Lock’d Jaw for John Bull depicts the prime minister fixing a massive padlock to Bull’s mouth (Figure 5). Here, too, a robust John Bull seems capable of overpowering the reedy prime minister, but Bull is frozen in shock. This public petrification at the boldness of Pitt’s venture is mourned in one anti–Gagging Acts pamphlet: “Was it ever prophesied that a minister should dare to air an open stroke at liberty,” the tract asks, while Britons stood “overwhelmed in speechless amazement?”41 In A Lock’d Jaw for John Bull, Pitt assures an overwhelmed and amazed Bull: “Don’t be alarmed Johnny, it will not hurt you, you will scarcely perceive it, when you are a little used to it—it will only keep your tongue from running quite so fast, in future!” In this cartoon, British minds are imprisoned within their own silenced bodies, and the prime minister, a key dangling from his shoulder, has become the nation’s jail keeper. Before the acts, Bull’s tongue was “running so fast” that the government believed that silence must be violently enforced. West’s cartoon indicates how radically “silence” has been revised since Edmund Burke’s Reflections, which had claimed that a British exceptionalism defined by silence would repel French revolutionary principles, for while there may be a handful of noisy, homegrown democratic “grasshoppers,” the majority happily “chew the cud and are silent.”42 For Burke, this well-fed silence defines British public opinion, and the tranquility will endure because Britons, unlike the French, who are tossed to and fro in a noisy storm of revolutionary texts, are impervious to Rousseau, Voltaire, Helvetius, and even their own chirping democrats, thanks to a prejudice so ingrained as to have become “a part of [their] nature.”43 By late 1795, however, things have changed. A padlock becomes the guarantee of Burkean second nature. The literary community’s alarm at this enforcement of silence energizes the mid-decade satires of Peter Pindar (John Wolcot), who cannily located

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Figure 5.  A Lock’d Jaw for John Bull, by West, 23 November 1795. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

two strategies for evading the reach of the Gagging Acts: ironic celebrations of repression, and figurations of his own silencing. In the first mode, he argues that since “freedom of discussion may be the loss of a Minister’s Place, that Minister is in the right to . . . bring in a Bill ‘For binding to the peace the Tongue and Pen, / So hostile to the peace of Courtier Men.’”44 Spoofing a loyal member of Pitt’s cabinet, Pindar champions the “necessity

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and wisdom of our Premier’s political maneuver” and promises to “vote to perpetual confinement the Pen.” Elsewhere Pindar takes as his subject the impossibility of literary discourse under the new laws. “Farewell, O my Pen and my Tongue!” he writes in Liberty’s Last Squeak; “To part with such friends I am loath; / But, Pitt, in majorities strong, / Voweth horrible vengeance on both.”45 Lest we mistake Pitt’s “majorities” for the British majority, in “The Convention Bill” Pindar ventriloquizes “Pitt’s Translation” of an epigraph from Horace: “I hate the MOB—Avant the Vulgar Throng! / Be padlocks plac’d on ev’ry BRITON’s tongue.”46 The working of these padlocks finds dramatization in Pindar’s One Thousand Seven Hundred and Ninety-Six, in which a young writer announces his plan to satirize prominent figures such as Pitt and the propagandist John Reeves.47 Pindar warns against this endeavor, citing the funereal scene of politically engaged writing: “Poor Field! at present much like Hounslow Heath / Whose chief production is the wood of Death.” One might as well enter Hounslow Heath, the deadly haunt of highway­ men, as join the ranks of writers. This sentiment is echoed in several ­jeremiads about the cultural death the Gagging Acts would effect. The day the legislation passes, warns Thomas Beddoes, “will be a proud day for the enemies of our country, inasmuch as they will date from the destruction of our national spirit, the certain decay of our national greatness.”48 And no one is immune: “Every individual who aspires after integrity, but is too timid to practice it in the face of reproach or danger, will feel that it is not the time to be honest.” In place of honest discussion comes compelled silence, as “Misery will be obliged to stifle its groan, and Virtue her sympathizing sigh, till at last . . . all the kindly feelings of the heart retire inwards and die.”49 In a terrible inverse of the gothic trope of the secret crime, in Pittite Britain it is integrity, honesty, kind feeling, and suffering that must be secreted in order to ensure social survival. Such visions of a nation silenced into cultural and moral death acutely register the government’s technologies of enforcement—the giant padlock in West’s cartoon has a host of analogues. Beddoes fears that the ministry’s enforcement efforts will quickly saturate the country’s social life: “[W]hat a demand will take place,” he foresees, “for hunters of treason, hunters of sedition, and every description of human blood-hounds, together with personages to act the graver part of the gagging magistrate.”50 As the gagging magistrate and its human bloodhounds were spreading through the country, writers such as Coleridge and Godwin were, like Pindar’s aspiring author, eyeing the “wood of death” before them.

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Coleridge’s Plots Discovered Dated 16 November 1795, amidst the oppositional furor in the weeks before the bills became law, Coleridge’s preface to Conciones ad Populum urges that “Truth should be spoken at all times, but more especially at those times when to speak Truth is dangerous.”51 Coleridge took this initiative seriously. During meetings at the Bristol Guildhall on 17 and 20 November, he spoke in opposition to both the war and the treason and sedition bills, drawing the notice of the Star, which reported that Coleridge issued “the most sublime address that was ever heard, perhaps, within the walls of that building.”52 His subsequent lecture, “On the Two Bills,” which he delivered at Bristol’s Pelican Inn on 26 November, was one of the most impassioned and dangerous speeches of his life. These public addresses were expanded into The Plot Discovered, in which Coleridge argues that the British political system is distinguished from despotism only by the freedoms of press and assembly: the press allows the circulation of political information, and assemblies permit public discussion of this information and facilitate the drafting of petitions to parliament.53 Thus press and assembly form in concert an alternate parliament that has the power to shape the constitution. By foreclosing this popular house, the Gagging Acts render the historically progressing constitution deaf to demotic remonstrance and thus legally invalid (PD, 35–6). Though not apparent in this summary of Coleridge’s long-view legal plea, central to The Plot Discovered is the development of an idea of enduring importance to his work—a sense of what might be called the sacredness of human language.54 The Plot Discovered shares with Coleridge’s earlier “On the Present War” (from Conciones ad Populum) an interest in how discursive activity shapes public opinion. He is especially concerned in the earlier piece with the propagandistic power of keywords. For “many fierce Aristocrats,” he writes, [s]ome unmeaning Term generally becomes the Watch-word, and acquires almost a mechanical power over his frame. . . . The favorite phrases of the present Day are—“It may be very well in Theory”—and the “effects of Jacobine Principles.” Aided by the one and alarmed by the other, the shuddering Bigot flings the door of Argument in your face, and excludes all Parley by gloomy anticipation of the consequences.55

Coleridge is most worried that the activation of certain language can foreclose all other language (with “Parley” perhaps hinting that such foreclosure can infect even the nation’s houses of speech, parliament).56 But Coleridge’s attention to language in “On the Present War” is brief. His planned “On the

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Liberty of the Press,” meant to have been second in a series of “­Lectures on the English Rebellion and the French Revolution,” would likely have more fully studied the relationship between language and the polis, but notes for this lecture have not been recovered.57 We might, however, think of The Plot Discovered as a broader, exploratory version of Coleridge’s planned discussion of freedom of the press. Coleridge’s response to the Gagging Acts manifests both the activist immediacy of the Bristol meetings and the investment of a writer who had already thought much about the relationship between language and the political health of the nation. Coleridge quickly positions his adversary in The Plot Discovered, arguing that William Pitt has threatened the cultural commons that separates Britain from despotism. “The liberty of the press gives us an influential sovereignty,” Coleridge writes, “by books necessary information may be dispersed; and by information the public will may be formed; and by the right of petitioning that will may be expressed” (PD, 312). From this defense of the necessity of popular remonstrance, Coleridge moves into a fuller account of the relationship between free expression and the state, for the Gagging Acts assail not only civil liberties but also what Coleridge understands as the divine potential of human speech. He begins his turn from law to linguistics by recruiting etymology. Since “majesty” in “its original signification” derives from “majority,” he argues, the king should be “regarded as the voice and will of the people” (295).58 Joining loyalism and democracy through theology, he predicts that “the public will” shall be sounded “first, perhaps, in low and distant tones such as beseem the children of peace; but if corruption deafen power,” these tones will be heard “gradually increasing till they swell into a deep and awful thunder, the VOICE OF GOD” (312). Not the king but the public speaks the “Voice of God.” Situating the traditional adage “Vox populi est vox Dei” within the extraparliamentary juridical process that he argues is unique and essential to Britain, Coleridge frames his analysis of governmental procedure in The Plot Discovered with a theologically grounded apology for popular expression. But he goes further. Coleridge’s urge to the nation to reject the Gagging Acts, “[l]est hell exorcise all that is heavenly,” figures the legislation as a satanic invasion (PD, 291). Both the prime minister and the bills fittingly assume several guises in The Plot Discovered, each poisonous to the commons. “The present Bills were conceived and laid in the dunghill of despotism,” Coleridge fumes, “among the other yet unhatched eggs of the old Serpent” (288). After likening Pitt to the cockatrice, a proverbial demon, he next compares

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the Gagging Acts to another earthly serpent, the “manchineel tree,” which “will poison those who are fools enough to slumber beneath it” (296).59 The ­manchineel—Spanish for “little apple”—bears deadly fruit, and its sap can kill on exposure. These theologically shaded toxins indicate Coleridge’s sense of the matter of the Gagging Acts’ threat: if language is a living, growing entity, then the legislation’s evil rests in its potential to petrify linguistic growth. The theological implications of this petrification are illuminated by two neologisms Coleridge later forged in his thinking about linguistics— “outness” and “desynonymization.” “Outness” first appears in an 1803 notebook entry on the relation of language to thought: “Language & all symbols give outness to Thoughts & this is the philosophical essence & purpose of Language.”60 To realize this “essence and purpose,” language must grow together with human consciousness in vital relation. The notion of outness is so important for Coleridge because he believed that through communication one’s identity is established and one’s mind is expanded. “Personal identity itself,” notes Steven E. Cole, is for Coleridge “amorphous and meaningless until expressed in language.”61 Coleridge understands the development of mind and medium as reciprocal: language is an organic entity that continues to grow as society advances. The concept of “desynonymization” is crucial to this growth. The process of distinguishing between words that are normally used interchangeably is necessary for the mutual expansion of language and mind, for new discriminations demand a new precision of diction, and lexicographical distinctions foster “a progressively more astute apprehension of the world.”62 As Coleridge put it in Biographia Literaria, “in all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective, unconscious good sense working progressively to desynonymize those words originally of the same meaning.”63 This notion of the growth of medium and mind merges in Coleridge’s language theory with a projection of humanity’s questing toward the divine. In his marriage of linguistics and theology, “outness” expands to include humanity in a conversation with God, whose language is manifest in all of creation. In the first of his Lectures on Revealed Religion Coleridge writes, “[T]he Omnipotent has unfolded to us the Volume of the World, that there we may read the Transcript of himself.”64 Transcript, read, volume, unfolded—these are key terms, for as Angela Esterhammer notes, “the outness or visible otherness of an object . . . that allows the human mind to relate to it” is for Coleridge “a type of utterance.”65 Drawing on the long tradition that figures nature as the “language” of God, Coleridge adds human language to the circuit of communication.66

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For Coleridge, divine and human language form a continuum that links heaven and earth, and so the continual growth of human language is a perpetual seeking toward God. In The Plot Discovered, it is this very process that the Gagging Acts will destroy—as Coleridge remarks in a notebook entry, Pitt is “[p]reventing by these bills the growth of the human mind.”67 The informing trope of The Plot Discovered—that repression of the vital circulation of ideas equals cultural and spiritual death—has a knowing lineage in the liberal polemics of Milton’s Areopagitica. Like The Plot Discovered, Milton’s tract was conceived in response to repressive legislation, the Licensing Order of 1643, which required the submission of texts to government censors for authorization before publication. Contesting parliament’s claims for the necessity of shielding Britons from harmful influences, Milton argued for the urgency of a free press for the development of virtue. Milton’s ideal government does not foster “a perpetual childhood of prescription” but trusts people to use “the gift of reason” to make their own choices.68 Coleridge sketches a version of the arrested development depicted by Milton in a notebook entry which likens the stunting effects of the Gagging Acts to “giving Gin to [a] Puppy Dog that it may be a safe & amusing little [?Gentleman/f[l]atterer] for Royalty to play with.”69 Doling out a legislative intoxicant for the public to lap up, the ministry is plotting against the growth of language and thus the growth of minds, and because it is precisely the coincident growth of language and mind that brings humankind ever closer to God, the Gagging Acts are for Coleridge truly wicked. Thinking, lecturing, and writing about the Gagging Acts, Coleridge developed a forceful sense of the relationship between free speech and theology: to thwart the growth of language is to thwart access to God. The legislation led Coleridge, in effect, to discover his purpose as a cultural sentry. In his battle against Pitt’s attempt to “exorcise all that is heavenly” from human life, Coleridge found the plot of his own life’s work: whether as watchman, friend, or clerisy, he remained committed to guarding the freedom of speech so essential to the health of both the soul and the state.

“A Lover of Order”: Godwin’s Gagging Act If The Plot Discovered marks an important moment in the arc of Coleridge’s career, Godwin’s Considerations is normally taken to signal both Godwin’s break with reform politics and an epochal shift in British political discourse. Yet we must wonder how far Godwin’s politics had changed at this moment,

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since he was so opposed to the Gagging Acts that for the first time in his life he was tempted to disregard his wariness of collective action in order to draft a popular petition.70 If there is a change in Godwin’s writing at this point, I would suggest that it is less in political commitment than rhetorical strategy. Composed two weeks after his friend Joseph Gerrald landed at an Australian penal colony to begin a fourteen-year sentence for sedition, and published anonymously, in the close grain of Considerations we see Godwin forging a complex persona amidst the pressures of repression and surveillance.71 Tracing the reception of Considerations reveals a dynamic of vital importance to the critical history of Romantic-era writing: how rhetorical strategy can be misread as political apostasy. On what logic might such misreading proceed? Published on 21 November 1795, with the byline “A Lover of Order,” Godwin’s Considerations greets readers with a voice that sounds, according to Lewis Patton and Peter Mann, “strangely like Burke.”72 “The foundations of society have been broken up in the most considerable kingdom of Europe” (127), Godwin proclaims, and amidst this “unnatural state,” he cautions, “[w]e must not, for the sake of a problematical future, part with the advantages we already possess; we must not destroy, faster than we rear” (125, 127). Not only does this sound Burkean, but after presenting himself as a lover of order, Godwin enters into an anti-Godwinian tailspin, dismissing his own claim in Political Justice that communal responsibility would obviate the need for a legal system. “To govern individuals in a petty and limited circle is easy,” he writes in the opening pages of Considerations, because in such a social circle “all exercise an inspection over all. . . . [T]he general censure or applause, follows immediately in the rear of every action” (125). But he quickly rejects this vision of communal surveillance with a turn to practical politics, arguing that “in nations of men, there is no eye penetrating enough to detect every mischief in its commencement” (125). Community surveillance schemes may be fine for utopian philosophers, but this is the real world, and nation-states demand juridical systems. Across the next twenty pages Godwin’s performance of anti-Godwinism only deepens, and pulls into its orbit former allies, most strikingly John Thelwall. Godwin’s previous political writing was grounded in what he called in Political Justice a denial of any “original propensity to evil” and hence in a refutation of the need for regulatory institutions.73 In Considerations, however, he proposes that strong governmental control is all that saves humanity from savagery. As if speaking back to Political Justice, he writes, “There are persons indeed, to whom the edifice of society appears as nothing but one

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mass of deformity,” and sighs at the prospect of trying to reason with “such a person” (127). Against the ethos of “sincerity” in Political Justice, Considerations rallies for “security”: “Without security mankind would speedily become ignorant and blood-thirsty savages” (127). From perfectible—and possibly immortal—in Political Justice, to nasty, brutish, and short in Considerations: what are we to make of Godwin’s Hobbesian swing? Thelwall, for one, was shocked by the apparent apostasy, and he was particularly incensed at Godwin’s disparagement of his political activism. “It is with difficulty,” he wrote to Godwin in response, “that I can believe that William Godwin is the man who has taken advantage of the alarm and fury of the moment to join the warhoops [sic] of slanderous misrepresentation against an individual whom every engine of Tyranny and Falsehood is at work to destroy.”74 Thelwall’s umbrage is registered in E. P. Thompson’s influential assessment of Considerations. Godwin “seemed to condone” the “legislation against popular organizations like the Corresponding Societies,” Thompson reports, and “was held to have let down the cause.”75 Thompson himself might be of this party, for he dismisses the anti-Pitt polemic that makes up the majority of Considerations as nothing more than Godwin’s “moaning on and on about Bills so loosely drawn that they might even touch benign philosophers like himself.”76 Thompson’s wariness about Godwin’s commitments in this tract joins a long tradition of chastising Godwin for having “supported the action taken by the government,” as B. Sprague Allen once put it.77 But this assessment rests on a decidedly partial reading of Considerations, one that neglects Godwin’s larger strategy. If this strategy was missed by Thelwall, it was caught by another contemporary reader, Eliza Fenwick, who read Considerations as a tactically ambivalent tract: if “Godwin bruises his friends,” she discerned, “he slays his enemies.”78 Extending Fenwick’s thoughts, we might say that Godwin’s performance as “a lover of order”—that is, an anti-Godwinian, anti-Thelwallian conservative—renders the ­essay’s bruises as payment for its slayings. Considerations is a strategic discourse, one in which Godwin confects a slippery narrative persona. His title page arrays the confection. “A Lover of Order” is a decidedly conservative byline for Godwin to have chosen—one pro–Gagging Acts tract opened with a call to “the lovers of Peace and Good Order.”79 Opponents of the ministry tended to opt for pseudonyms that signaled resistance, such as “Hampden,” “Citizen,” “Democrat,” “Friend of the People,” and so on. Making good on his loyalist pen name, Godwin sounds the alarmist rhetoric of anti-Jacobin propaganda, echoing the sharp-

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est attacks on the LCS. He warns of the expansion of “this extraordinary institution,” one that is now “extremely numerous in the metropolis, split and divided into a variety of sections” and all the while “weekly gain[ing] an accession of numbers” (130). Casting an eye over these “immense multitudes,” Godwin cites the LCS members’ “poverty” and the “abundance of their zeal,” warning that “it is easy to see what such a machine is able to effect” (130). This may not be satirical spoofing alone: Godwin was certainly no champion of mob politics. From this perspective, working-class collectivities could transform quickly into monstrous machines, controlled by the chief engineer, John Thelwall. Whatever Thelwall’s intentions may have been, Godwin laments, his principles have crumpled beneath the pressure to appeal to his crowds. “He observes what passages they are in his discourse that produce the loudest tumults of applause,” Godwin charges, and “aims at the frequent recurrence of such passages” (132). To amplify the tumultuous applause, all oratory, argues Godwin, relies upon “an appeal to the passions,” and the rhetorical move most often summoned for this appeal is ad hominem, as lecturers learn to “inveigh against the individuals that exercise the functions of government” (133). Godwin implies that in his inveighing Thelwall has put the lives of these officials in danger. Thelwall, who was always careful to preach nonviolent resistance, was understandably angry, and sympathy with his indignation has contoured critical assessments of Considerations.80 But Godwin was only “bruising” Thelwall. His real target was a different kind of radicalism. The opening section of the tract, in which readers are invited to recite loyalism’s greatest hits, occupies only twenty-two of eighty-six pages, after which the Thelwall-bashing lover of order turns sharply to portray the Gagging Acts as the most pressing threat to national stability and to cite Pitt (not Thelwall) as Britain’s most dangerous radical. Contemporary reviewers were puzzled by this abrupt turn. The Monthly Review reported that the essay begins with “remarks which are moderate, candid, and judicious,” as it “passes a degree of censure on the political Lectures lately given in Beaufort Buildings,” and wisely denounces “the Corresponding Society as a formidable machine.”81 But assuming this to be a pro–Gagging Acts work, the reviewer was caught off guard by what ensues: when “all seems to promise much in favor of the bills” they are, without warning, “totally condemned, as in the highest degree unjust, arbitrary, and dangerous.”82 The reviewer was left confused, but in this very confusion we see Godwin’s rhetorical coup. He has framed Considerations so that a condemnation of the Gagging Acts emerges out of

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loyalist discourse, offering opponents of Pitt a perspective through which they can identify themselves as the true lovers of order in 1795 Britain. In this long perspective, we can see Godwin mobilizing the supposed threat of Thelwall as a foil to the danger represented by Pitt. Godwin’s early critique of Thelwall and the LCS, while biting, had been contained within sober, concise sentences: “It may happen, that a political leader shall commence his career with uncommon purity of intentions. I believe this has been the case with the lecturer in Beaufort Buildings” (132). Thelwall is easily controlled by orderly syntax, but the danger of the new legislation bursts this order. “Who does not see,” begins one query, with a stylistic expansiveness that rivals Burke, that if the king’s minister do not like my pamphlet, or do not like my face, if he have an old grudge against me for any past proceeding, if I have not proved a fortunate candidate for his general good-will, or if, by any distortion of understanding, or excessiveness of alarm, he be led to see in my pamphlet things it does not contain, I may suffer the penalties of this act? (136)

“My face,” “my pamphlet,” “I may suffer”—it is significant that Godwin loads first-person pronouns into this syntactic rush. There’s a point to the panic, as Godwin draws upon the craft he had developed while composing Caleb Williams the previous year. Godwin’s move from Political Justice to Caleb Williams has long attracted critical attention—Hazlitt found the transition to be a “new and startling event in literary history.”83 More recent criticism, however, has focused as much on continuity as difference, examining the ground the novel shares with Political Justice.84 But what happens after Caleb Williams? Just as the ideas of Godwin the philosopher influenced the work of Godwin the novelist, the strategies honed by the novelist in turn shaped his later political essays. We find, for example, a heightened interest in agonistic couples in his post–Caleb Williams political writing: in Considerations, the Caleb/Falkland dyad is recast as Thelwall versus Pitt. And in Caleb Williams, too, Godwin had discovered the power of a reader-inhabitable first-person pronoun. If in Political Justice he had asked, “What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my,’” in his famous eschewal of the worth of familial bonds in assessing a person’s “value” (50), he would come to learn the affective pull of the first person for provoking his reader’s investment in tales of “flight and pursuit.”85 Godwin reflects on this rhetoric in his 1832 preface to Fleetwood: “I began my narrative,” he recalls of Caleb Williams, “in the more usual way, in the third

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person. But I speedily became dissatisfied. I then assumed the first person, making the hero of my tale his own historian.”86 With this change, Godwin leads readers to inhabit Caleb’s pursued “I.” Hazlitt certainly lost himself in Caleb, writing that “no one that ever read [Caleb Williams] could possibly forget it, or speak of it after any length of time but with an impression as if the events and feelings had been personal to himself.”87 Godwin recruited the affective “I” in Considerations to highlight the danger of the Gagging Acts: the threat was not a matter for abstract juridical speculation but one of crucial importance to every Briton. Godwin’s change in direction about a quarter of the way into Considerations pivots on these first-person poetics. “I may suffer the penalties of this act”: readers who had been inhabiting the “I” Godwin forged in the essay’s opening, a loyal opponent of Thelwall and the LCS, now find themselves subject to the sublime reach of the legislation. One might “determine never to commit another word to paper,” might “resolve never, upon any account, to sell, give, or lend any book, paper or writing,” might take a “vow of silence,” and pass the days “counting the clock” (145). But all to no avail, for not only may any utterance “be distorted,” but even those who remain silent “may be proved, by legal evidence, to have damned the king” and find themselves en route “to Botany Bay” (145). Unlike the prosecutions related to the distribution of Paine’s Rights of Man, the purview of the Gagging Acts was not limited to booksellers or lecturers. Anyone might be arraigned. “[T]hose persons, who are under no apprehensions from the extention of authority,” Godwin insists, “ought yet to disapprove of the present bills” (161). Stressing the universal, Godwin engages readers who were once faithful to Pitt but who have now become worried about the Gagging Acts. Francis Horner (later MP and a founder of the Edinburgh Review) reported from Shacklewell on 24 November about the local opinion of Pitt’s legislation. “Here it is very unpopular,” he noted, adding that “a few of Mr Pitt’s advocates, who enjoy not a sleep so profound and unbroken as the o­ thers, deem it an unnecessary stretch of power.”88 The grumblings were also sounded closer to Westminster. In a letter of 5 December to the Duke of York, Lord Malmesbury troubled over parliament’s handling of the legislation, fearing that the Duke of Leeds “has been wrought upon by some of the enemies of the bill, and, I apprehend, will be against it.”89 Five days later, Malmesbury still had his eye on Leeds: “I must say that I do not think the measure was ably or judiciously supported by Ministers. Lord Grenville, who opened the business, was prolix and heavy. . . . The Duke of Leeds did not speak,

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and I believe went away without voting.”90 Godwin’s Considerations reaches out to this drifting allegiance, prodding the murmuring disenchantment by refusing the official explanation of the bills’ necessity and suggesting that any lover of order may well have doubts. The existing laws are “abundantly sufficient for the purpose,” he argues, adding that “this would have been the case, even if we had torn the Riot Act from our statute books, and introduced some more humane legislation” (156).91 But ignoring the laws already in place, the ministry “seized the opportunity to provide a remedy ten times larger than the evil in question,” he argues, “a remedy that would suit . . . all the purposes of private revenge or sanguinary alarm” (136). Godwin could be speaking about the Committee of Public Safety in France, and he knows it: Pitt and his ministers have become impassioned tyrants who “consult not the coolness of philosophy, but the madness of passion,” and when “the time calls upon them to reason, they begin to rail” (157). Leaving behind the “still and quiet process of reason,” the ministry here emerges as the very tyranny it claims to be protecting Britons against. Godwin deftly manages loyalist rhetoric to court once-loyal but now uncertain supporters of Pitt. It is only through an incomplete reading of this complex textual hybridity that critical reception can claim Godwin’s support for the Gagging Acts and discern an apostatic slide. In this way, Considerations is a textbook case for the endurance of selective misreading. Godwin’s clear and sustained attack on the Gagging Acts and the Pitt ministry has itself too often been silenced. Readers from Thelwall onward who have balked in dismay at the opening pages of Considerations have also missed the strategic design of anti-Pitt polemic that unfolds across the text. What Considerations signals is a necessary turn in Godwin’s sense of the ethics and tactics of persuasion: authorial transparency was no longer a safe option in Pitt’s Britain, but irony, parody, and cagey reversals could accomplish much. Considerations testifies to the force of the Gagging Acts in compelling authors to new, rhetorically complex modes of writing, and reveals the urgency for us to develop new modes of reading.

“The Whole Country Seems Dead” The Gagging Acts prompted a flurry of opposition in late 1795. Godwin’s Considerations, Coleridge’s The Plot Discovered, Pindar’s poems, the satirical prints of Gillray and others—this battery appeared in the charged weeks before the passage of the acts. But however energetic, however impressive, this

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outburst could not overawe Pitt’s majority in parliament, and the legislation at last received Royal Assent on 18 December 1795. Once the laws passed, elegies on the “deathlike silence” that Coleridge feared began to be issued. “I do not know what to write to you about our politics here,” sighed Fox to Lord Holland on 18 February 1796; “the whole country seems dead.” 92 What little political activism remained was easily contained. In the fourth number of the Watchman, Coleridge ran a sad report from the Birmingham Gazette: When LCS members John Binns and John Gale Jones, “regardless of the laws,” held political gatherings at Bristol’s Swan and Bull pubs, a local magistrate rushed into action. Although “the meeting at the Swan had broken up,” at the Bull Jones was found “in a room haranguing about 70 people.” But not for long: “As soon as he saw the Magistrate he was silent.”93 The passage of the Gagging Acts marks a political and cultural turning point in the eighteenth century’s turbulent closing decade. The vibrant democratic movement of Paine, Thelwall, and the LCS, which generated scores of impassioned political tracts and drew hundreds of thousands to outdoor lectures, was hushed, as E. P. Thompson and others have shown, by the passing of the acts.94 Yet if political activism was effectively smothered in 1795, the significance of this moment for literary culture was just beginning. In the aftermath of the Gagging Acts we see the publication of some of the seminal works of British Romanticism, impressed and imprinted under the sign of gagging, such as the troubled status of conversation in Lyrical Ballads or the endurance of the figure of the prison in the later-1790s lyrics of Thelwall and Coleridge.

ch ap te r

t wo

Close Confinement John Thelwall and the Romantic Prison It may sometimes happen that the fate of an insignificant individual involves that of a whole nation. —The Case of William Hodgson, Now Confined in Newgate (1796)

Is the Patriot come yet? . . . I was looking out for John Thelwall all the way from Bridgewater, and had I met him, I think it would have moved me almost to tears. —Charles Lamb, letter to Coleridge, 19/26 July 1797

The Bastille has drawn warranted notice in the critical history of Romanticism, but with the steady arrests and incarcerations of the Pitt ministry, the Tower, Newgate, and Britain’s regional jails soon became no less important to the era’s cultural landscape. Two decades before the political imprisonments of the 1790s, the idea that a society’s civility could be gauged by the state of its jails was set forth by prison reformer John Howard. The protosociologist Howard visited jails throughout Britain, a campaign that led to his 1774 call for action in the Commons and, three years later, to his publication of the monumental State of Prisons in England and Wales.1 It was the example of Howard’s legendary work that drew Coleridge from his “place of retirement” in 1795 to protest the Gagging Acts. “Was it right,” Coleridge asked himself, While my unnumbered brethren toiled and bled, That I should dream away the entrusted hours On rose-leaf beds, pampering the coward heart With feelings all too delicate for use? Sweet is the tear that from some Howard’s eye Drops on the cheek of one he lifts from earth[.]

(45–50)

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Coleridge was not the only one to laud Howard. Contemporary tributes also included Walter Lisle Bowles’s “On Mr. Howard’s Account of L ­ azarettos” and “The Grave of Howard,” Samuel Bishop’s “Epigram CXXXIX,” Bernard Barton’s “John Howard,” and Thomas Dermody’s “The Death of Howard.”2 By the 1790s, Howard’s clarion call for prison reform found broad popular notice, as writers, editors, journalists, and booksellers lived through or were threatened with imprisonment. These literate convicts told what had often been a silenced story, the lot and experience of the common prisoner.3 From this event in early Romantic print culture, the specter of the prison appears in the work of Thelwall, Coleridge, More, Wordsworth, Hays, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft, and of lesser-known figures such as James Montgomery, John Augustus Bonney, and Charles Pigot.The birth of “prison literature” is twin to the birth of British Romanticism. The most famous, or notorious, political prisoner in 1790s Britain was John Thelwall, and to read his writing across the decade is to encounter the journal of a nightmare. The direst moments came in five months of solitary confinement in the Tower, and another seven weeks at Newgate, where Thelwall was locked in the “Common Charnel House” alongside the corpses of inmates dead from disease.4 The prison, both as experience and metaphor, haunts Thelwall’s life and career and is etched into his most powerful poetry, Poems Written in Close Confinement in the Tower and Newgate (1795) and Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement (1801). Thelwall’s prison ordeal began on the morning of 13 May 1794. Arrested at his home, he lost ten years’ worth of writing—including manuscript drafts and fair copies—in the agents’ raid of his house. With his files and library seized, he was quick to request a pen and paper from his Tower cell to begin creating a new body of work. On 30 May he was granted “use of Papers Pens Ink and Books,” an allowance that would produce Close Confinement (Figure 6). Published in early 1795, this volume holds a series of twelve sonnets, two odes, and five ballads. Proud of his collection of prison poems, which he would later refer to as his first efforts at “correct composition,” Thelwall sent a copy to Coleridge, who wrote back: “Several of the sonnets are pleasing—& whenever I was pleased, I paused, & I imagined you in my mind in your captivity.”5 Coleridge’s experience of pleasure checked by visions of pain points to the complexity of Thelwall’s prison verse, which necessarily conflates gestures of solace and complaint. This is the idiom of political resistance and stubborn creativity that the prison poets of the 1790s developed, and its force radiated beyond the prison’s walls to anticipate and model the for-

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Figure 6.  “Order for permitting John Thelwall the use of Paper Pens Ink and Books,” 30 May 1794. PC 1/28/62. The National Archives, London.

mal complex that M. H. Abrams named the “greater Romantic lyric.”6 The prison poetry of the 1790s is an important archive for understanding the history of poetic form, one that illuminates how political repression shaped early Romantic writing. In this chapter I trace this dynamic from Thelwall’s Close Confinement to the locodescriptive lyrics he wrote while in seclusion at his farm in Llyswen, Wales, a few years later. I conclude with a well-known greater Romantic lyric, Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” to show its marking by the prison verse of the 1790s and its consciousness of the fraught situation of literary expression in Pitt’s Britain.

Romantic Prisons The definitive study of Romantic-era writing on imprisonment is Victor Brombert’s The Romantic Prison, published in France in 1975, the same year as Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.7 While Foucault pursues the history of state tyranny, Brombert is concerned with writing that figures the prison as an existential trope. The texts that Brombert focuses on, Leo ­Bersani has noted, seem “indifferent both to the official justifications of prisons and to what may have been their real political function.”8 Sometimes called the felix carcer or “happy prison” tradition, the discourse Brombert

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traces represents confinement as a fortunate fall in which solitude is the generative circumstance for heightened self-awareness, even transcendence. The rhetoric of felix carcer that Brombert identifies in the works of Stendhal, Hugo, and Nerval helps us to think about the prison poetry of the writers I examine, as they search for and test a positive value in imprisonment, if only as a defiant oppositional gesture—“propaganda for the cause,” as Jonathan Wordsworth has put it.9 Despite this discourse, however, 1790s prison writers more often declined the consolations of the felix carcer tradition, forging instead what we might call an atrox carcer discourse. Prison was brutal, not happy. A collision of felix carcer and atrox carcer structures Wordsworth’s “The Convict,” printed in the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads. This poem proved controversial—contemporary reviewers were incensed by its concern for the prisoner’s well-being—and Wordsworth chose not to publish it again in his lifetime.10 “The Convict” opens with a solitary speaker admiring a spectacular mountainside at the gloaming, but the second stanza interrupts the reverie with elegy: “And must we then part from a dwelling so fair?”   In the pain of my spirit I said, And with a deep sadness I turned, to repair   To the cell where the convict is laid.

(5–8)

In a first reading nothing seems amiss, even through line 7: we might expect the speaker to “repair” to a nearby cottage for the night. But line 8’s jarring location confronts us with the material circumstances that pain the spirit beyond repair. We are not told why the speaker must inspect the prison, though from the poem’s action we know the answer to line 5’s question. Yes, we must leave behind the “glory of evening” and, in a reworking of the Romantic lyric’s familiar inward turn, we must turn “To the cell where the convict is laid” (8). From gazing on an expansive landscape, the speaker now not only inspects the convict’s wretched cell, but further, attempts to imagine the prisoner’s interiority. Afflicted with remorse, the prisoner’s malignant recollection of his crime, the speaker supposes, “Still blackens and grows on his view” (24). The political charge of Wordsworth’s poem is brought home by contemporary reviewer Charles Burney’s indignation at compassion offered for someone “justly” imprisoned, “one condemned by the laws of his country, which he had confessedly violated!”11 For Burney, this juridical plot

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is the only narrative we need. But Wordsworth continues, envisioning a remedy through the introduction of felix carcer discourse. The convict’s silent gaze first compels the speaker to defend himself against any supposition that he is voyeuristically musing upon what, metaphorically at least, he might have in common with the prisoner. Rather than attempting a comparison of confinements, the speaker assures that he “Is come as a brother thy sorrows to share” (48). This begins the felix carcer turn, at least for the speaker: eschewing a quietist rhetoric that would equate literal imprisonment with his own felt immurements, the speaker frees himself to contemplate action. He now engages contemporary penology: wishing he could “plant thee where yet thou might’st blossom again” (52), the speaker evokes William Godwin’s writing about what he referred to as penal “colonization”—an ameliorated version of Britain’s brutal system of transportation.12 Wordsworth’s notion of prison reform, like Howard’s, focuses on the material conditions that inmates suffer. Some writers, however, while aware of the putrid state of Britain’s jails, dissociated institutional from moral and spiritual reform. This is the status of the prison in Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts, in which imprisonment offers a felix carcer for Christian salvation. More glanced at the utility of the prison in Village Politics when, in the conversation between republican malcontent Tom Hod and persuasive loyalist Jack Anvil, we hear suspicions aired about the legitimacy of Britain’s prisons: “What are all the jails for? Down with the jails, I say; all men should be free,” Tom proclaims. To this sentiment, loyalist Jack cautions that “a few rogues in prison keep the rest in order, and then honest men go about their business, afraid of nobody.”13 More here emphasizes the social instrumentality of the prison, but the institution itself does not appear in the text. In several of the longer Cheap Repository Tracts, however, More’s narrators bring us inside prison cells and hold us there for several pages, and as her central characters face moments of crisis, the prison becomes the setting for both narrative climax and moral instruction. We begin to see More’s interest in moving beyond the institutional silhouette of Village Politics to painful scenes of prison life in her broadside ballad “The Gin-Shop; Or, a Peep into a Prison” (1795). Indicting the “self-inflicted curse” of alcoholism and dismissing the effects of “War” and “Want,” the poem’s speaker admonishes, “the state compels no man to drink.”14 As though pointing out wretched figures in a Hogarth print, the speaker reads the scene as a vast gin alley—we are shown, for instance, a “shivering female” who, “ten to one,” has found prostitution through

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­alcohol (54–7). The poem’s chief lesson is revealed by the subtitle’s promised “Peep.” It is the reader rather than the prisoners whom More would save— the prisoners are just cautionary examples. Look and learn, we are exhorted: Look thro’ that prison’s iron bars,    Look thro that dismal grate; And learn what dire misfortunes brought    So terrible a fate. The Debtor and the Felon too,    Tho’ different much in sin, Too oft you’ll find were thither brought    By all-destroying Gin.

(69–76)

Though More acknowledges strata of “sin,” her lines wipe away the reformers’ effort to differentiate debtors from felons: all “sin” rhymes with “Gin.” The prison roster includes a “pale Manufact’rer” whose weaving business was ruined by alcoholism, an “Apprentice” who “rob[bed] his master’s Till,” and a “serving Man” who stole and pawned silverware. The poem even collapses the fate of murderers and alcoholics, as self-destroying drunks share the divine punishment of suicides (121–4). More has ventured into sight of a prison, rendering it the material realization of the fate that greets soft will and errant action. She moves from “Peep” to all-access pass in The History of Mr. Fantom, a Cheap Repository Tract that reveals the carceral work and promotes the salvational potential of the prison, framed by an extended admonition of the social harm wrought not by gin but by the circulation of radical discourse. The title character, a cartoon hybrid of Thelwall and Godwin, was once a retail trader in London, but under the influence of the “new philosophy” he soon began to rail against state authority and church doctrine. Returning to the structure of Village Politics, More sets up a dialogue between Fantom and John Trueman, his pious friend. At issue is the case of one William Wilson, who had once worked for Fantom but was dismissed for drunkenness and at his dismissal stole some wine and silverware. The narrator tells us that Wilson had been corrupted by the “new philosophy” of his master, with a life of alcoholism and criminality as the result. With this damage already done, Trueman urges Fantom to turn his philosophy of universal benevolence to practical use by assisting with his work for the “Society for relieving ­Prisoners for small Debts.”15 Fantom, however, counters with abstractions, sounding like a Godwinized Tom Hod: “I would put an end to all punishments; I would

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not leave a single prisoner on the face of the globe. This is what I call doing things on a grand scale.”16 Trueman responds cautiously to Fantom’s vision, saying that it would mean “pleasing a few rogues at the expense of all honest men,” while he has in mind not global freedom but a local initiative: “I am just now getting a little subscription from our club to set free your poor old friend Tom Saunders, a very honest brother tradesman, who got first into debt, and then into gaol, through no fault of his own” (8, 10). The fund for Saunders is almost sufficient: Trueman has all but one guinea left to collect, which he asks of Fantom. But quickly redirecting the conversation, Fantom explains that he would rather “diffuse light and knowledge” than trouble over a guinea (10). “I despise the man,” Fantom proclaims, “whose benevolence is swallowed up in the narrow concerns of his own family, or parish, or country” (12). Fantom rejects such “narrow concerns”: “I wish to see the whole world enlightened” (11). But this satire of Godwinian “benevolence” soon turns to tragedy. A letter arrives from Chelmsford Jail from Wilson, who has written to ask Fantom to visit his “dark and doleful abode” (17). Trueman urges him to accept the request, but still enraged at the loss of his wine and silverware, Fantom responds only that Wilson deserves the execution he will soon meet. Playing on Fantom’s response, Trueman suggests that Wilson may now be willing to confess to the location of the silverware; the ploy works, and the two head off to Chelmsford Jail. Recalling the prison’s role as the guarantor of a safe society in Village Politics, the narrator reports that when they arrive at the prison Trueman’s “heart sunk within him,” for he “deplored the corrupt nature of man, which makes such rigorous confinement needful, not merely for the punishment of the offender, but for the safety of society” (18). But rather than closing with this bromide, More takes us inside the prison, where Wilson, bound in chains, confesses that the new philosophy led him astray, first into drunkenness, then into theft, and finally into an unspecified murder. Wilson is now convinced that Christian doctrine is true, that there is a heaven and hell, and on considering his own likely fate, he collapses onto the cell’s floor. With Wilson now unconscious, Fantom realizes that he will not recover his silverware and coldly decides to leave, as Trueman chastises: “Do you go home, Mr. Fantom, and finish your Treatise on Universal Benevolence, and the blessed effects of Philosophy” (20). Fantom leaves, but More’s narrative stays in the prison. We learn of Trueman’s long night of prayer with Wilson, and of his insistence that the prisoner draw up a final statement to be distributed at the scene of execu-

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tion. Wilson agrees, and in his self-account—appended to the tract as “The Last Words, Confession, and dying Speech of William Wilson, who was executed at Chelmsford for Murder”—he laments falling prey to Fantom and the new philosophy, and emphasizes his turn from radical atheism to Christian piety. More’s tale closes with the narrator joining Trueman in a final wish: “Poor William was turned off just a quarter before eleven: and may the Lord have had mercy on his soul!” (23). Though The History of Mr. Fantom begins as a satire on those who follow Godwinian philosophy while disregarding the real plight of the working poor, the latter half of the tale figures the prison as a site not only of punishment but of generation, one that produces both Wilson’s repentance and his very tale, which is released from the prison and sent into the crowds gathered at his execution. We know from an 1801 preface that More included prisons in the distribution channels of the Cheap Repository Tracts, but in The History of Mr. Fantom we see the obverse transit, as a cautionary narrative flows out from the prison itself and into public circulation. Replacing gin with radical discourse as the primary toxic inebriant, The History of Mr. Fantom offers an account of prison-cell repentance, though Wilson’s ultimate fate is left uncertain. It is in Jack Brown in Prison that we see More’s most flamboyant felix carcer performance, one that ends in a register of celebration.17 Here we follow the title character’s benevolent friend, who like John Howard risks infection as he visits “sick and dying” prisoners, including Brown himself, who is near death after an outbreak of the “loathsome distemper, called the Jail Fever” (4–6). Such “fever” (typhoid) could render even brief sentences fatal. In his prison diary, John Horne Tooke referred to his confinement as ministerial “murder,” explaining, “I call it murder; because indefinite and arbitrary imprisonment, CLOSE CUSTODY (such as I experience) with all its circumstances of time and place and manner at the will of a malicious minister, may be certain death by the slow torture of disease.”18 More’s Brown manages to survive his fever, and the cell is the means for a divine healing, too, as he recognizes that “sin is a greater evil than the prison” (8). Absent from John Howard’s narratives, “sin” grounds More’s vision of penology: once confinement leads Brown to renounce sin, his health improves, and when he is finally reconciled to God, he instantly inherits the funds necessary for his release (16). In More’s felix carcer, state confinement provides the opportunity for higher freedom through Christian devotion. The calculus of immurement and redemption in More’s Cheap Repository Tracts plays no part in the chilling tales circulated by contemporary

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prison reformers. These narratives instead move from Howard’s documentary reports to horrors of the juridical gothic, and no small part of their rhetorical force comes from their emphasis on the looming menace of incarceration for ordinary Britons. The Affecting Case of James MacCurdy (1793), for instance, recounts how MacCurdy, while walking from London to Highgate “with some papers in his hand,” was seized by a local constable, charged with “distributing certain seditious and inflammatory papers, tending to stir up discontents in the minds of his Majesty’s subjects,” and tossed into prison to await trial. Within a few days he was dead of “gaol ­distemper.”19 MacCurdy was “of a good family” and was an “inoffensive man, of an irreproachable character,” the pamphlet reports, with an eye to the audience’s care: “Reader, this may be my case—it may be thine.”20 This warning that every Briton is vulnerable to arbitrary imprisonment and its attendant miseries is the terrible refrain of prison reform discourse. Writing from his Newgate cell, William Hodgson used this logic to ground his appeal for political action: “It may sometimes happen that the fate of an insignificant individual involves that of a whole nation.”21 The narratives of MacCurdy and Hodgson reach out to readers like them, and the want of a redemptive conclusion performs the expansive threat. The number of such reports rose dramatically in the 1790s as the arrests of political actors accumulated.22 An additional spur to publication may have been the isolation of many political prisoners. Writing about prison experience in this period, Iain McCalman has argued that among certain inmates at Newgate there was an upending of the familiar notion of the jail as “an instrument of state surveillance and human disempowerment,” an upending that created the potential for collegiality among aspiring activists and revolutionaries within the prison.23 This is an appealing account, and one for which McCalman gathers good evidence. The experiences of Thelwall and the other prison writers I focus on in this chapter, however, do not fit this profile of an organic jail community, as each prisoner I study was held in solitary confinement. The arrest warrants for Thelwall, Hardy, and the other political leaders specified that they were “not allowed communication with any person” without a written dispensation from the Privy ­Council.24 Months into their sentences, this sequestration continued. According to a 30 July 1794 note from the Privy Council permitting the prisoners to leave their cells for exercise, they were at all times to “be attended each of them by a warder, and not suffered, without special order, to speak to one another, or with any other person.”25 Faced with isolation,

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these prisoners found a virtual community in writing to readers beyond the prison’s walls. The rhetorical circuits also included those who managed to gain permission to visit the imprisoned at Newgate and other jails, and who often became sympathetic reporters of prison life.26 From his diary we know that Godwin made several trips to Newgate in 1794. An evening spent at Gerrald’s cell famously moved him to write Cursory Strictures, and he included a long description of imprisonment in Caleb Williams.27 Caleb’s tale of incarceration fills four chapters, operating as a field report for readers who have “never seen a prison” (184). Encountering scenes of “misery such as nothing short of actual observation can suggest to the mind,” Caleb implores readers to “visit the scenes of our prisons! witness their unwholesomeness, their filth, the tyranny of their governors, the misery of their inmates!” (186, 188). But from the miserable solitude of his cell, as he experiences what Michael Hardt has called the “empty time” of the prisoner’s existence, Caleb begins to generate a felix carcer turn, as he comes to regard his isolation as an opportunity for introspection.28 Having discovered “the secrets of a prison,” he soon “found out the secret of employing my mind.” Caleb writes: “I am shut up for half the day in total darkness, without any external source of amusement; the other half I spend in the midst of noise, turbulence, and confusion. What then? Can I not draw amusement from the stores of my own mind?” (192). He emerges from his trip through these stores with new insights: “I became myself a poet; and, while I described the sentiments cherished by the view of natural objects, recorded in the characters and passions of men, and partook with a burning zeal in the generosity of their determinations, I eluded the squalid solitude of my dungeon, and wandered in idea through all the varieties of human society” (193). Not only can Caleb escape his cell’s solitude through an imagined journey, but he even recovers incidents from his life that might otherwise have been lost: “By degrees I called to mind a number of minute circumstances which but for this exercise would have been for ever forgotten” (192). Telling Caleb’s story of confinement and exploring what the evolving thoughts and feelings of a prisoner might be, Godwin continues the analysis of imprisonment, both its pains and its rare ameliorations, that he had sketched in Political Justice. There he was particularly critical of solitary confinement, writing that it “must strike every reflecting mind as uncommonly tyrannical and severe” for “Man is a social animal,” and asking, “Who can tell the sufferings of him who is condemned to uninterrupted solitude? Who can tell that this

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is not, to the majority of mankind, the bitterest torment that human ingenuity can inflict?”29 But Godwin does allow that on some occasions literate prisoners might use their time for self-reflection. This possibility prompted Godwin’s support of the allowance of books, pens, and paper in jail: “Will you deprive the man you imprison, of paper and books, of tools and amusements? One of the arguments in favour of solitary imprisonment is, that it is necessary the offender should be called off from his wrong habits of thinking, and obliged to enter into himself.”30 In showing Caleb Williams experiencing both the material brutality of imprisonment as well as a moment of meaningful self-reflection, Godwin’s portrayal of Caleb’s time in jail compresses the range of prison experiences from atrox carcer to felix carcer, as Caleb turns to poetry for relief in his squalid cell. Bringing his meditations on imprisonment to the lived experience of Caleb, and allowing us to hear the prisoner detail his time in jail, Godwin works to map the prison cell as a real social coordinate. Thanks to this effort by Godwin and others to deliver prisoners from social banishment to public notice, the first-person narratives of inmates are framed by the understanding that they are entering into public notice at the moment of their incarceration. This dynamic of close confinement and public visibility creates a complex of the introspective and the performative that is the hallmark of 1790s prison verse.

“Who from such a dream would wake?”: 1790s Prison Poetry The potential for a solitary prisoner to become a national folk hero propels the prison verse of Bonney, Montgomery, and Thelwall into the terrain of the greater Romantic lyric. This poetic mode, in M. H. Abrams’s influential description, is a variety of dramatic lyric, in which we encounter “a determinate speaker in a particularized, and usually a localized, outdoor setting, whom we overhear” addressing a “silent human auditor, present or absent”: The speaker begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied but integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which remains closely intervolved with the outer scene. In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds upon itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation.31

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For Abrams, the “repeated out-in-out process, in which mind confronts nature and their interplay constitutes the poem,” is the Romantic signature in literary history, “a new and exciting poetic strategy.”32 After indexing its traits, Abrams traces the form’s genealogy, via the eighteenth-century locodescriptive poem, to the descriptive-meditative sonnets of William Bowles.33 Taking his cue from Coleridge’s account in Biographia Literaria, Abrams pays particular attention to Coleridge’s infatuation with Bowles’s work. But by 1796 this romance was a half decade old. There was an influence much closer to Coleridge in the mid-1790s, one he may not have wished to elaborate upon in 1817. The poems of prisoners such as Coleridge’s friend Thelwall anticipate the formal complex of Abrams’s greater Romantic lyric. The pattern appears over and again in 1790s prison poetry, in which the “landscape” is the jail cell, and the appearance of a natural object, usually a bird or stream of light, provokes an imaginative journey traced on the “structure and style” of the Romantic lyric. The poem concludes as the imaginative flight returns us to the cell, with the speaker having come to some new realization. It is important to recognize that the scene of composition is integral to the shaping of these poems, as the visibility of their plight prompts Bonney, Montgomery, and Thelwall to theatricalize their poetic utterances as though they are addressing an audience, while their solitary prison existence leads them to structure their verse after the inward turn of their thoughts. Having initiated this flux, the poets then follow with another outward turn in which they craft imaginative escapes from confinement. The significance of the jail cell to the development of this style is evident as all three prisoners develop the mode after first writing more conventional political verse upon their incarceration. The prison poems of John Augustus Bonney are an exemplary case. Bonney was imprisoned in the Tower on 12 May 1794 as part of the government’s series of arrests of prominent political activists.34 An attorney and member of the SCI, Bonney defended several reformers in the early 1790s, including Daniel Isaac Eaton, who was charged with seditious libel for Politics for the People.35 Bonney is remembered by legal historians for requesting improved prison conditions upon his indictment. “A situation in which a man can neither sleep by night, nor cast his eye on a ray of comfort by day,” he argued to the Privy Council, “is not much adapted to prepare his mind for so important a trial as mine.”36 While in prison Bonney found comfort in writing verse, and in an act of bestowal that evokes the confined pro-

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tagonists of Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman and Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice, he gave his prison manuscript to his daughter as a gift, “the only token my situation enables me to give.” The manuscript of Bonney’s prison poetry is dated 10 August 1794, three months into his imprisonment, his fate still uncertain.37 In a gesture that recurs among 1790s prison writers, Bonney’s poetry figures his close confinement as visible to a national audience. His first poem— a brief epitaph written in the voice of a goldfinch—signals the heroic lineage of his incarceration. With reference to Sir Walter Raleigh’s immurement in the Tower, the poem records that within Bonney’s cell, “heroes bold, and patriots firm could dwell” (3). Sharing the status of past political prisoners, Bonney’s realization that he occupies an elevated national stage flows into “Ode to Liberty,” which returns to the motif of a bird held captive in the Tower. Bonney’s headnote sets the location—“Scene, the Tower”—as he again ponders the prison’s dramatic past. “With my own sorrows, I have mourn’d the fate / Of those brave men, the glories of the state” (48–9), the poem begins, before offering the roll call of glory: Here valiant Raleigh, whose advent’rous skill, Found out new worlds, to please one monarch’s will, In the next reign to pay the toils he’d past, Obtain’d a dungeon first, and death at last. Great Russell’s worth, and Sydney’s patriot zeal, Here fell beneath a Tyrant’s murd’ring steel.38 (51–6)

The canon of political convicts is familiar—Walter Raleigh, William Russell, and Algernon Sidney are eulogized in turn—and aligned with the latest round of political imprisonments: Nor, charg’d with guilt, when Pitt’s uneasy mind Saw plots in air, and treason in each wind, Could virtuous Patriotism, and learning’s lore, Against Tooke’s entrance, bar this fatal door.

(57–60)

Pitt’s “uneasy mind,” finding specters of revolution all around, has no patience for learning and patriotism. No less than John Horne Tooke (Cambridge MA and by 1794 a renowned scholar) was subject to the prime minister’s net. Imprisoned in the wave of arrests that caught Tooke and Thelwall, Bonney understands that his confinement is visible to the nation.

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This visibility is central to “Suspension,” in which Bonney suggests that the government’s efforts have backfired, serving only to turn the imprisoned reformers into this era’s heroes. The poem’s title focuses the irony: That freedom soon might have an end The Habeas corpus they suspend. Then lofty tow’rs the rogues prepare, And Britains friends suspend in air.

(15–8)

The government’s aim, Bonney suggests, was not necessarily to hang the accused, but to present them as a warning to other activists and their supporters by “suspending” them in the Tower’s high cells for all to see. It was through the “suspension” of habeas corpus, of course, that the government was able to hold the accused in prison indefinitely without trial, with the strategy, Bonney suspects, of turning them into cautionary examples. But the very visibility of their plight has ended up generating public sympathy. From his own Tower cell suspended in air, Tooke recounts witnessing the generation of this support: “Walking about my room, I accidentally stopped for a minute looking out of my window at a boat on the Thames. The wharf was full of people, and to my surprise, they all together suddenly pulled off their hats to me.”39 Tooke’s plight has become public theater, with his audience a newly conscious community of active support. In Bonney’s account of this community in “Suspension,” the once benighted public has formed into a body now critical of the ministry’s plots. Before “ten short weeks were at an end” (35),     the mist which veil’d men’s eyes, Before the sun of reason flies: They see with rage and discontent, The plot which jugglers could invent, To rob them of their dearest friends, And compass interested ends.

(37–42)

If the spectacle of accusations and mass arrests once veiled Pitt’s machinations, by witnessing the prisoners’ suffering the public is now able to discover the fraudulence of the government’s own secret “plot.” Bonney oscillates in “Suspension” and “Ode to Liberty” between the comfort of public sympathy and the pain of enforced solitude, a flux that also occupies his domestic affections, and in this poetic grammar we can

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see, even more legibly, the Romantic lyric’s pattern of expansion and contraction. This pattern shapes the imaginative journey at the heart of “To the Author’s Wife,” a poem occasioned by Bonney’s contemplation of the morning sun streaming into his cell. Bonney moves from the synecdochal reach of state power to the metonymic logic of escape, as following the beams of light he realizes that imagination can slip confinement: Though power’s hand has chain’d my body here, Alone, disjoin’d from all my soul holds dear, My mind, above the reach of human pow’r, Stretches its sight beyond this dreary tow’r: It joins me ev’ry evening to her side, Ere sleep’s gay visions o’er my fancy glide[.]

(17–22)

In his reverie Bonney is able to heal his “disjoin’d soul” by joining his wife. He concludes with a return to his cell, with the realization that the love of his wife, which the Tower’s walls cannot shut out, will lighten the hell of prison: “Through the dull day, which else would longer seem, / Her heav’nly virtues on my bosom beam” (25–6). Connubial love is as fortifying as the rays of the sun, as Bonney synthesizes natural object, symbol, and referent. While Bonney wondered who outside his cell was thinking of him, the fate of another 1790s prison poet, the Sheffield journalist and writer James Montgomery, was followed closely by at least one other author. “Poor Montgomery’s in prison,” Coleridge wrote to a friend on 4 February 1796, as he was traveling the Midlands to secure subscriptions for the ­Watchman.40 Coleridge’s concern for Montgomery’s plight is informed by their parallel ventures in oppositional journalism. As Coleridge labored to build an audience for the Watchman, Montgomery was serving time, according to a government report, for “seditiously contriving, devising, and intending to stir up discontent and sedition among his Majesty’s subjects, and to alienate and withdraw the affection, fidelity, and allegiance of his said Majesty; and unlawfully and wickedly to seduce and encourage his said Majesty’s subjects to resist and oppose his said Majesty’s government, and the said war.”41 Though perhaps best known for his later abolitionist verse and hymns, Montgomery was a vibrant figure in 1790s radical politics, grabbing the Home Office’s attention in 1794 when he took over the Sheffield Register from Joseph Gales (who had fled to Hamburg with an arrest warrant on his heels).42 With the paper renamed the Sheffield Iris, as editor Montgomery

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supported the reform cause by turning his eye to the present tyranny. Arrested for seditious libel, he wrote to a friend that the government’s aim was to shut down his newspaper. “The prosecution is leveled against the Iris,” Montgomery suspected, “they are determined to crush it.”43 This determination extended into the following year, when Montgomery was once again imprisoned, this time for his report of a public disturbance at Sheffield. While in jail he wrote the pieces that went into Prison Amusements, a volume of twenty-seven poems that he published under the pseudonym “Paul Positive” in 1797.44 In one of these Prison Amusements, “Captive Nightingale,” Montgomery describes a bird whose sorrowful song evokes his own plight. Hearing something of his trials in the bird’s sad melody, the prisoner greets the nightingale as a fellow captive in a “cold cage” and then “translates” the nightingale’s song, one that could be his own. Stolen from the green fields and immured in a cage, the nightingale’s protests to its captors is sounded by Montgomery’s narrator: Ah! is thy bosom iron?     Does it thy heart enchain? As these cold bars environ     And, captive, me detain?

(69–72)

When the nightingale dies attempting to escape, Montgomery joins Bird to Bard, telling the nightingale that there is one person “Who thinks, who feels, like you”: The Bard, that pens thy story,     Amidst a prison’s gloom, Sighs—not for wealth nor glory;     —But freedom, or thy tomb!

(93–6)

In “Captive Nightingale” the scene of writing is the subject of writing, and the deepest sigh is that there may be no difference between freedom and death. Like Bonney, however, Montgomery’s sense of the relationship between confinement and imagination evolves. Bonney’s redemptive sunbeams in “To the Author’s Wife” are twinned by the moonbeams that play on the walls of Montgomery’s cell in a poem entitled “Moonlight,” in which he asks: “dost thou see, / From thine elevated sphere, / One kind friend who

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thinks of me?” (25–7). This mention of the world outside the prison provokes an imagined escape from the cell: Fancy, too, the nimble fairy,     With her subtle magic spell, In romantic visions airy     Steals the Captive from his cell. On her moonlight pinions borne,     Far he flies from grief and pain; Never, never to be torn     From his friends and home again! Stay, thou dear delusion! stay!     Beauteous bubble! do not break! —Ah! the pageant flits away!     —Who from such a dream would wake?

(37–48)

If Keats would conclude his “Ode to a Nightingale” with the sigh “Fled is that music” and its questioning frame, “Do I wake or sleep?,” Montgomery’s question is self-answering, or no question at all. To ask it already declares the dreamer awakened, the pageant lost to air. For Montgomery, no less than for Bonney, arrest and imprisonment came as a shock, and the poetry of both is the pained reverberation. John Thelwall, on the other hand, suspected that his loud opposition to the Pitt ministry would soon enough land him in jail. A few months before his incarceration he defiantly declared that it would be better “to be immured oneself in a Bastille, than to have the Bastille put into one’s mouth to lock up one’s tongue.”45 The government was using imprisonment to silence the reform movement, but Thelwall refused, at least in early 1794, to be cowed. He had been under surveillance since 1792, and the harassment continued to escalate until by 1794 he knew by name the spies assigned to trail him. His imprisonment in May 1794 seemed inevitable. Critics have identified Thelwall’s time in jail as central to his withdrawal from active politics. In this narrative (given its basic plot by Thelwall himself in the preface to Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, and then influentially retraced by E. P. Thompson in “Hunting the Jacobin Fox”), government persecution forced Thelwall to leave politics after the passage of the 1795 Gagging Acts, wary of a return to prison, or worse. But this withdrawal was never complete, and

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in Thelwall’s post–Gagging Acts poetry we can trace how the formal logic he developed in prison poems such as “The Cell” is extended and refined in seemingly nonpolitical Llyswen lyrics such as “The Woodbine.” We can follow, that is, the process by which politics abides in literary form, as an archive of the political moment past. Thelwall’s time in prison was vital to his development as a poet: a glance at his literary efforts before his imprisonment indicates the significance of Close Confinement to this trajectory. In 1787 he published Poems on Various Subjects, a collection of conventional romance ballads, but his first significant showing as a poet came six years later with verse scattered throughout the Peripatetic, a work well described by Judith Thompson as a “medley of verse and prose, oratory and anecdote, political satire and sentimental effusion.”46 In the Peripatetic Thelwall’s chief interest is the “freedom of conversation from which the human heart can be revealed,” and to achieve this freedom Thelwall’s title character rejects “the confines of the study” for “a pedestrian expedition.”47 The controlling metaphor for Thelwall’s formal mélange and social vision in the Peripatetic is the escape from confinement to cross-country walk, as mobility creates the speech community. Thelwall would bring this interest in the structuring influence of the scene of composition to Close Confinement, though with a crucial revision: confined to a jail cell, he crafts short, introspective poems that figure a social world he can imaginatively join from prison. Thelwall’s “Advertisement” to Close Confinement describes his verse as experiments of a mind in a state of confinement. His prison poems “may perhaps gratify the curiosity of those who wish to know what the feelings of men are in situations the most perilous and awful, when supported by the consciousness of suffering for a virtuous principle.”48 Writing while his trial for high treason loomed, Thelwall uses juridical discourse to convey his poems’ affective authenticity: they are “transcripts of the heart, rather than flights of the imagination,” and are “rather intended to rouse the patriotic feeling, than calculated to amuse the admirer of poetical enthusiasm.”49 Thelwall’s transcripts are meant to appeal to truly “patriotic” hearts: “I have spoken what I felt; not considered what I should speak; a method, at least, the most honest, and sometimes the most successful, in appealing to the hearts of others.”50 Although he presents Close Confinement as heartfelt effusions, Thelwall knows what it means to reach an audience, and so he carefully calibrates his appeal to readers’ hearts. First of all, we find a title page that advertises both the past prestige and contemporary

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prominence of political imprisonment. The London booksellers Thelwall lists—Ridgeway, Symonds, and Eaton—had by 1795 each spent time in prison. The same page also flaunts an epigraph on defiance in the face of confinement adapted from one of Thelwall’s idols of political conviction, John Milton:51           Fool, do not boast; Thou can’st not touch the freedom of my mind, —————Altho’ this corporal rind     Thou hast immanacled.

Aligning himself with the virtuous Lady’s resistant words to the evil enchanter Comus, Thelwall lets Milton’s villain portray the Pitt ministry as foul deceivers.52 Milton’s presence registers further in Thelwall’s decision to use the sonnet form for these political poems.53 He rarely turned to the sonnet before his imprisonment, but in solitary confinement fourteen lines must have seemed an apt poetic cell. The sonnet’s restraint allows him to develop his own defiant felix carcer iteration: anticipating Wordsworth’s troping of the sonnet as liberatory confinement (“Nuns fret not”), the form offers Thelwall occasion to demonstrate that no plot is too narrow for courageous resistance.54 The importance of Milton to this demonstration is apparent right away as Thelwall evokes “On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament” (1647) by crafting his own caudate sonnet to open Close Confinement. “The Feelings of a Parent” expresses Thelwall’s bewilderment at anyone who “the cause of sacred freedom would forego, / For aught luxurious Grandeur can bestow” (4–5). Further, by setting his descriptions of the plight of imprisoned 1790s radicals in sonnet form, Thelwall aligns them with a patriotic tradition that readers would have recognized. “On the Report of the Death of Thomas Muir,” for instance, written on 18 September 1794, four months into Thelwall’s imprisonment, mourns the Scottish activist Thelwall believes died while being transported to Botany Bay (8). As had Bonney, Thelwall parallels the struggles of present-day martyrs such as Muir with the storied defiance of heroes of the English Revolution.55 In the folk heroics of his imprisonment, Thelwall knew himself to be on stage, like a convict on the scaffold, with the public awaiting his defiant words. Long a performer, Thelwall was always ready to indulge his dramatic impulses, later recalling that as a boy his “rage for theatricals was obsessive,” and that he was “perpetually painting scenes” and “fabricating

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theatrical decorations.”56 The penchant for performance was with him early and late—as E. P. Thompson notes, even in his political activism Thelwall “preferred to strike a theatrical posture.”57 This affect is equally important to Close Confinement, in which “political prisoner” becomes a role that Thelwall was fully prepared to fill. He presents himself most clearly as a performer in “The Crises,” a sonnet headed by lines from Beaumont and Fletcher: I will not, like a careless poet, spoil The last act of my play, till now applauded, By giving the world just cause to say I fear’d Death more than the loss of honour.58

Taking this proclamation as stage direction, Thelwall’s sonnet exclaims on his performance of defiance. He models “The Crises” on the scaffold speech, a well-cultivated genre, and one given fresh production in the French ­Terror.59 “It comes—the awful hour!—Compatriots dear,” Thelwall opens, before calling on his “audience” to gaze upon him (1). “Search my breast with scrutiny severe,” he implores as he bares himself to public display. Thelwall connects this performance of courage to the Civil War martyrs, writing that with the eyes of the country upon him he will show the fortitude “Of Hampden or of Sidney” (14). Sharing with Bonney and Montgomery a sense of the visibility of their persecution, Thelwall next joins these prison poets in trading accounts of public heroism for figurations of imaginative exploration in a sonnet suggestively titled “The Cell.” Writing soon after his transfer from the Tower to Newgate, and amidst the rotting corpses of the “charnel house,” Thelwall contrasts himself against some “trembling Ruffian” who is unable to find solace in introspection. Despite the “damp foul floor, the ragged wall, / And shattered window, grated high” (5–6), “The Patriot,” consoled by principle, is able to “smile—in conscious virtue blest!” (4). From floor to wall to high window, his upward-moving glance leads him to call himself “blest,” but for the atheist Thelwall the source of this blessing is consciousness of self. Though trapped in a dungeon, he “o’er a race of well-spent years / Can call the retrospective view” to mind, looking “inward to his heart,” to see “objects that must ever please” (11–4). This turn to memory reworks the referent of the poem’s title, as we have moved from the confinement of the prison cell to the expansive prospect of the speaker’s mind. The formal poetics of “The Cell” are integral to this movement, as the opening lines depict the material surroundings and the turn moves to consider the poet’s

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interiority. The inward movement is signaled by a shift (against sonnet protocol) to iambic tetrameter, a ballad measure that gives a folk idiom to his experience. When Thelwall referred to Close Confinement as his first attempt at “correct composition,” he may have meant his experiments in the close confinements of form, in which he works out a dramatic relation among the scene of composition, his structure of thought, and the formal dynamics of his verse. His concern for this relation would continue to evolve in his poems written at Llyswen a few years later.

“Some sequester’d dell”: Thelwall’s Llyswen Lyrics By the late 1790s Thelwall was nursing both a wariness of present threats and bruised nerves from past ordeals. This mix of fear and caution runs through William Hazlitt’s account of a visit Thelwall paid to an inn at ­Llangollen, Wales. From inside the inn, on Hazlitt’s report, Thelwall noticed someone in a window watching him, and before he had recognized that it was ­Taylor, a well-known spy, the horrors of the past erupted. Thelwall heard “the speeches of the Attorney and Solicitor General over again” while visions of “the gaunt figure of Mr. Pitt glared by him.” These ghouls of prosecution were followed by the terrors of punishment: “the walls of a prison enclosed him; and he felt the hands of the executioner.”60 In this grotesque obverse of the window scene from Tooke’s prison diary, the “free” Thelwall finds himself in a new kind of prison, a close confinement no longer eased by broad public support. Thelwall had relocated to Wales in search of a reprieve from the politics of London, but he remained haunted by the journey from courtroom to cell to scaffold, a haunting that erupts, like Pitt’s gaunt specter, into the Llyswen lyrics.61 Thelwall’s Llyswen poems arrive trailing clouds of persecution. “The ordinary transactions of life have been interrupted,” he writes in the preface to Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, explaining that he is continually intruded upon by government agents whose surveillance functions as “the insidious prompter of hostility and insult” in the public at large.62 In a strategy of self-preservation, Thelwall fashions himself an innocuous rural poet. No longer the “Lecturer and Leader of Popular Societies,” he is now a “disciple of the Muses,” and he assures readers that “political discussion would ill accord with the character and contents” of a volume of poetry by the new Thelwall.63 And what of his political beliefs? “He is anxious for no vindication,” Thelwall writes, grounding his new persona in a claim to

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mute integrity even as he stubbornly borrows a keyword from oppositional discourse: “It is enough for himself, he remembers [his political opinions] without self-reproach. That he retains them in silence, ought to be enough, even for the most prejudiced and hostile.”64 But this declaration of “silence” was more than a simple recusal, for Thelwall found himself compelled into a new kind of solitary confinement in which even “Friendship (the last stay of the human heart),” he laments, “wearied and intimidated with the hostilities to which it was exposed, has shrunk from its own convictions, and left him in comparative isolation.”65 This isolation was not enforced by iron bars, but it felt close enough. “I consider myself as little better than a prisoner upon parole” Thelwall confessed to LCS founder (and fellow treason trial survivor) Thomas Hardy.66 “Retirement” was not the opposite of “confinement” but a cruel sequel, and lonely as he was, Thelwall would not jeopardize the safety of his few persevering friends. In May 1798 he canceled a planned visit to the Welsh poet Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams), explaining that “the prejudices with which I know myself to be watched have made me deem it prudent to lay this intention aside, lest picturesque curiosity, & visits of friendship should be construed into High Treason.”67 This was not paranoia—he was indeed under surveillance. On 30 April 1798, one Edward Edwards wrote from Hays-on-Wye to report that “Thelwall, who now lives in this Neighborhood, may be carrying on a treasonable Correspondence. He lives in the Parish of Llyswen . . . and writes and receives . . . a vast number of Letters by every Post.” Quick to respond, the Home Office instructed that “Means should be taken to know the contents of those Letters in whatever manner they may get to them.”68 Against this climate of surveillance, Thelwall figures his move to Llyswen as a performance of his oath of silence, but try as he may, he cannot cordon off his rural poetry in Pitt’s Britain.69 Hence Andrew McCann’s argument that Thelwall’s lyrics reveal “the historical and social contingency of ‘the retreat’ as an intellectual and literary posture” helps us see that the very term “retreat” bears with it a sense of enforced withdrawal, as though Thelwall were a soldier under fire.70 Sketching a revealing portrait of post–Gagging Acts Britain, Thelwall’s Llyswen lyrics list uneasily between pastoral retirement and political strife, recording the compelled solitude of political exile. Thelwall’s best-known poem, “Lines, written at Bridgewater,” dated 27 July 1797, sounds the agon of sociability and alienation. Dreading yet another “Year of miseries, / Of storms and persecution,” Thelwall, nominally

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at liberty, still suffers from “disappointed hope, and keen regrets, / Wrung from the bosom by a sordid World / That kindness pays with hatred” (11–5). He has left solitary confinement only to find himself longing for “solitary haunts” in which “bustling Cares intrude not, nor the throng / Of cities, or of courts” (55–6). But the ever-sociable Thelwall no sooner imagines then recants this new vision of solitude:             Yet not for aye In hermit-like seclusion would I dwell (My soul estranging from my brother-Man) Forgetful and forgotten.

(56–9)

The internal rhyme of “I” and “aye” suggests the eternal solitude that Thelwall the ex-prisoner most fears. This rural seclusion is merely confinement by another name, and so he looks for a compromise between bustling Bristol and absolute isolation. “With some few minds congenial, let me stray,” he resolves, “Along the Muses’ haunts” (60–1). The compromise is a remote dell in which Thelwall can share the fit society of Coleridge. “Ah! let me then, far from the strifeful scenes / Of public life” (80–1), he writes, echoing Thomas Gray,       let me, far in some sequester’d dell, Build my low cot; most happy it might prove, My Samuel! near to thine, that I might oft Share thy sweet converse.

(85–8)

Rather than village-Hampdens and mute inglorious Miltons, Thelwall’s new society includes “minds congenial”: Sara Coleridge, Susan Thelwall, and “Alfoxden’s musing tenant, and the maid / Of ardent eye, who, with fraternal love, / Sweetens his solitude” (124–6).71 But a ten-day visit at Alfoxden was the summa of Thelwall’s dream. His appearance at the Wordsworths’ rented mansion triggered panic in the Poole family over what seemed to be an expanding radical circle. “We are shocked to hear that Mr Thelwall has spent some time at Stowey this week with Mr Coleridge, and consequently with Tom Poole,” commented Poole’s cousin. “To what are we coming?”72 Thelwall, for his part, was coming to feel he had found a home. He asked Coleridge to secure him a cottage in the area so that he might join their social circle, but like Poole’s cousin,

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Coleridge was wary. “Very great odium T. Poole incurred by bringing me here,” Coleridge explained to Thelwall, and when Wordsworth came & he likewise by T. Poole’s agency settled here— You cannot conceive the tumult, calumnies, & apparatus of threatened persecutions which this event has occasioned round about us. If you too should come, I am afraid, that even riots & dangerous riots might be the consequence. . . . [W]hat can it be less than plot & damned conspiracy.73

Ventriloquizing Pitt-era paranoia, Coleridge worried that the ministry’s alarmist rhetoric of secret plots reached well into the West Country. And he was right: as we have seen, Home Office files identified the Alfoxden circle as a “mischievous gang of disaffected Englishmen” who plan to “do much harm,” while a second insisted that “the inhabitants of Alfoxton House are a Sett of violent Democrats.”74 Sweet converse was not possible in the repressive 1790s, in which suspicion reached into every dell, turning it into one more cell. The expanse of this reach is underscored when Thelwall’s Llyswen lyrics, as though following the progression of the prison poetry, move from public utterance to private meditation but still retain the scars of his political strife. A good example is “The Woodbine,” a virtual model of Abrams’s greater Romantic lyric, and a case in point for the prison’s imprint on its early formations: Sweet flower! that loiterest on the autumnal branch Beyond thy wonted season, pleas’d to view, In Dove’s pure mirror, thy reflected charms, And cheer her with thy fragrance, be thou blest!— For thou hast sooth’d my heart; and thy soft scent (Mild as the balmy breath of early love!) Hath warm’d my kindling fancy with the thoughts Of joys long past—of vernal days, how sweet! Past with my gentle Stella, far away— Even in the vale of Catmose. Or my heart, Turning from retrospects to dreams of hope— Paternal hope! can dwell on thee, sweet flower! (Emblem of artless softness) till I see, In Fancy’s glass, the offspring of my love Seeking the fragrant bower, to breathe, or hear, (In Youth’s due season) the delightful tale Of soul-awakening passion. Gentle flower! The thought, perchance, is wild—the hope is vain—-

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(For, ah! what blighting mildews wait the hours Of life’s frail spring-tide!) yet ’tis cheering sweet— And my heart hails it, gentle flower!—well pleas’d If o’er the sterile scene of real life Imagination sometimes shed around Her transient blooms:—for blissful thoughts are bliss.75

In “The Woodbine,” as in “The Cell,” Thelwall’s title sustains multiple referents. Able to weather the frosts of fall, the woodbine signals a spirit of endurance through adversity. Its appearance amidst the coarsening autumn scene also suggests a temporal disruption, a refusal, in this case, of the past to stay in the past. Gazing on this remnant of another time, Thelwall sees a past instantiation of the landscape superimposed upon its present self, a doubled temporality that prompts him to contemplate the past and imagine the future. But rather than the terrible eruptions of his experiences of persecution, Thelwall attempts to convert this gesture of endurance to a discourse of love. Pondering days spent “far away” with his wife, Thelwall names, in particular, Catmose, where they had lived shortly after their marriage. From this memory of nuptial happiness the poet follows the woodbine’s “artless softness” into thoughts of his daughter, and from there into his “dreams of hope” for the future (13–4). “Fancy’s glass” imagines the child one day standing in Thelwall’s place, looking through his eyes and “Seeking the fragrant bower” herself (15). This shared subjectivity leads to the sad address to the “Gentle flower!” (17), which names both Thelwall’s child and the woodbine, as he harmonizes nature and imagination in a moment that lasts no longer than its recognition. Realizing the fragility of his vision—“the hope is vain”—he contracts his thoughts (18). The world, Thelwall knows, is more likely to leave one with “disappointed hope, and keen regrets.” A shadow now moves across the poem, as “blighting mildews” are never far from “life’s frail spring-tide!” (19–20). If nature had been politicized by state confinement in the prison poems, here the effort at rural idyll bears the scars of remembered confinement and later exile. Thelwall’s experiences of the 1790s continue to haunt his Llyswen ­lyrics, so that even ostensibly nonpolitical poems such as “The Woodbine” have both formal and political stories to tell—or, rather, they reveal the inseparability of these discourses in post–Gagging Acts verse. That Thelwall writes of nature with the weight and urgency of political information sets the rural idiom of Coleridge and Wordsworth in a new light, and we can see why E. P. Thompson urged us to recognize Thelwall’s importance to 1790s culture.76

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Thompson’s work on Thelwall’s significance has been furthered by recent studies of the collaborative writing communities of early Romanticism. Extending Paul Magnuson’s attention to the public networks of Coleridge’s 1790s lyrics, Judith Thompson first found echoes of the animated correspondence between Thelwall and Coleridge in the subtle intertextual conversation of Thelwall’s “To the Infant Hampden” and Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” (with Coleridge’s lyric appearing as an answer to the despair expressed by the alienated and dispirited father of Thelwall’s poem), before tracing Thelwall’s larger presence in the Wordsworth circle.77 I wish to extend this investigation of the public networks of high Romantic form by thinking about the relation between the structure and style of the Romantic lyric and the status of “confinement” in two of Coleridge’s poems of the late 1790s, “The Dungeon” and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.”

Coleridge’s Vast Aviary Coleridge had been interested in the condition of the imprisoned before he met Thelwall. His “first substantial and original poem,” notes Richard Holmes, was “The Destruction of the Bastille,” composed in 1789 amidst an outpouring of responses to the news from Paris.78 At the decade’s close, in “The Devil’s Thoughts” (co-written with Southey), he focused his attention on a notorious jail. Twisting a John Howard-esque inspection of British jails into an educational field trip, the Devil especially admires one prison: As he went through Cold Bath Fields he saw   A solitary cell; And the Devil was pleased, for it gave him a hint   For improving his prisons in Hell.79

Between his conventional piece on the fall of the Bastille and his ironic endorsement of one of Britain’s famously miserable jails, Coleridge offered his most extended poetic treatment of imprisonment in “The Dungeon,” which appeared in Lyrical Ballads. Here we encounter a vision of “friendless solitude, groaning and tears,” in which the prisoner’s condition is irreparably harmed by his experience of the jail (13). Although Coleridge originally wrote these lines for his play Osorio—as the soliloquy of a prisoner in sixteenth-century Spain—the stand-alone poem has no determinate temporal marking, leaving readers to consider the prisoner’s plea within the context of contemporary writing about the state of Britain’s jails.80 In this

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line of reference, especially with its sympathy for the prisoner’s agony, readers of Lyrical Ballads would have recognized Coleridge’s “The Dungeon” as a partner piece with Wordsworth’s “The Convict.” There is a key difference, however: Wordsworth’s poem is named for the prisoner, Coleridge’s for the imprisoning structure. If we meet Wordsworth’s convict in a wretched state, Coleridge traces the process by which the prison itself creates this condition, as he attends to the prisoner as a means for exploring the shaping power of confinement. The prisoner, Coleridge writes,               lies Circled with evil, till his very soul Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deformed By sights of even more deformity!

(16–9)

Coleridge figures the atmosphere of the prison virtually entering into and satanically reshaping (“unmould[ing]”) the convict’s soul after its own image. The poem’s lexicon even petrifies from the telling, as the adjective “deformed” hardens into the noun “deformity.” As we watch the prisoner become the dungeon, Coleridge’s title assumes a chilling indeterminacy. How can we know the prisoner from the prison? The shaping force of confinement is central to Coleridge’s other “prison poem” of 1797, “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” This famous lyric is not about a state jail—far from London’s Tower, Thomas Poole’s “Lime-Tree Bower” in Nether Stowey is the setting for Coleridge’s exploration of confinement. But how might Coleridge’s trope of the prison appear if we were to read it against the contemporary incarcerations of his friends and fellow writers? In tandem with Magnuson’s reading of “Frost at Midnight” as “a private poem with public meanings,” I would like to think about “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” in its larger public context.81 The earliest version of the poem appears in Coleridge’s 17 July 1797 letter to Southey, written a few days after Charles Lamb had left Nether Stowey for London. “Dear Sara accidentally emptied a skillet of boiling milk on my foot,” reports Coleridge, “which confined me during the whole time of C. Lamb’s stay & still prevents me from all walks longer than a furlong.”82 The burn was severe enough to require confinement in Poole’s garden, but this “prison” is a far cry from a putrid jail cell, and the irony against the complaining speaker is sharpened by Coleridge’s involvement with friends who had experienced truly harrowing scenes of confinement. 17 July 1797 was also the day of Thelwall’s arrival in the West

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Country to visit Coleridge. “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” that is, was conceived and written as Coleridge was anticipating meeting in person the nation’s most famous political prisoner. Lamb shared the excitement, pausing on his way back to London to ask Coleridge, “Is the Patriot come yet? . . . I was looking out for John Thelwall all the way from Bridgewater, and had I met him, I think it would have moved me almost to tears.”83 Thelwall was not the only survivor of “confinement” in Coleridge’s circle. Lamb, to whom the poem is addressed, had himself been “pent” in London, all but shackled to his desk at the East India Company, and hemmed in by family obligations. These commitments included caring for his sister Mary, whom he had released from an Islington asylum in April 1797 (where she had been confined since murdering her and Charles’s mother in September of the previous year). Coleridge, sensitive to Mary’s condition, had asked Charles to bring her along during his July visit.84 As if this were not enough, another gentle-hearted Charles, young Charles Lloyd, had been boarding with Coleridge at Nether Stowey since 22 February 1797. Lloyd’s father paid Coleridge £80 to tutor and care for the troubled young man, but Lloyd’s mental health had steadily deteriorated, and in late March, Coleridge at last had him confined to an asylum at Litchfield. For Coleridge in the summer of 1797, “confinement” was an overdetermined concept. This referential surplus inflects the opening lines of “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” as the confined speaker troubles over missing out on the sights his friends will see on their midsummer hike: Well, they are gone, and here must I remain, This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison! I have lost Such beauties and such feelings, as had been Most sweet to my remembrance even when age Had dimmed mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile, My Friends, whom I may never meet again, On springy heath, along the hill-top edge, Wander in gladness . . . (1–8)

“May never meet again”? Some critics have faulted Coleridge for this “peculiar and unwarranted notion,” while others have tried to explain its cause: “This statement may sound a bit self-pitying and melodramatic,” writes Anne Mellor, “until one recalls that Mary Lamb had killed her mother and seriously wounded her father in an attack of madness less than a year before and could well do the same to Charles in a second seizure.”85 Yet, whatever

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tone we hear in this line, the speaker expresses the chief, and often articulated, fear of anyone headed for a prison sentence, which as we have seen was often a death sentence in the diseased squalor of the jails. Having sounded the commonly articulated fear of prison writers, that they may never again see their friends, Coleridge’s speaker succeeds to the next standard gesture of prison poetry, as he imagines the activities of his friends while he sits in his “cell.” The speaker orients his imagined journey through two key tropes of prison verse. Can his friends see these same birds fly overhead? Do the sunbeams that filter into his prison shine on his friends as well? Pursuing these thoughts, he is able imaginatively to join and share his friends’ exploration of the Quantocks, and so envision a world beyond his confinement. He brings this experience, through the surrogate of Charles Lamb, back into his bower to see it no longer as his prison but as his site of sympathetic imagination. This occasions the famous felix carcer realization: No plot so narrow, be but Nature there, No waste so vacant, but may well employ Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart Awake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes ’Tis well to be bereft of promised good, That we may lift the Soul, and contemplate With lively joy the joys we can not share.

(61–7)

With some of his closest friends having experienced penal and psychiatric immurement, friends who were with him as he was writing “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” what is the significance of Coleridge’s meditation on confinement, and why does he conclude with this felix carcer sentiment? He may have meant to comfort either of the Lambs, or Charles Lloyd, or even Thelwall, to whom he quoted the poem in a letter of 16 October 1797. Perhaps in addition to offering solace, Coleridge was attempting to sympathize, through his injury, with his friends’ more dire bouts of confinement. Or maybe we could say, with Jean Genet, that “[p]risons and their inmates have too real an existence not to have a profound effect on people who remain free.”86 But how “free” did Coleridge understand himself to be in the summer of 1797? It is worth recalling here two images with which Coleridge had closed The Plot Discovered. Thanks to legislative terror, Coleridge shuddered in this pamphlet, “British Liberty leaves her cell by permission, and walks abroad to take the air between two jailors” (314). Coleridge’s carceral imagery extended

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into his closing vision of Britain as “a vast aviary, and all the honest are encaged within it” (315). This virtual prison was all too familiar to Coleridge’s friend Thelwall, and here, in the lines that immediately precede the felix carcer turn in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” Coleridge’s meditation on confinement reaches self-reflexively toward a broader public statement. In the late twilight, the bower is noiseless, save for a solitary song:             though now the bat Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters, Yet still the solitary humble-bee Sings in the bean-flower!

(56–9)

Magnuson has argued for the political resonances of “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” pointing to such paratextual issues as the pseudonym Coleridge signed to the poem and the location in which it was first printed.87 If Magnuson finds in this textual history evidence that Coleridge’s poem was sent into the world as a public rather than private utterance, we should note that its public, political significance is there, too, in its structural dynamic of isolation and escape, and in its story of a voice in confinement, still singing as silence blankets the countryside. Coleridge was not alone in this sentiment of a perseverance, of a spirit that, like the woodbine, stays alive. The rhetoric of a brave stand, of a voice that remains amidst a landscape of silence, is a master trope of the 1790s prison poetry of Thelwall and others. In his sonnet on Thomas Muir, Thelwall had insisted that despite the ministry’s program of arrests and imprisonments, “with souls unaw’d, the virtuous few, / The sacred cause of Freedom still pursue” (13–4). If in “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement” Coleridge had glanced back to John Howard’s prison reform efforts to inspire the political bravery to which he aspired in 1795, in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” we see him turning toward the prison poets: Howard was once Coleridge’s model for political action, the prison poets are now his models for poetic action. With one eye on the prison writers, Coleridge in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” suggests that the solitary poet, crafting a greater Romantic lyric in post–Gagging Acts Britain, must never abandon this song, not even within the silence of William Pitt’s “vast aviary.”

ch ap te r

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Hell Broth The Trials of Benjamin Flower

“Let the leaf be cancelled.” So Wordsworth instructed the publisher of his 1809 pamphlet The Convention of Cintra in reference to any passage that might “expose” him to “prosecution in any of the courts of law.” 1 Words­ worth’s worry, he reveals in this and a string of subsequent letters, was prompted by the memory of the case of Benjamin Flower (1755–1829), a Cambridge journalist who in 1799 was sent to Newgate for libel, or as Words­worth puts it, for writing “Truth with honest intentions.” It is unusual to find Wordsworth veering into political panic in these years, and critical history has followed Sara Hutchinson and Dorothy Wordsworth in dismissing his concern as an oddity of terror out of step with the times. “We have not the least fear of Newgate,” Sara Hutchinson chuckled to De Quincey, who was seeing The Convention of Cintra through the press in London, “and a Gaol in the Country would be quite pleasant.”2 In a separate letter, Dorothy Wordsworth told De Quincey: William still continues to haunt himself with fancies about Newgate and Dorchester or some other gaol, but as his mind clings to the gloomy, Newgate is his favorite theme. We, however, have no fears, for, even if the words

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be actionable (which I cannot but think they are not), in these times they would not dare to inflict such a punishment.3

Rather than using these jocular and altogether rational responses to license dismissal of Wordsworth’s fear, however, I wish to pause here in order to recognize that the trials of Benjamin Flower still served as a monitory example of brave endeavor and dire consequence very much alive in Wordsworth’s mind in 1809. When we tug at this curious thread from Wordsworth’s Allen Bank correspondence, what opens before our eyes is the perilous world of Pitt-era resistant journalism, one that, in the intrepid work of Flower, stayed alive into the latter 1790s, after many newspaper editors and printers had been imprisoned, bankrupted, or otherwise driven out of the trade. Following this thread leads us back to the wake of the passage of the 1795 Gagging Acts, to the scene of provincial journalism that Coleridge entered when he launched the Watchman on 1 March 1796, as part of a small but determined effort to keep progressive ideas alive. He even hoped that through calm, reasoned argument the Gagging Acts might be repealed.4 But the Watchman was a short-lived venture, and on the last page of the journal’s last number Coleridge directed his readers to Flower’s Cambridge Intelligencer, “the style and composition” of which, he assured, “would claim distinguished praise, even among the productions of literary leisure; while it breathes every where the severest morality, fighting fearlessly the good fight against Tyranny.”5 Coleridge had known Flower since his undergraduate days, and the Cambridge Intelligencer was one of the first venues for his poetry, so he had reason to admire Flower’s literary taste.6 But he also supported the newspaper’s political agenda, as Flower, “fighting fearlessly the good fight,” managed to sustain what E. P. Thompson has called the “last national organ of intellectual Jacobinism” in the Pitt era.7 Flower’s paper lasted longer than most, running from 1793 to 1803. By the end of the 1790s, his brave work had cost him six months in Newgate, a fine of £100, and trial expenses of £400, altogether over three times his annual income from the Cambridge Intelligencer.8 The bruised hopes of Coleridge and later tremblings of Wordsworth frame the daunting scene in which Flower operated. His was the goal, and the burden, of carrying a democratic message to a nation in which his fellow fighters in the cause were falling one by one away. Flower’s trials are compelling because even as he remained, as Timothy Whelan has re-

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cently written, one of the most “consistent critics of the Pitt administration and advocates of political reform,” his career does not match the pattern of other prominent 1790s activists and journalists.9 That arc is familiar by now in the careers of John Almon, Joseph Gales, Daniel Holt, Sampson Perry, Richard Phillips, Thomas Walker, and many others, whose bold resistance during the first few years of the 1790s gave way to various forms of silencing, self-imposed or externally enforced, especially by mid-decade. But Flower’s trajectory is different: founding the Cambridge Intelligencer six months after the execution of Louis XVI, he was just getting started as a creeping disenchantment with reform politics was putatively taking hold in Britain. Through the regicide, Robespierre’s terror, the 1794 treason trials, and into the post–Gagging Acts hush, Flower’s commitment to reform did not waver. He kept the Cambridge Intelligencer afloat through the worst years of Pittite repression, his trial and imprisonment in Newgate coming a half decade after most other oppositional journalists had left the scene. How was Benjamin Flower able to stay active for so long? In this chapter I attempt an answer. Long recognized as a defining feature of early Romantic discourse, the pamphlet storm of the revolution controversy has sometimes eclipsed the booming newspaper industry that was a close rival in the battle for public opinion.10 There are good conceptual and methodological reasons for this uneven critical attention: the textual heterogeneity of newspapers is not easily molded to the conventional author-thesis model of literary critical work, and newspapers’ ephemerality has restricted their accessibility for modern critics. But things are changing. Against these hindrances we can set two developments in Romantic studies: attention to the era’s social and cultural networks, and the vast digitization initiatives that have made a good number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century newspapers more widely accessible.11 These changes have made it possible for us to move beyond simply poaching Romantic-era newspapers for an occasional book review, advertisement, or other instance of the ambient discourse that lay behind a given literary work, in order to consider the newspaper as a cultural entity in its own right. The newspaper was no marginal form. Coleridge, Southey, Robinson, Thelwall, Opie, Lamb, Godwin: most major (and minor) early Romantic writers were involved in newspaper culture. As we have seen, in the spring of 1794 Wordsworth was making plans with William Matthews for a venture to be called the Philanthropist. “I solemnly affirm that in no writings of mine,” he told Matthews about his intended

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political stance as a journalist, “will I ever admit of any sentiment which can have the least tendency to induce my readers to suppose that the doctrines which are now enforced by banishment, imprisonment, &c, &c, are other than pregnant with every species of misery.”12 By November 1794, Words­ worth no longer had his sights set on his own journal, though he wrote again to Matthews, a parliamentary reporter for the Telegraph, this time about the possibility of joining his friend in working for a London paper: “You say a newspaper would be glad of me; do you think you could ensure me employment in that way on terms similar to your own? I mean also in an opposition paper, for really I cannot in conscience and in principle, abet in the smallest degree the measures pursued by the present ministry.”13 This early ambition for journalism may have amplified Wordsworth’s later worry over Flower’s fate. But here the trail leaves off, as Wordsworth seems to have abandoned these aspirations (though Johnston and Roe have wondered if he was involved with a journal titled the Philanthropist that appeared in London a few months later).14 It is in the case of Benjamin Flower that we have the rare chance to listen to the voice of reform journalism as it endures the most harrowing years of the Pitt era. What we find is a story of canny improvisation in which this Odysseus of Romantic-era journalism, through a slippery cluster of engagement and retreat, critique and panegyric, developed a vexing persona that allowed him to keep reform discourse alive through the deathlike silence of the later 1790s.

Romantic-Era Newspapers Recent work on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century newspapers has revised foundational accounts of the history of British journalism. Against Arthur Aspinall’s claim in Politics and the Press, c. 1780–1850 that papers were effectively controlled by treasury and opposition payments, for instance, H ­ annah Barker has argued that governmental tampering was less determinative of newspaper content than press historians have supposed.15 For Barker, the influence of readers was what mattered, as editors were concerned to present a range of political views without risking the alienation of their paying customers by taking sides. In this claim, as Mulrooney has pointed out, Barker’s work is aligned with a larger narrative of the press’s liberation via the marketplace: as the expansion of the reading public brought higher subscription rates and increased advertising revenue across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, newspapers began to free themselves from

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governmental support and influence.16 This narrative of journalistic independence bears traces of Jürgen Habermas’s vision of the emergence of a liberal public sphere in late eighteenth-century Britain. But Habermas’s account overlooks the presence of domestic repression, as he traces a clean line from the dissolution of prepublication censorship in 1695 to the 1771 decision to allow parliamentary reporting, pausing in the 1790s only to report Fox’s comment during a debate in the Commons over Pitt’s actions concerning Russia that “it is certainly right and prudent to consult public opinion.”17 Any hint of post-1789 turmoil is muffled in Habermas’s terse follow-up to the report of Fox’s urging: “Nevertheless, the discussion about expanding the right to vote was drawn out over four more decades,” until the passage of the 1832 Reform Act. The Romantic era is almost entirely disregarded in this easy glide to reform. Habermas’s elegy for a lost era of free “rational-critical debate,” which he contrasts against the “manufactured consent” effected by modern mass media, misses what is most modern in Romantic-era public discourse, in which the authority of the better argument cedes to the authority of the better lawyer. No wonder, then, that Romanticists have been particularly active in the effort to revise and resist Habermas’s paradigm.18 It is the tendency toward overcorrection in the narratives of Hannah Barker and others, influenced by Habermas’s vision of “a critically debating public’s gradual assumption of the functions of political control,” that I wish to reconsider.19 While Barker’s critique of Aspinall focuses on the importance of newspapers for the 1780s reform movement, and others, following Habermas, skip ahead to the press’s role in early-1830s reform, the story I tell in this chapter might be thought of as a fraught abeyance, a regrettable era in the history of journalism in which the “people’s papers” were systematically demolished while those that supported the ministry were indemnified and subsidized.20 But this is not an account of repression alone. While newspapers such as the Manchester Herald were shut down within a year of their founding, Flower managed to keep his paper in print and himself, for a half decade at least, out of prison. This story really begins four years before the founding of the Cambridge Intelligencer. From the summer of 1789 and through the early years of the revolution controversy, the cultural and political importance of newspapers grew steadily, fueled by two familiar historical developments: increasing literacy rates, especially among the lower middle and working classes, and the intensity of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary discourse. From this meeting of expanded reading public and fiery

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debate emerged the addition of persuasion and commentary to newspaper reporting. The rise of opinion marks the papers of the early Romantic era, launching the editor to a role of national importance. It was the visibility generated by the editor’s rise as a named commentator on political affairs that led to Flower’s eventual arrest. Because the task of treating every 1790s editor falls beyond the scope of this chapter, I shall briefly consider the management and grim collapse of two significant newspapers that were in operation alongside the Cambridge Intelligencer, before turning to Flower’s story of improvisation and survival.21

Country News No newspapers were printed outside of London before the eighteenth century. This changed gradually as the decades unfolded and the advent of the mail coach in 1784 markedly improved print circulation. By the third quarter of the century we begin to see the rise of politically significant country papers.22 The emergent democratic newspapers in particular, argues E. P. Thompson, “set new standards in provincial journalism” by “abandoning the paste-and-scissors copying of the London press, and presenting original edited articles.”23 This move away from reliance on the London papers is only part of the story of the evolution of the provincial press. As John Feather points out, while the ministry had severely hampered radical journalism in the metropolis by 1793, there remained some space for democratic voices in the country press: the government may have had more trouble regulating provincial papers “merely because of their distance from London,” but perhaps more importantly, Feather writes, it was “assumed that because of their restricted circulation, and their tradition of copying from the London press, they presented only slight danger.”24 It was precisely the counterrevolutionary assault on the London press, Feather suggests, that created the conditions for the emergence of radical newspapers in the country. While the Cambridge Intelligencer was the most resilient of these new provincial papers, in Manchester we see an illustrative case of the more typical career of a progressive newspaper in the 1790s. Manchester ­reformers Thomas Walker and Thomas Cooper formed their own reform group, the Manchester Constitutional Society, in 1790. Early in its existence the MCS printed notices in the city’s two newspapers, Joseph Harrop’s Manchester Mercury and Charles Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle, but after a few

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months the staunch Tory Harrop blocked any notices from Walker and Cooper, and by 1792 Wheeler decided to do the same.25 With no venue to announce their meetings, petitions, and other initiatives, Walker and Cooper decided to set up their own newspaper.26 Published every Saturday from 31 March 1792 until 23 March 1793, the Manchester Herald was printed by the team of Matthew Falkner and William Birch and featured editorials by Walker and Cooper. Walker well understood the political power of newspapers: “There is not a more formidable enemy to political error,” he insisted, than a newspaper impartially conducted. All parties in this country are aware of this. Hence the tax upon paper, the tax upon newspapers, the penalty on lending papers, the threats and inducements used toward the publicans throughout the kingdom, to reject some and take in others. Hence the prosecutions which have been carried on against the Argus, the Morning Chronicle, the Manchester, the Sheffield, and the Leicester papers. Hence, in many public-houses throughout the kingdom, you see none but such contemptible papers as the Sun and the True Briton.27

Recognizing the need to counter the ministry press, in the 28 April 1792 issue of the Manchester Herald Walker proclaimed that there is a “greater Revolution visible in men’s minds of late, than in their governments,” and to fuel this intellectual revolution his paper printed excerpts from Paine, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, and Voltaire, along with his own spirited editorials, which engaged the revolution controversy with gusto. Here is a typical volley: As France has now been forced into a war by the conduct of tyrants who have presumed to interfere in her internal government; and as the contest is for the Rights of Man on the one part, and for the Wrongs of Despotism on the other, so this country is particularly interested in the event. The great Cause of Liberty demands the steady support of the brave, the just, and the philanthropic—for should oppression triumph, the vengeance of power will know no bounds; Racks and Tortures, Bastilles and Inquisitors, will be the punishment of those who have dared to avow themselves the Friend of Liberty.28

What “the vengeance of power” did know was that Walker needed to be silenced. The first attempt was a wobbly imitation of the coordinated attack on Priestley in Birmingham. A drunken church-and-king mob ransacked the Manchester Herald office on 11 December 1792, but Walker was not

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cowed—when the rioters came to “pull down” his house, he scared them off by firing his gun over their heads.29 There were other forces, though, that could not be so easily chased away. In the spring of 1793 the government took legal action against Walker’s paper. He later wrote about the targeting of printers Falkner and Birch: The sale of this paper became so extensive, and the information contained so important, that, in the then temper of the times, it was not likely to pass long unnoticed. Previous to the departure of these worthy, but unfortunate men, to America, there were five ex officio informations and six indictments against each of them, at the suit of the Crown. As the purse of the Treasury is more than a match for that of an individual, whose riches consist in his labour, and who, from the intolerable expence, would be sure to fail in the contest, they preferred a voluntary exile to imprisonment.30

By March 1793, Falkner and Birch had fled to America, and loyalists were cheering the Manchester Herald ’s fall. A broadsheet of 6 April 1793 celebrated the “Violent Dissolution” of “Mons. Herald of Manchester, a near relation of Mons. Argus of London, who expired Saturday last to the great regret of the Jacobin Paineites, &c.”31 Focusing this vitriol toward the Manchester Herald was the loyalists’ awareness of the ties that reform journalism had to democratic societies. Regarding the educative mission of these societies, which aimed to “provide the working and middle classes with some knowledge of their constitutional liberties and current affairs as their essential passport to an extended or universal electoral franchise,” Goodwin argues that “for this purpose the newspaper was as vital a means of communication as the pamphlet or handbill.”32 The appearance of a democratic newspaper hence often signaled the coordination of a larger organization, a pairing that was all too clear in Sheffield, where Joseph Gales was both editor of the Sheffield Register and a founder of the influential Sheffield Constitutional Society (as well as a member of the LCS). Gales launched the Sheffield Register in 1787, and in the aftermath of the storming of the Bastille he began to print selections from Paine, Godwin, Tooke, and others.33 The readership of the Sheffield Register grew steadily—by May 1794 its circulation reached over two thousand copies per week (seven hundred copies was considered a strong circulation for a provincial newspaper).34 Part of the appeal of the Sheffield Register came from the editorials Gales began to write in the early 1790s, in which he urged his readers to become involved in a host of progressive movements.35

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Gales’s chief cause was parliamentary reform, and among other strategies he published speeches from the meetings of the Sheffield Constitutional Society, realizing that through his newspaper the ideas of reform leaders would reach a much wider audience. The ministry, meanwhile, alarmed by Sheffield’s political buzz, had stationed barracks there in 1792, and given the impressive circulation of the Sheffield Register as well as Gales’s own rally­ ing editorials, it was only a matter of time before he found himself in the government’s crosshairs. In late spring 1794 the Home Office intercepted a letter from Sheffield to LCS founder Thomas Hardy. Gales was suspected as the author, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.36 Rather than waiting to find out what the government had in store, Gales fled first to Hamburg and soon afterward joined Joseph Priestley and others in Pennsylvania.37 But before leaving Sheffield, he issued two final editorial blasts. In the 20 June 1794 issue of the Sheffield Register he pleaded, “Reader, if thou art a husband or father, a wife or a mother, look at thy own fire-side—look at thy own ties of affection at home, then ask thy heart if it beats in unison to the glory of War, and if the money so thrown away might not be better employed.” And in his farewell editorial he lamented of his own fate that “in these persecuting Days,” it was “a sufficient Crime to have printed a Newspaper which has boldly dared to doubt the Infallibility of Ministers, and to investigate the justice and Policy of their Measures.”38 As Flower set up the Cambridge Intelligencer in the persecuting days of spring 1793, he would have had provincial editors such as Walker and Gales before him as models, both to emulate in oppositional spirit and to learn from in their various juridical entanglements. Like Walker and Gales, Flower developed a strong voice—press historians credit him with fully realizing the political force of the editorial. And like the Manchester Herald and Sheffield Register, the Cambridge Intelligencer ran local, national, and international news, and quickly developed a countrywide readership. These similarities might be expected. More significant are the differences between the Cambridge Intelligencer and the papers that were shut down by 1794, distinctions that help us understand how Flower’s paper weathered the post–Gagging Acts years. Flower developed three strategies in particular for keeping the Cambridge Intelligencer in print: he forged a mutable persona and heterogeneous textuality that often rendered the Cambridge Intelligencer politically inscrutable; he made strategic use of poetry insertions; and he continually recalibrated his newspaper’s relative portioning of local, national, and international news.

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Benjamin Flower’s Hell Broth Flower’s turn to journalism in 1793 happened quickly and with relatively little preparation on his part. A few years earlier in Paris he had witnessed “some of the most interesting, and the most innocent scenes of the French Revolution” and, like Wordsworth, Helen Maria Williams, John Moore, Arthur Young, and dozens more, felt compelled to record his thoughts.39 His French Constitution: With Remarks on Some of its Principal Articles (1792) was as much a critique of things as they were in Britain as a celebration of events across the channel. Flower was particularly concerned to urge British leaders to take reform seriously. “The voice of the people must prevail,” he warns, and “those who affect to despise it, will one day tremble.”40 His central argument is that Britain’s ruling classes should find in the French Revolution motivation for attending to the remonstrations of British reformers: “Our constitution—Our king—Our church—Our liberties—Our laws—should be involved in one common ruin. The only possible way to preserve them is, A REFORMATION; which if not effected, we must then be forced to a remedy, which may prove almost as desperate as the disease—A REVOLUTION.”41 Attacking the status quo and warning of violent uprising could still be an effective calling card in 1792, and the Monthly Review ranked Flower’s tract among “the best productions that have appeared in this country, on the subject of the French Revolution.”42 Flower was now a young writer of promise, a rising soldier in the culture war. The timing was fortuitous, as his older brother Richard was preparing to launch a newspaper to counter the loyalist presence of the Cambridge Chronicle by providing a public voice for progressives both within and without the university’s gates.43 Richard Flower’s plan was ambitious given the counterrevolutionary presence in Cambridge: 1792–3 brought “suspicions of Jacobinism in the University and demonstrations of loyalty in the town,” as a group of one hundred pub owners pledged to report “seditious activities” and effigies of Paine were set afire in the streets.44 A famous casualty of this effort was William Frend, the Cambridge math professor who was forced to leave his academic post in 1793 over his support for the French Revolution and British reform.45 This growing counterrevolutionary movement convinced Richard Flower, along with a group of young Cambridgeshire reformers, that an oppositional newspaper was desperately needed.46 With Benjamin Flower as editor, the Cambridge Intelligencer published its inaugural issue on 20 July 1793. It was printed at

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Flower’s own Bridge Street shop, from which he also worked as a writer and printer.47 From the paper’s inaugural issue we can see Flower forging the complex persona of a pro-military Royalist who supports political reform and opposes most of the Pitt ministry’s measures. Through a constant shuffling of emphases and alignments, this persona allowed Flower to steer an uneasy course between arrest and recusal. With the first number of the Cambridge Intelligencer readers met a declaration from Junius just below the flag: “Let it be impressed upon your minds, let it be instilled into your children, that the Liberty of the Press is the PALLADIUM of all the civil, political, and religious Rights of Freemen.” This motto graced each issue of the paper in its ten-year run (20 July 1793–18 June 1803). Published every Saturday, the Cambridge Intelligencer followed the quarto format of other provincial papers, its four pages each holding five vertical columns of text. Advertisements were mostly scattered across the first two pages (usually taking up a third of each page), and promoted the regular fare of books, household goods, employment openings, and an occasional quack remedy. On the third page Flower normally ran a poem, and taking up a few inches at the bottom of the final page was a masthead boasting the paper’s national presence: This Paper is circulated through the Towns and Villages in the Counties of CAMBRIDGE, HUNTINGDON, LINCOLN, RUTLAND, BEDFORD, and HERTFORD; likewise through a considerable part of NORTHAMPTONSHIRE, LEICESTERSHIRE, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE, LANCA­ SHIRE, YORKSHIRE, NORFOLK, SUFFOLK, ESSEX, and the Eastern and Northern Counties.—The circulation has likewise been considerably extended in LONDON, BATH, BRISTOL, OXFORD, PLYMOUTH, the Western Counties, and in Wales and Scotland.

Flower was also sure to let readers know that the “paper is regularly filed at the CHAPTER COFFEE-HOUSE, PATERNOSTER-ROW, and PEELE’S COFFEE HOUSE, FLEET-STREET.” In many regards the Cambridge Intelligencer was typical of late eighteenthcentury newspapers, but setting the paper apart were Flower’s editorials, the first of which appeared on the front page of the paper’s first and second issues, offering readers an introduction to this new venture (Figure 7). “To the Public” opens by explaining that the Cambridge Intelligencer, “an independent and impartial Newspaper,” has been set up with the support of “several gentleman of the University Town, and County of Cambridge.”

Figure 7.  Front page of the Cambridge Intelligencer, 27 July 1793. Flower’s inaugural editorial, titled “To the People,” is at top left. He included “To the People” in the newspaper’s first and second issues. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Flower then turns to address his own political positioning, beginning with a patriotic indemnification: With respect to the important branch of Politics, the Editor would deem himself unworthy of encouragement, were he not to be explicit in the declaration of his sentiments. On the present occasion he esteems it not only his duty, but his privilege, as a Briton, to declare himself a zealous friend to the British Constitution, composed of the three Estates of King, Lords, and Commons; and as settled at the Glorious Revolution. Every attempt, therefore, by fraud or by force, to undermine a Constitution, contrived by the wisdom, and purchased by the blood of our ancestors, will meet in the Intelligencer with the most determined reprobation. The Editor cannot, however, rest contented with declaring himself a friend entirely to the theory of the constitution. . . . The editor, therefore, deems it necessary to desire his attachment to every branch of the constitution, and while he is anxious for the preservation of the just prerogatives of the Crown, and the due privileges of the peerage, he is no less anxious for the preservation of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the people, and in particular for the most important of those rights.—A House of Commons, which, for its purity, integrity, and independence, shall at all times deserve the title of the Representative of an Empire of Freeman. A free, adequate, and frequent representation of the people, is what a distinguished writer, justly admired by all parties, stiles The Spirit of our Constitution.

Having cleared this ground with care and some help from the distinguished writer of Reflections on the Revolution in France, Flower then broaches the subject of reform, picking up where Junius left off: A Free Press having been always considered the Sacred Palladium of British Liberty (and without which no liberty can be secure) the Editor has no hesitation in declaring it his sentiment, that Opinions should be free as the air; and his resolution to preserve the Intelligencer open for discussion to all parties. He has nothing to hope from the smiles, and nothing to fear from the frowns, either of administration or opposition. His aim will be to conciliate the moderate, the wise, and the virtuous of all descriptions. Britons, so far from having anything to fear, have much to hope from temperate discussion. Ignorance may, in a false system of government, as in a false system of religion, be “the mother of devotion.” But in a government founded on the principles of justice, knowledge alone can secure solid attachment, or excise just admiration. In a free country, the more ample the discussion, the brighter the light, the more universal will be the diffusion of happiness. While the Intelligencer will thus be a free organ to convey the sentiments of the people, it will be shut to every species of licentiousness. The abuse of a free press is one of its most dangerous enemies. All calumny and slander

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of persons in either private or public life, all misrepresentation of facts, or imputation of principles to parties, which their language interpreted by their conduct, disavows, will be carefully avoided.

“The abuse of a free press is one of its most dangerous enemies”: this sentiment signals the complex, often cautious persona that Flower developed at the helm of the Cambridge Intelligencer. No radical broadcast, Flower’s first editorial, like Godwin’s Considerations, is positioned as the work of a loyal Briton, one who recognizes the possibility of reform while also insisting that it always be discussed dispassionately. But alongside the careful language of his first editorial, Flower also signaled his political sympathies, and using a strategy that he would variously deploy across the newspaper’s run, he created a montage of voices to supplement his own. Flower surrounded his first address with advertisements for William Frend’s Peace and Union (Frend had been forced from Cambridge two months earlier), Godwin’s Political Justice, and Robert Hall’s An Apology for the Freedom of the Press. He also printed an excerpt from Barbauld’s Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation, which eviscerates the complacency with which many Britons had responded to the war. “We devote a certain number of men to perish on land and sea,” the passage reads, “and the rest of us sleep sound, and, protected in our usual occupations, talk of the events of war as what diversifies the flat uniformity of life.” 48 Just as the London coffee shops had become the “penny universities” of Britain earlier in the eighteenth century, Flower here assembles a colloquy of radical professor, progressive minister, London philosopher, and Warrington anti-war writer, with our reasonable, Burke-quoting editor as sober host. While Flower would present a variety of voices in his newspaper, one of his strategies for subtly commenting on the news came from an unlikely quarter: the poetry column. The Cambridge Intelligencer was an important venue for new and established poets, most notably the young Coleridge, but also including Southey, Opie, Burns, Robinson, and many others.49 One pattern we find when surveying this verse is a move away from boldly political poems, beginning in early 1796. The ministry’s proposal of the new treason and sedition bills in November 1795 was met in the Cambridge Intelligencer (as in many other venues) with a strong critique. We have seen how the reform movement gained confidence after the 1794 treason trial acquittals, and Flower shared the general hope that the ministry’s new bills would be quashed by public protest. Two poems printed in the Cambridge Intelligencer at this time signal both this hope and, following the passage of the Gagging Acts, a larger development not only in the poetry column but

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in the wider content of Flower’s newspaper. The first, in the 21 November 1795 issue, is titled “Billy Pitt’s New Bills; or, Lock Jaws, a Ballad”: Ye True British Lads, and ye Lasses See what in our Parliament passes; Be dismal and dumb, for, instead of your laws, Billy Pitt is to give you a pair of Lock’d Jaws!   ... In the midst of our horrid disasters, He lays on this worst of all plasters; He takes from us Bread:—aye, this is the cause That Billy thus gives us a pair of Lock’d Jaws!       A pair of Lock’d Jaws!       And Famine’s the cause; For lest we should murmur, he gives us Lock’d jaws!

As we have seen, this was a popular interpretation of the Gagging Acts, that social and economic conditions have forced the government to silence critique through legislation. The sense that Pitt was deploying alarmism in order to ensure this silence is also registered: We are told of alarms and of terrors As a screen for the Minister’s errors; So, to hide all his criminal flaws, And to stifle our clamours, he locks up our Jaws!       A pair of Lock’d Jaws       Will screen all his flaws; And to stifle our clamours he locks up our Jaws!

But the poem also recognizes, as did the ministry, that the language of fear was not enough to close the mouths of disenchanted Britons: With Pop-guns and Plots he confounds us; With Barracks and Camps he surrounds us: By arts such as these the People he awes, And, back’d by his Red-coats, he locks up our Jaws!       He locks up our Jaws!       While the Bayonet awes, His Barracks are built, and he locks up our Jaws!

This is a war poem, though it is the British government rather than France that is the enemy of the British people. The public has been “awed” not by patriotism or disenchantment with the revolution but by Pitt’s militariza-

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tion of the country, which has left Britons frightened into silence. Readers are urged to resist, and as we have seen elsewhere, the call is for nonviolent protest, for a performance of vox populi loud enough to overawe the ministry’s measures. But this poem appeared during those energized six weeks in late autumn 1795, when the reform movement was bursting with fresh confidence. A poem printed in the Cambridge Intelligencer after the passage of the Gagging Acts brings us directly to the abrupt stifling of this energy. Appearing in the 6 February 1796 issue and titled simply “Mum!!!,” this poem borrows Peter Pindar’s strategy of ironically endorsing the government’s measures. “Should war ( just and righteous) its miseries shower” upon the “rabble and scum,” the poem suggests, “Let them silently bow to the strong arm of power, / And cheerfully learn to subsist upon MUM!” (17, 19–20). The poem’s repeated title word also featured in cartoons on the effects of the new laws, such as MUM! (Figure 8), published by William O’Keefe, which likewise registers the fact that a silence very different from the quiet contentment once lauded by Burke has stricken the nation.50 The poem “Mum!!!” in the Cambridge Intelligencer, coming in the immediate aftermath of the passing of the Gagging Acts, marks an important turning point in Flower’s newspaper. Its extended treatment of enforced silence, of a nation made mum by Pitt’s new legislation, suggests Flower’s initial response to the pressures of the post–Gagging Acts years. Flower’s task was to find a way to generate discourse amidst this climate of enforced silence.51 In a letter of 18 September 1799 (sent from Newgate) to his future wife Eliza Gould, who had cautioned him after reading his editorials on both the slave trade and the war with France, Flower complained about the narrow scope in which he could operate. “Surely there is no Situation like mine,” he wrote in response to Gould’s warning, “in which it is so difficult to unite the path of duty with the path of safety.”52 The difficulty of uniting these paths did not, however, force Flower to go mum on politically engaged poetry. Although after 1795 he rarely published direct poetic critiques of named political actors, he found other ways for poetry to comment on the affairs of state. One technique he employed is a canny version of what is known as “cross reading,” in which an editor places news items side by side, leaving readers to make connections by reading horizontally. “Cross Reading of a Newspaper,” an anonymous poem from an 1800 anthology, has fun with this journalistic trick: “Yesterday the new Lord Mayor was sworn in, / and burnt with dreadful fury; but no lives were lost.”53 Flower reworked “cross reading” to smart effect in his insertion of poetry at

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key spaces within the Cambridge Intelligencer. Take the 5 January 1799 issue, which features a transcript of a Commons debate on the government’s plan to extend the suspension of habeas corpus. Pitt argued that the extension need not even be discussed: “[U]nder the present circumstances, he should not trouble the House with any preface, but simply move that a Bill be brought in to continue the suspension. The Bill was brought in, ‘to enable

Figure 8.  MUM!, by William O’Keefe, 3 December 1795. Courtesy of the Nicholas K. Robinson Collection of Caricature, Special Collections, Trinity College Dublin.

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his Majesty to apprehend and detain all persons suspected of conspiring against his Government.’” But just to the left of Pitt’s claim for the selfevident need to maintain the suspension, Flower printed a poem entitled “Address to Britain.” The verse opens with a warning: “We have offended, O my countrymen! / We have offended very grievously.” This of course is Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude,” from which Flower printed the jeremiad lines on Britain’s transgressions: We have offended, O my countrymen! We have offended very grievously, And have been tyrannous. From east to west A groan of accusation pierces heaven! The wretched plead against us, multitudes Countless and vehement, the sons of God, Our brethren! like a cloud that travels on, Steam’d up from Cairo’s swamps of pestilence, Ev’n so, my countrymen! have we gone forth And borne to distant tribes slavery and pangs, And, deadlier far, our vices, whose deep taint With slow perdition murders the whole man, His body and his soul! Meanwhile, at home, We have been drinking with a riotous thirst Pollutions from the brimming cup of wealth, A selfish, lewd, effeminate race, Contemptuous of all honorable rule, Yet bartering freedom, and the poor man’s life For gold, as at a market!

Encountering Flower’s textual arrangement, readers would move from Coleridge’s critique directly to Pitt’s speech, which argues that measures are needful to prevent any opposition to the actions of government. By setting the poetic excerpt next to Pitt’s words, Flower allows readers to register not only the prime minister’s want of contrition but to think about the consequences of his claims for governing with absolute impunity. Flower achieves this commentary without writing a word of his own.

Unimaginable Community We have seen Flower’s careful self-positioning and his strategic placement of poetry, but perhaps his most conspicuous strategy of adjustment involved the purview and proportion of the news he reported, whether local, na-

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tional, or international. Flower’s assorting of these foci goes some way toward explaining not only his survival through much of the decade but also his eventual arrest and imprisonment in 1799. On its appearance in 1793 the Cambridge Intelligencer had an even allocation of news: the first and second pages covered the international scene (usually reports of Britain’s military campaigns transmitted from the London press), national politics ran on the second and third pages, while Cambridgeshire news was featured on the third and fourth pages. By late spring of 1794, however, the relative proportion of local, national, and international news changed. With the arrests of the leaders of the LCS and SCI, Flower began devoting more attention to national politics. The front page reported the plight of the imprisoned political leaders, their movements from one jail to another, and the rumors of their treatment. By the autumn of 1794, with the trials set to begin, national news took up a disproportionate share of the Cambridge Intelligencer, as court transcripts dominated the first page and articles on the trials were sprinkled throughout. This coverage included, in the 13 December 1794 issue, a large-font broadcast of the results of the trial of John Thelwall: “NOT GUILTY.” But this was pre–Gagging Acts boldness. Flower’s emphasis on national politics saw a sharp reversal after the passage of the Acts, when alongside “MUM!!!” and other lamentations of the erosion of free speech in Britain, Flower returned to international news on the opening two pages. Though he did run advertisements for transcripts of the treason trials, gone were the notices for tracts that decried the “sins of the government.” The opening pages began again to focus on scenes of battle from around the world, and while Flower’s attention to local issues in Cambridgeshire and greater East Anglia was as detailed as before, gradually cashiered from the paper’s original grammar of local, national, and international was the middle term. In the wake of the Gagging Acts, the Cambridge Intelligencer performed an inversion of Benedict Anderson’s theory of print culture’s fostering of national consciousness: call it the nation as unimaginable community. Flower’s editorial strategies allowed him to dodge prosecution for a half decade, but his fortunes began to change in the spring of 1798, and here too a shift in his distribution of the news mattered. In May of that year, the Anti-Jacobin scanned what it called the nation’s “traitorous newspapers,” pausing to let its spotlight linger on the Cambridge Intelligencer. In response to a letter from a reader who feared that Flower’s paper, “from its ‘rancour and scurrility,’ might do much mischief among the Yeomanry and P ­ easantry

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of the Northern Counties, if not properly checked,” the Anti-Jacobin offered its own account of the Cambridge Intelligencer: It contained a mass of loathsome ingredients, a sort of “hell-broth”. . . . [I]t presented such a hideous spectacle to the astonished eye, that we shrunk from the task of encountering its enormities—satisfied in our own minds, that a Print so decidedly hostile to the Religious and Political Establishments of this Country, so rancorous and malignant in its language, and so diabolical in its principle, must either be confined to a few Readers, as mad and wicked as its Conductors; or must soon be suppressed by those Laws which its purpose was to revile.54

The Anti-Jacobin concedes, however, that in its forecasts of a limited readership and an eventual termination by authorities it has “been mistaken in both suppositions.” Flower even brashly sent a copy of his “hell-broth” to boil and bubble at the offices of the Anti-Jacobin, with a note boasting a circulation of nineteen hundred copies per week. The Anti-Jacobin fumed: “[I]f this be true, the evil is great indeed; and most sincerely do we deplore the fate of so many victims to the false, and irreligious, and anarchical, and murderous principles of the Cambridge Intelligencer.”55 The Anti-Jacobin admitted misgauging the popularity of Flower’s paper, and its expectation that it “would be quickly suppressed” had been disappointed, for “the Cambridge Intelligencer is still endured.”56 This endurance is difficult for the Anti-Jacobin to understand, given what it presents as the actionable content of Flower’s paper. The most recent issue, we learn, “surpasses in infamy all that have preceded it, and seems a premeditated experiment, a bold determination, to try how far an attack on the Religion and Laws of the Country may be carried with safety.”57 In response to Flower’s protests against the arrest and imprisonment of the bookseller Thomas Williams, the Anti-Jacobin describes the one-year prison sentence of Williams as lenient and well deserved, and leaves no doubt that Flower as well should face punishment: The Cambridge Intelligencer cannot be accused of disguising his sentiments; he speaks out with the frankness of a Marat or a Hebert; and leaves to the Institutions which are threatened by the unrestrained propagation of his principles no shadow of an excuse for their supineness. For ourselves, we scruple not to declare our conviction, that he is to be combated with other weapons than Arguments; and we therefore conclude as we begun, with asserting, that if such language is suffered to be held, and such doctrines to be disseminated, with impunity, there is an end to our prosperity and peace; the reign of Atheism is established, and Anarchy, and Rapine, and Murder, are at our doors!58

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A year later, subject to “other weapons than arguments,” Flower found himself in Newgate. What provoked this clamping down on Flower and the Cambridge Intelligencer after a half decade of relatively unmolested operation? One answer may be found in a structural change Flower brought to the paper in 1797, a change reflected in the Anti-Jacobin’s tirade. If in the wake of the Gagging Acts Flower truncated his coverage of national politics, with the mutinies at Spithead and Nore in April and May of 1797 he returned to the national scene. Reports of the uprisings and their repercussions crept onto the front page of the Cambridge Intelligencer, and from here we can trace a steady increase in Flower’s allotment of space to the political scene at home. The nation was back in play. Though criticized in the loyalist press for his sympathetic coverage of the mutinies, Flower remained convinced that they signaled the possibility for unified resistance in post–Gagging Acts Britain. “The discontents in the Fleet at Portsmouth are settled, by granting the Seamen every thing in their own way,” he wrote in his 20 May 1797 editorial: This fully proves what people may do if they are firm and united. Had the mutiny, as it is called by some, been partial and confined to one or two ships only, no doubt the usual practice of military discipline would have followed; and the principal persons concerned, would have been hanged. But in the present instance, Ministers, though with a very ill grace and after a suspicious delay which calls for the loudest censure, redressed the grievances complained of in a very ample manner. . . . The military, as might naturally be expected, were beginning to complain. Ministers have at once thought proper to prevent their complaints from spreading, by promising them an advance of pay, &c. From the conduct of these bodies of men in the lowest class of life, the most useful lessons may be learnt. Have Nations grievances to complain of—are the people at large in any country robbed of their rights and plundered of their property? Let the National Will appear; let the people universally present their demands, in such language as will plainly shew they must not be rejected: their villainous oppressors will soon display themselves in their proper characters; it will appear that Tyrants are as cowardly as they are cruel, and that, so far from resisting the claims of justice, they will comply.59

While careful to project the “useful lessons” of the Spithead mutiny onto unspecified “Nations,” Flower reveals his hope for the reemergence of a “National Will” to remonstrate for justice. The violent mutiny at Nore, however, was more difficult to support, though Flower cautiously continued to side with the sailors. “The renewed disturbances onboard the Fleet,” he wrote in his 3 June 1797 editorial, “have engrossed much of the public

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attention the present week. As ministers will not bring the subject before Parliament, and the public are not acquainted with the demands of the seamen, we shall abstain from remarks harshly condemning their conduct, which we think have been too incautiously made, even by the friends of freedom, both in and out of the House of Commons.” The Nore uprising had a gruesome ending (twenty-nine mutineers would eventually be executed), but Flower still pleaded the sailors’ case in his 17 June editorial: “The unhappy mutiny at the Nore is at length terminated. What may be the fate of the leading mutineers we know not, but we deprecate that bloodthirsty spirit which disgraces the ministerial prints. Let it be recollected, the mutineers, when they had every thing in their power, shed no blood.” Taking on both the ministry and the loyalist press, Flower from this moment forward became more brash in his opposition. The Burke-quoting moderate of 1793 was replaced by an exasperated radical, and while he did try to vary his editorial subject matter with writings on military patriotism and the newspaper trade itself, Flower’s strong rhetoric revealed him to be one of the Pitt ministry’s boldest public opponents by 1798. No longer just abstract policy debates, several of his editorials attacked the prime minister directly, mixing critique and mockery as though Flower were reliving November 1795 all over again. By 1798 the Anti-Jacobin was complaining about Flower’s unchecked boldness, and by 1799 he was in prison. Flower’s arrest in May 1799 is remarkable not just because his six-year run of oppositional journalism finally landed him in jail, but because of the obscure legal measure used to send him to Newgate. His case drew attention both at the time and in sub­ sequent years because the ministry’s legal maneuver (headed by Grenville) opened up the potential for the Lords (without a debate in the Commons and without royal assent) to suspend the state’s entire apparatus of law. But in the early hours of Flower’s arrest his bizarre legal situation was not yet fully apparent, and by the standards of 1790s repression we might say that his prosecution began in an “ordinary” way. At 6:30 a.m. on 2 May 1799, the deputy sergeant at arms of the House of Lords appeared at Flower’s home to serve notice of the case against him, which involved a special transgression referred to as a “breach of privilege”: Complaint being made to the House of a certain paragraph in a printed paper, intituled the Cambridge Intelligencer, Saturday, April 20, 1799, highly reflecting upon the honour of the Right Reverend, Richard Lord Bishop of Llandaff, a member of this house, and containing a breach of the privileges

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of this house: the said paragraph was read by the Clerk. . . . [It was] resolved, by the Lords, spiritual and temporal in Parliament assembled, that the said paper produced and read, intituled the Cambridge Intelligencer, Saturday, April 20, 1799, is a gross and scandalous libel upon the Right Reverend Richard Lord Bishop of Llandaff, a member of this house, and a high breach of the privileges of this house. Ordered, that the Sergeant at Arms attending this house, do forthwith attach the body of the said Benjamin Flower, of Cambridge, Printer, and bring him in safe custody to the bar of this house on Friday next, to answer for his offence.60

Flower was understandably vexed by this information: he had apparently been charged with two crimes, libel and breach of privilege, and been found guilty of both without trial or even previous notification. In the weeks that followed he would learn that he had good reason for confusion. Flower was ordered to appear in the Lords “to answer for his offence,” but this did not mean he would be suffered to mount a defense. His crime, and guilt, had already been determined, and so as Flower had it there was nothing left to do but “address their Lordships in mitigation of punishment.”61 Brought into the Lords, Flower was shown the editorial of 20 April, asked to confirm whether he were its printer, and then ordered to read the offending paragraph aloud. Here is the passage in question, in which Flower (as Wordsworth once had done) accuses Watson of apostasy: The Bishop of Llandaff has made a fine speech in support of the minister’s plan of Union. The brief history for a few years past of this “humble retired churchman,” as he modestly terms himself, is curious. For sometime he was an opponent of the minister: finding that was not the way to preferment, he suddenly became an alarmist, then applied to Mr. Pitt for farther preferment (this our readers may depend upon as a fact,) and has since supported his measures. The minister, however, has not yet thought the Right Reverend time-server and apostate worth paying, and he remains in the church— In statu quo, the “humble” Bishop Llandaff, with a living, and what is nearly a sinecure in this University—The Regius Professorship of Divinity. The public will doubtless give him all the credit for his sentiments he deserves.62

At this point Flower asked permission to address the Lords and delivered something of an apologia, not for this specific paragraph but for his larger status as a law-abiding journalist. He was his own character witness and his chief exhibits were his editorials, as he marched the Lords through a sampling of his writing in the Cambridge Intelligencer, beginning with his opening address to readers, the one in which he presented himself as “a zeal-

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ous friend to the British Constitution.”63 Flower was particularly attentive to what he thought might have been the Lords’ predisposition to see him as a “Jacobin”: “I am somewhat apprehensive that the foul tongue of slander may have insinuated to your Lordships, that I am a person tainted with Jacobinical principles, or addicted to Jacobinical practices. If your Lordships still harbour such a suspicion, what follows will, I trust, obliterate it for ever.”64 What follows is Flower’s editorial of 23 August 1794 on the fall of Robespierre, whom Flower styled an “execrable tyrant,” and after this an excerpt from his 4 February 1797 editorial on the French Directory, which emphasizes his reverence for monarchy: [W]e find by the late Paris papers that the anniversary of the murder of their King, has been again celebrated with disgusting parade as a festival. We will never suffer that day on which all the principles of truth, justice and liberty, the most sacred rights of man, were completely trampled under foot, to be thus celebrated, without endeavoring to raise the just indignation of our readers.65

Flower closed his address by attempting to effect his planned “mitigation of punishment,” reminding the Lords that he was never a member of a democratic society and insisting that with a salary of £140 per year he could not absorb a weighty fine as part of his sentence. Grenville, who had introduced the case into the Lords, moved for a fine of £100 and a sentence of six months in Newgate. Because Flower was charged with a breach of privilege, parliamentary reporters were dismissed from the deliberation that followed (the House of Lords in this case was officially a Committee of Privileges), and so there is no record of what was discussed, though Flower was able to learn that Lord Holland attempted to untangle the confusion inherent in Grenville’s proceedings by explaining that libel and breach of privilege were not interchangeable. A libel that occurs outside the Lords, Holland pointed out, must be tried at court, while a breach—an obstacle to the regular running of parliament—could not be punished by a term longer than the House’s current session. In claiming libel for language that occurred outside the House and sentencing Flower for a period beyond the close of the session, Grenville had essentially declared a state of exception: “They must consider,” Holland warned, “that if they had the power to declare the guilt, to fine and imprison for time certain, they had in fact the power to enact the crime, confiscate the whole property and imprison for life every subject!”66

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Flower was taken directly to Newgate that evening to begin his sentence.67 His accommodations were better than most, for he could afford the fee to live within the jail keeper’s quarters, though Southey still shuddered in anticipation of visiting him: “[T]hese are evil times & I believe I may write the epitaph of English Liberty!”68 Flower was certainly shaken by his ordeal at the Lords, King’s Bench, and Newgate, but he was not yet ready to write liberty’s epitaph. He buoyed his spirits by composing e­ ditorials in prison, and unlike Walker and Gales, whose newspapers were ended by legislative strikes, Flower kept the Cambridge Intelligencer running after his release, using the venue to express wonder about the precise transgression for which he was jailed.69 He described his arrest and imprisonment in detail, dwelling at length on the legislative obliquity of his case, but with characteristic savvy he also let slip a hint that he knew perfectly well why he was punished. Buried in an endnote to the preface of Proceedings of the House of Lords in the Case of Benjamin Flower (1800) he reports: Mr. Wakefield and others, have been of opinion that it was not any reflection on the honour of the Bishop of Llandaff but on that of Mr. Pitt, which drew down on my head the resentment of ministers. It however would be a libel on Lord Grenville to suppose, that he could possibly be influenced by any other motive than a regard [for] the honour of the Bishop, and the privileges of the Lords.70

Flower followed this wry occupatio charge by announcing, without explanation, that “the paragraph respecting the Bishop of Llandaff appeared in the Cambridge Intelligencer, April 20. The following paragraph appeared in that of the following week.” He then reprinted this other “paragraph,” from his 27 April editorial, the one that immediately preceded his arrest and that contains the harshest language he ever published about Pitt: While our ministers have, for years past, been exerting themselves, and squandering the blood and treasure of the British Empire, in supporting the old despotic governments of Europe, their endeavours have not been wanting at home, to render our constitution, (distinguished by the freedom of its genuine principles,) more similar to those governments. After all the numerous abridgements of our liberties—After all the extraordinary powers committed to ministers—After the many severe prosecutions, and the verdicts of complaisant juries—After the repeated, the boasted acknowledgements of our national loyalty—After the annihilation, almost, of opposition in both houses of parliament, ministers it appears are not yet satisfied. What farther powers they mean to have, we shall be better able to determine, when their

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new bill for Farther Abridging the Freedom of the Press, &c. &c. is digested. From Mr. Pitt’s speech, on the report of the committee of secrecy, our readers may form some idea of the ferocity, the implacability, the enmity to the principles of freedom, which reign in the heart of that Apostate. But what is too much for the temper, even of the Stoic to endure, is to hear a man who can at his pleasure trample not only on the liberties, but on the laws of his country, and on the laws of God—A Sabbath Breaking Duellist—(to say nothing of his Sunday drinking parties) get up and prate about Religion and Virtue, and of his concerns for the Morals of society! Is there a man in the house of Commons, or out of it, such a dupe as to give him an Iota of credit for such professions!71

By the “new bill for Farther Abridging the Freedom of the Press” Flower likely refers to the 1798 Newspaper Act, which included sharp restrictions on printers and publishers. Flower was not alone in protesting against these new measures; more significant here are his legal and moral charges against Pitt. By specifying that this blast came directly before his arrest and imprisonment, Flower implies that his words on Pitt were the true transgression, and in case readers missed it, he closes this note by returning to his occupatio nudging about Wakefield’s suspicion: “The above paragraph containing truisms only, no legal notice could possibly be taken of it. I leave it to the reader to determine on the justice of Mr. Wakefield’s opinion, to which I have before alluded.”72 Flirting with a libel against Grenville, as well as the implication that Pitt had Grenville bypass a jury trial by activating an obscure legal measure to assure his imprisonment, Flower in the end allows readers, as he had in his use of “cross reading,” to make the connection themselves. But could he trust the public to make this connection? After his release from prison, Flower seemed ready to hope that the political skies were brightening and that Britons might begin publicly to question the ministry. “Have you made any observations of a political nature during your peregrinations? Do you think the temper of the people at all altered?” he asked Eliza Gould in October 1799, optimistic that the government’s rejection of Napoleon’s overtures of peace would have an impact on public opinion. “The late events on the Continent are so very adverse to our ministers, that I have some hope the people may a little recover their senses.”73 Flower’s hopefulness extended to the real prospects of peace that began to glimmer in 1800. As Coleridge’s series of articles about the peace appeared in the Morning Post, Flower wrote optimistic editorials through the approach and realization of Amiens, and published Reflections on the Preliminaries of Peace,

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Between Great Britain and the French Republic as a stand-alone tract. He had weathered the worst storms of the 1790s and emerged scarred but not defeated. The war and its attendant evils, and so too the term of William Pitt, seemed to be coming to an end. But soon enough Flower had to face what was the cause of disappointment for so many of the 1790s generation: it was not the degeneration of the French Revolution but his own country’s renewed war with France in 1803 that convinced Flower to end his work as an oppositional journalist. He fought for a decade and achieved a brief glimpse of something that seemed like victory, but with the return of war he brought the Cambridge Intelligencer to an end.74 “The war in which we are now engaged,” he lamented in his final editorial, “is, on the part of this nation, a war of Injustice, and of course utterly indefensible on all those principles of Justice and Honour, which are professedly held by states as well as by individuals.”75 Rather than mounting an argument for the injustice of the war, which Flower reasoned could too easily be ignored, he contended that it was simply bad policy. The return of hostilities would wildly inflate taxes, for instance: “[T]he amount of taxes to be raised for the expenses of the first year of the present war, will be more than Double the amount of the war taxes raised by Mr. Pitt, within any year of the last war, even including his famous Income Tax, and more than Six Times the amount in any other year of that war.” The return to war, he argued, was also tactically absurd in comparison with 1793: “[T]here were some reasons assigned at the commencement of the former war, which operated on some worthy people before they were aware of their fallacy. The atrocious murder of Louis XVI and the Royal family, the horrors of the Robesperian government, called for every species of reprobation, except that of War.” But the renewal of conflict involves only Britain’s claim to the island of Malta, or at least that is the official alibi for war: “[T]o pretend that our laws, our liberties, and our national independence, rest on the possession of Malta, is mere cant, as hypocritical as it is ridiculous.” By now, however, it is not only the government’s march to war that has left Flower exhausted, it is the fact that this militarism has met with a public passivity that he cannot bear. “The war is far from being popular,” he writes, pointing especially to manufacturing centers, but protests are “scarcely audible”: “Lethargy benumbs the faculties of our countrymen, and Fear, lest in case of opposition to the measures of ministers, the system of terror should be revived.” This fear “prevents the expression of the public voice” so that “[n]ot one remonstrance against the war, not one petition to the throne for

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a change of measures, and for peaceable counsels” can be found. Nor can Flower find any encouragement in other newspapers, which by his lights are “prostituted and servile, and with a very few exceptions, are, either supporting the war, or disguising the sentiments of their Editors, who are well known to hold the war in abhorrence, but who dare not speak out to their readers.” Flower closes his final editorial by placing his decision to shut down the Cambridge Intelligencer within this scene of terrified hush: The Editor is confident that he shall obtain ample credit from his readers, when he assures them, that although he has not met with pecuniary success, similar to some of his contemporaries, who can accommodate their principles to the times, there is not one of them, who is the object of his envy: they have their reward, and the Editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer has his reward. . . . Surrounded, almost entirely, by the timid, the lukewarm, and the deserter, he has, in spite of the temptations which party, self interest or popularity may have assailed him, stood firm to those principles which he first professed, and from which, he trusts, he shall never apostatize.76

It is sometimes brought as evidence of the lenience of Pitt-era repression that the Cambridge Intelligencer continued to appear after Flower’s imprisonment and finally ended not with the ministry’s assault but at the discretion of the editor. But it is plain, and Flower takes great pains to make it plain, that the government’s “system of terror” has shaped a populace unwilling or unable to participate in its own liberty. When we examine Flower’s case, it is important to distinguish Pitt’s “terror” from the French Terror: Flower was not dragged to the guillotine and savagely beheaded. But as his final editorial makes clear, the Cambridge Intelligencer was ended because of the numbing effect of unrelenting repression on the British public. Flower continued to work as a printer after ending the Cambridge Intelligencer, setting up shop at Harlow and publishing the works of Robert Robinson, a dissenting minister who had a strong influence on his early life.77 He also dabbled again in journalism with Flower’s Political Review and Monthly Register in 1808. But his activities during these later years were of a lower profile and drew less notice both in his own lifetime and in the decades after his death. He was instead remembered as a journalist who braved Newgate in his battle for the cause. The endurance of the memory of his trials is captured well in that 1809 episode in which, as Mary Moorman has written, “Wordsworth was suddenly attacked by what can only be described as panic.”78 Dorothy Wordsworth and Sarah Hutchinson were right in finding it unlikely that Wordsworth would face legal action for his pamphlet.

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Wordsworth was wrong, his worries too overwrought by half. But this was precisely the point of Pitt’s terror. Punishments were sporadic and capricious, and the fact of Wordsworth’s fear shows that the government’s erratic prosecutions left deeper scars than we have realized. It is difficult, in this regard, to understand the tendency of modern critics to downplay the impact of repression on 1790s journalism. Most striking are the rhetorical contortions necessary to maintain this claim in the face of counterevidence. Here, for instance, are two passages, three pages apart, from a modern account of Flower’s work: The fine and imprisonment inflicted on Flower by the House of Lords in 1799 has not been mentioned, to make the point that this was of minor importance in determining the fate of the Cambridge Intelligencer. Only in a very few cases can legal or social sanctions have had a crucial effect on periodicals as business concerns. Even with regard to allowable political commitment, the repression of the 1790s can be exaggerated. Benjamin Flower was imprisoned and fined by the House of Lords for referring to the Bishop of Llandaff in his paper as the “Right Reverend timeserver and apostate.” This remark, though a single peer was attacked, was construed as a contempt and breach of privilege upon the House. For the first time liberal pressmen could feel that they were being marked out for special attention.79

In this uncertain collation Flower appears first as proof of the relative freedom available to journalists, and next as evidence that they were specifically targeted for prosecution. No less puzzling is the reference to Flower’s imprisonment in 1799 as the “first time liberal pressmen could feel that they were being marked out for special attention.” After the treatment of Joseph Gales, James Montgomery, Samson Perry, Richard Phillips, and just about everyone associated with the Manchester Herald, “being marked out for special attention” defined the life of the liberal journalist by 1793. Flower’s 1799 trial was the somber epilogue to this terrible story, not its opening act. I pause over this disjunction between thesis and evidence not only because I wish to offer a corrective, but because diminishing the impact of 1790s repression has important stakes. Consider this version of the collision between evidence and argument in another modern effort to dismiss the impact of repression on 1790s newspaper culture: Richard Phillips’s Leicester Herald, founded in 1792, was able to avoid prosecution for its radical pieces, and when it came to an end in 1795 it was due to

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fire not prosecution. Benjamin Flower’s Cambridge Intelligencer flourished in the 1790s despite its radicalism. Action was however taken against some papers that were closely associated with the radical Constitutional Societies. The printers of the Manchester Herald and the Sheffield Register fled abroad to avoid trial in 1793 and 1794 and their papers came to an end. James Montgomery, the conductor of the radical Sheffield Iris, was imprisoned for political libels in 1795 and 1796.80

The wish to minimize the real reach of repression here results not only in confusion but distortion. Richard Phillips, as we have seen, surely did not “avoid prosecution,” as he was sentenced to eighteenth months in Leicester Gaol. The Cambridge Intelligencer weathered much of the 1790s, but not without direct ministerial assault from the highest political body in the nation and the subsequent imprisonment of its editor. But, astonishingly, in this report the cases of Phillips and Flower are the good news, apparently meant to temper the storms felt in Manchester and Sheffield. It is as though in order to suggest a balance between freedom and repression, the (wellknown) information to the contrary is simply misrepresented. There is overwhelming evidence that those involved in the newspaper press in the 1790s were subject to intimidation, prosecution, and imprisonment. What is more interesting, in terms of how these years have been thought and written about by modern critics, is that this fact is repellant enough to generate thetic contradiction and evidentiary elisions in its refusal. This is a symptom of a larger problem, one that matters for our understanding of early Romantic culture. It emerges from a wish not to give too much credit to the Pitt ministry’s program of repression, an effort, influentially focused by E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, to underreport the effectiveness of repression in order to emphasize the people’s resourceful and brave struggles for democratic self-realization. This is a laudable aim, but it also has the potential to deform our sense of the period’s writing by leaving us with an incomplete understanding of the shapings of Romantic-era form. Perhaps for historians the consequences are smaller: the local archive is misrepresented, but the larger Whiggish thesis of a longue durée march to reform remains sound. But for literary studies the stakes cannot be higher. What is at issue is the registration of the feeling of the life of a repressive era in thoughtful and often brilliant conceptual strategies and formal inventions. This dynamic interaction of repression and engagement focuses my final two chapters.

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“By force, or openly, what could be done?” Godwin, Smith, Wollstonecraft, and the Gagging Acts Novel

What is the “Gagging Acts Novel”? The categories of “Jacobin” and “anti-Jacobin” have never fully comprehended the variety of politically engaged novels published across the 1790s. Most recently, critics have questioned the coherence of the “anti-Jacobin” rubric, for it has sometimes functioned to homogenize the writing of conservative novelists.1 This reassessment has helped us to recognize that the novels of Robert Bisset, Isaac D’Israeli, Elizabeth Hamilton, George Walker, Jane West, and others, however blandly propagandistic they may at first appear, register the era’s political debates in complex ways and entertain different thresholds for what they convey as threats to British stability.2 We can trace the modern critical project of apportioning the fiction of the revolutionary decade into competing camps to Gary Kelly’s The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805, which set out specific criteria for the “Jacobin novel,” including a necessitarian conviction that subsumes character to environment and circumstance, and, in depicting the relation between identity and social world, ­ elly’s clasthe achievement of a “unity of design” in the novel as a whole.3 K sificatory work had critical utility, revealing patterns of resemblance within

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what was then the little-studied field of the Romantic-era novel, and his argument that Robert Bage, William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, and Elizabeth Inchbald produced works with similar political investments has generally endured, though it has its own history of refinement, as critics have both narrowed and widened the purview of his study. Pamela Clemit, for instance, has proposed the “Godwinian novel” (produced by the triad of Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, and Mary Shelley), while Miriam L. Wallace has expanded the field through a Williams-esque “structure of feeling” to add several more works to Kelly’s list.4 If Clemit, Wallace, and others have enriched our sense of both the real heterogeneity and the substantive relays among Jacobin novels, I wish to call attention to an important redirection in the work of politically progressive novelists, in which a range of formal innovations engage specifically with the discursive foreclosures of the repressive 1790s. We see an instance of the dilemma faced by novelists at this moment in the case of George Cumberland’s 1798 novel, The Captive of the Castle of Sennaar, which both attorney Erskine and publisher Egerton warned against publishing. Next to a passage on “single tyrants framing arbitrary laws,” a manuscript note from Cumberland records that “Mr. Erskine deemed it dangerous, under Mr Pitts maladministration, to publish it” (155), and in a copy now held at the Beinecke, Cumberland recorded in the margin of a passage critiquing militarism, “such was the state of the Country in 1798. that from fear of Mr Pitts power Edgerton [sic] declined publishing this passage” (157).5 As the decade unfolded and the measures of the Pitt ministry intensified, as the arrest notices and legal expenses accumulated, novelists became particularly interested in portraying discursive constraint and communicative breakdown. In this chapter, I propose a way of thinking about those Pittera novels that are as interested in figuring strategic reticence and enforced silence as they are in recognizable political engagement. I refer to these works as “Gagging Acts novels,” for they are united by an effort to develop strategies for depicting both how communication is curtailed and the consequences of that curtailment for the social life of the nation. Reading these novels in the context of the repressive 1790s sharpens our attention to the trials of novelistic expression that emerged in the bleakest years of the Pitt era. I focus on three novels that trace constrained utterance and social fracture: William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Charlotte Smith’s Marchmont (1796), and Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1796–7, published 1798). These novels, like the journalism of Flower

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and the verse of the prison poets, employ formal strategies for figuring a climate of repression. Across these three works we find an escalation in the formal registration of discursive constraint, from the role of secrecy in the narrative mode and characterology of Caleb Williams, to the interruptions and obfuscations of Marchmont, to the forms of apophasis that define The Wrongs of Woman. That the 1790s novel engages the ministry’s repressive measures is clear from the importance of the 1793 Aliens Act to the plots of Henry James Pye’s The Democrat (1795), Isaac D’Israeli’s Vaurien (1797), and Charlotte Smith’s Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (1800). Pye is particularly direct, notes Gilmartin, in his integration of legislation into plot structure: after sending the character Le Noir out of Britain via the Aliens Act, rather than “betraying any embarrassment about his deus ex machina,” Pye launches a “fulsome tribute to a legislature that ‘wisely armed the executive government, with a power of sending away such active citizens of a neighboring nation, as migrate hither for the purpose of imparting to us the same liberal system they have established at home.’”6 This mode of “negative cosmopolitanism,” as Amy Garnai helpfully terms it, also banishes a Hungarian citizen from Britain in Smith’s Letters of a Solitary Wanderer. But unlike Pye’s celebration, Smith views the Aliens Act, Garnai argues, as “representative of the political backlash” of the 1790s.7 In Smith’s turn to the Aliens Act in Letters of a Solitary Wanderer we can see the extension of her interest in British jurisprudence beyond inheritance law.8 By distinguishing the Gagging Acts novel from the familiar modes of Jacobin and anti-Jacobin, I intend the term not as an enclosure but a heuristic, a means of recognizing emphases rather than of discounting variety. What is at issue in Caleb Williams, Marchmont, and The Wrongs of Woman is the portrayal of the discursive deformations that attend repression. Taken only as paraphrasable content, these novels share the familiar dynamic of the Jacobin novel: the agon between individuals and social and legal institutions, an account of conflict that broadly follows the bildungsroman mode. But attending to the structure and style of Gagging Acts novels reveals a shift in attention from broadcasts of radical thought to explorations of the pains of repression. To trace the arc described by Caleb Williams, Marchmont, and The Wrongs of Woman is to see obfuscation and reticence entering into the conceptual, structural, and even grammatical shape of the novel, as writers discover more sensitive and complex modes for formally registering the trials of the Pitt era.

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“I was shut up” Caleb Williams was published amidst the coordinated arrests of reform leaders in May 1794. This was not, however, Godwin’s first expression of concern for imperiled liberty. A year earlier, prompted by the case of tallow maker Daniel Crichton, who was imprisoned for a drunken antimonarchy rant, Godwin published four letters in the Morning Chronicle (under the name “Mucius”) which excoriate what he identifies as the emergence of an atmosphere of suspicion and persecution: “The most crying evil of a despotic Government,” Godwin warns, “is spies and informers.”9 Thanks to the zeal of the government and the efforts of John Reeves’s Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, Godwin worries that people must now “set a guard upon the door of their lips” and “anxiously watch every countenance, before they begin to speak!”10 He accuses Reeves of funding an effort to prosecute anyone who “utters a syllable” to which he objects, so that now, in “every coffee-house and place of public resort we must look round to see whether we have not one of your runners at our elbow,” leaving the nation afflicted with “perpetual watchfulness and reserve.”11 Godwin’s study in Caleb Williams of the consequences of “perpetual watchfulness” for an individual life acquires a special charge when read alongside his brief essay “Of History and Romance” (1797), which suggests the potential of the novel to comprehend the force of history in each person’s life. “The abstractions of history,” Godwin argues, are “cumbrous and unwieldy,” and so those who “study the history of nations abstracted from individuals whose passions and particularities are interesting to our minds, will find it a dry and frigid science.”12 For a more precise understanding of “our social existence,” we must not only consider “society in a mass,” but also the lived experience of individuals, including “the influence that one human being exercises over the other.”13 The novel’s capacity to register “our social existence” had been on Godwin’s mind for a few years, at least since his original preface to Caleb Williams, in which he offers the novel as “no refined and abstract speculation” but a “study and delineation of things passing in the moral world.” It is “now known to philosophers,” he writes in this preface, “that the spirit and character of the Government intrudes itself into every rank of society,” and so he explains that his aim has been to write a novel that would chronicle the consequences of this intrusion.14

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Tracing the lived experience of history, Godwin in Caleb Williams studies the development of character under surveillance and pursuit. No wonder the language of occlusion is not just a gothic device in Caleb Williams but its chief concern—Godwin’s novel is a sustained study of the power of secrecy as both narrative engine and social toxin. Given the Argus-eyed zeal of Ferdinand Falkland, we should not be surprised that the target of his surveillance is obsessed with secrecy: twenty chapters pass before Caleb Williams even allows his full name to appear in his narrative (158). The aura of secrecy that permeates the novel has not gone unnoticed: “[T]he whole of the plot of Caleb Williams revolves around the ‘secret’ which Falkland has jealously hidden in his chest,” one critic writes, and the conjectures are various: the “secret” has been read in terms of homosexual desire (Fludernik and Markley), theological allegory (Storch), and contemporary politics (Butler, Ousby, Sullivan, and James Thompson).15 We could widen this orbit to include ­Caleb’s declarations of narrative sincerity—declarations that are “necessarily suspect,” as Tilottama Rajan remarks, in a novel that thematizes the unreliability of all discourse.16 From the beginning, Caleb works hard to confect “sincerity,” assuring us that his memoir “will appear to have that consistency which is seldom attendant but upon truth,” and showering the first paragraph with twenty-two first-person pronouns (5). Despite this display of self-presence, however, throughout the novel Caleb holds readers at a distance, guarding his interiority as jealously as Falkland guards the contents of his trunk. Searching for a discursive register amidst intense surveillance, Caleb models the experience of Godwin himself, who was no less wary than his nervous protagonist. In the summer of 1794, Peter Marshall writes, Godwin was likely “under surveillance by the authorities,” and so he “scrupulously avoided any action which might be contrived as incriminating, carefully leaving his letters unsigned.”17 The preface he drafted for Caleb Williams (in May 1794) was no sooner written than withheld, recast, and later published with an explanatory gloss, a sequence of actions that suggests for Jonathan H. Grossman “an author both fearing and facing the possibility of a civil trial.”18 Godwin did not allow the preface into print until 1795 (during those months that E. P. Thompson has referred to as the “brief moment of ‘glasnost’” between the “aftermath of the acquittals of the treason trials and before the passing of the Two Acts”) because, Godwin explains, “it was feared that even the humble novelist might be shown to be constructively a traitor.”19 But his caution soon returned. The renewed repressions in November 1795 prompted Godwin to warn

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Thelwall, after revealing his authorship of Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills, “I do not conceive that my frankness in acknowledging the pamphlet entitles you to the public use of my name.”20 Living under a dragnet that models Pitt-era surveillance, Caleb’s circumspect narrative speaks to the warranted caution of Godwin and many other 1790s writers. Caleb’s elusiveness is apparent right away. While he closely documents Falkland’s background, Caleb is careful to make his own autobiography strategically generic. “I was born of humble parents, in a remote county of England,” he writes, declining elaboration; “[t]heir occupations were such as usually fall to the lot of peasants” (6). Caleb’s evasiveness, whether in withholding his name or shielding his past, seems refigured in the secrets of Falkland’s trunk: “The contents of the fatal trunk, from which all my misfortunes originated, I have never been able to ascertain” (326). With a tale of misfortunes born of a forever-mysterious trunk, Caleb himself seems a closed box: “I shrunk from the vigilance of every human eye,” he tells us; “I dared not open my heart to the best affections of our nature. I was shut up” (264–5). His syntax signals both externally enforced and self-imposed immurement: made to “shut up” by Falkland, Caleb’s voice is always on trial. “I do not pretend to warrant the authenticity of any part of these memoirs,” he cautions, “except so much as fell under my own knowledge, and that part shall be given with the same simplicity and accuracy that I would observe towards a court which was to decide in the last resort upon everything dear to me” (111). Caleb’s courtroom idiom reflects a life immured in the juridical machine controlled by Falkland. We would seem to be in Foucauldian terrain here, and critics have indeed drawn on Discipline and Punish in particular to assess Caleb’s subjectivity. I would suggest, however, that Caleb manages to elude full co-option into self-surveillance, as Godwin instead crafts him into a figure of resistance who slips surveillance through an authorial persona whose boasts of transparency provide cover for evasion.21 Caleb promotes his openness as a memoirist against a series of prior self-annulments: his catalogue of past disguises includes a beggar (242), “the son of a reputable farmer of the lower class” (262), a Jewish writer of adventure tales (263–8), and a watch repairer’s “twisted and deformed” apprentice (276). Even his lost literary endeavor—a history of English etymology—was meant to eclipse the autobiographical archeology he was then unwilling to pursue (305). By the time we meet Caleb in the narrative present, not only has he turned from lexicography to autobiography, he also assures us that during his second stint in prison he

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resolved to drop all masks. “I had thrown off every vestige of disguise,” he writes of his night in jail, “and appeared the next morning in my own person” (285). In determined opposition to Falkland’s effort to rob him of “the benefits and consolations of human society,” Caleb declares, “[t]here was one expedient against which I was absolutely determined—disguise” (315). But is “my own person” just another costume, his latest persona? At the very least, Caleb still seems attached to a theatrics of secrecy. The fissures in his memoir are conspicuous, as in this analepsis: “I had made use of this brogue, though I have not thought it necessary to write it down in my narrative,” he reports of an Irish accent he had, apparently, been feigning for some time (247). More telling than such disruption is Caleb’s tendency to destabilize the space between narrating instance and narrative moment, when Caleb-as-narrator, shorn of all disguises, collapses into his earlier, secreted self. As Caleb comes upon Falkland closing his trunk, for example, Falkland demands, “Who is there?,” but Caleb is unable to name himself: “I endeavoured to answer, but my speech failed” (9). Yet even in the present moment of narration he will not provide his name. The career of failed speech reappears in Caleb’s report of his effort to pry open Falkland’s trunk amidst the clamor of a fire. Directed by “some mysterious fatality” to Falkland’s secret library room, Caleb writes, “I know not what infatuation instantaneously seized me. . . . I forgot the business upon which I came” (137–8). “I forgot” is past tense, but “I know not” is present, as if he were even now repossessed by the state he is recalling. Not knowing seems Caleb’s main mode of narration: “[H]ow indescribable are the feelings with which I looked back upon it!” (138). As if to answer those who may wonder if, in retrospect, he may now describe his feelings, Caleb protests, “I have always been at a loss to account for my having plunged thus headlong into an act so monstrous” (139). “Always . . . at a loss” is Caleb’s default affect. About his later decision to flee to Ireland, he writes, “I cannot now tell what it was that inclined me to prefer this scheme to that which I had originally formed” (247). Over and again, despite claiming to have dropped all disguises, Caleb conceals himself behind a mask of self-alienation. This, Caleb’s final disguise, is also his final form of self-protection in a culture of unremitting surveillance. “Secrecy,” proposes D. A. Miller, is “a mode whose ultimate meaning lies in the subject’s formal insistence that he is radically inaccessible to the culture that would otherwise entirely determine him.”22 While Caleb details the process by which he abandoned a series of disguises, his memoir enacts his determination to remain “radically inaccessible.” His strategic secrecy is the legacy

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of his relationship with Falkland, who had long dictated the terms of revelation and concealment for him to obey. “If ever an unguarded word escape from your lips,” Falkland warns, “expect to pay for it by your death” (142). This power to control disclosure is tied to economic status: when Falkland hands him five guineas, Caleb recalls that “secrecy was one of the things expected of me” (10). Secrecy is a commodity, to be bought or hoarded, treasured or bartered. Pondering the “peculiar attraction of secrecy,” Georg Simmel has read the compulsion to withhold information in terms of commodification: the more secret the information, the greater its value.23 Yet if the value of a secret depends on supply and demand, as with any commodity the secret must at least appear attainable to hold its value, for just as the miser’s money is worthless if removed from the marketplace, so an unrevealable secret is socially valueless.24 And Caleb Williams is no miser: if secrecy is a commodity whose worth is a function of its possession, Caleb carefully controls his narrative’s commodity flow. His most prized commodity is his interiority, and his precise feelings and true motives become his always-advertised but never-revealed secret. Forging a persona in resistance to surveillance, Caleb’s claims for his own ultimate unknowability fashion his final mask, as he remains “shut up” for his own safety.

“An evident desire of concealment” Charlotte Smith’s Marchmont is not as well known today as her earlier novel Desmond, which appeared during the revolutionary excitement of 1791 and responded directly to Burke’s Reflections.25 In Desmond, Smith’s title character lauds the French Revolution and lambastes Reflections as an “elaborate treatise in favor of despotism,” one that would soon provoke any writer not bribed by the British government to write a counter-discourse in defense of “truth and reason.”26 Published five years later, Marchmont is no less concerned with its own political moment, and warrants attention for its conceptually nuanced and formally inventive treatment of the broad social consequences of what Thelwall called the “fangs of Law.”27 In Marchmont, Smith joins Thelwall, Godwin, Beddoes, and others in showing how the British legal system can terrorize its own citizens, and extends this study by embedding into novelistic form the paranoia and silencing that afflict her central characters. In the introduction to their edition of Marchmont, Kate Davies and Harriet Guest query the significance of the eponym. Marchmont is the impov-

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erished scion of a royalist family that lost much of its wealth by supporting and protecting both Charles I and James II. In this regard, it “seems intriguing,” Davies and Guest write, that Marchmont’s name is one which so obviously dissociates him from his family’s Jacobite legacy. The Earls of Marchmont were prominent Whig supporters of William III, whose virulent anti-Jacobitism . . . attracted some controversy. Within the novel, then, Marchmont’s family name signals the stubborn excesses of Tories and Jacobites, while without it is connected to anti-Jacobitical Whiggish immoderation. There is clearly something important about this reversal or exchange of family association.28

The import of this nominal mismatch is not quite clear. Davies and Guest hazard that “the interchangeability of Whig and Tory, as well as the reversed associations of the Marchmonts, suggests the futility of political attachment in a world of suffering individuals” (xviii). But we might also think about Smith’s political conflation in terms of the strategic inscrutability we have seen in Benjamin Flower’s self-positioning. Launching the Cambridge Intelligencer, Flower fashioned himself as a Burke-quoting, pro-monarchy, antiPitt democrat, and then shifted his political coordinates from one editorial to the next, rendering his voice difficult to locate in the radical-conservative binary. This mode of ambiguity is central to Marchmont: while Smith’s earlier novel Desmond was explicitly aligned with revolutionary thought, her first post–Gagging Acts novel topicalizes its own political caginess. Marchmont tells the story of the entwined plights of Armyn Marchmont and Althea Dacres, both victims of tyranny who have been exiled to the remote, ramshackle Devon estate of Eastwoodleigh. Wanted for debt, Armyn Marchmont is in hiding at the decrepit mansion, which was once owned by his family, while bailiffs circle the area in pursuit. Althea Dacres, meanwhile, has been confined to Eastwoodleigh by her father (who is now the estate’s owner) as punishment for refusing to marry the powerful and manipulative politician Mohun. A relationship develops between these two inmates, and though they end up marrying, the plot is tortured by surveillance, legal persecution, and imprisonment. Smith’s novel foregrounds the consequences of these forces not only in the story it tells but also in the manner of its telling. Smith provides a reading key to the cautious, sometimes oblique language of the novel in a passage that shows the imprisoned Marchmont considering a turn to writing in order to raise money to support his family and effect his release. While he

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worries that, writing from King’s Bench Prison, he will be unable to produce work of appeal to the “taste of the passing day,” this is not his only fear: It was besides very probable, that the principal dealers in literary traffic would hesitate at purchasing the work of a prisoner who was likely, besides the disgrace of the connection, to vent in his writing some part of the discontent that imprisonment is very apt to engender.—The passage from discontent to murmurs against oppression, real or imaginary, is very short; and murmurs may savour of seditious notions, and seditious notions might carry a man nobody knew whither. (383).

Echoing George Cumberland’s manuscript notes on his withheld novel, Marchmont troubles over the practical matter of simply finding a venue for writers whose murmurs hint at “discontent”: “What rich and substantial vendor would hazard any thing like this in these times?” (383). What is necessary “in these times” is indirection of the kind Smith herself practices in Marchmont through a shifting collision of loyalist and democratic sentiments. The hero is descended from royalists and supports monarchy; the heroine is the daughter of a titled aristocrat. Yet the ministry figures we meet verge on the satanic, and various references to the benefits, and needfulness, of political change punctuate the novel. Smith is careful, however, when airing progressive ideas, and she depicts a British public equally reticent about political discussion. The novel’s Britons are hardly jingoistic patriots. Take this account of a farmer’s reaction to an episode in the war with France he has just read about in a “country paper”: “[H]e considered only how it might, by prolonging the war, prolong or increase the taxes he already grumbled to pay” (303). In London things are much the same. Encountering a gathered crowd, Marchmont asks a bystander about the commotion: “[I]t is a waggon-load of wounded soldiers from beyond sea,” she tells him, and another clarifies that this group represents “not a tythe, no nor a fiftieth hardly, of only the last cargo; for most of them have been sent on by water that they might not be seen, because people grumble” (347). Smith sets such grumblings on the margins, and primarily in the mouths of minor characters. She does not need Pigott’s dictionary to remind her of how complaint was registered in these times: “To grumble,—high treason.”29 Appropriately for Smith’s strategy of obfuscation, the novel’s title character is also its most politically inscrutable. His family’s renowned loyalty to the Stuarts during the English Revolution and the Jacobite Risings nearly bankrupted them, and subsequent generations have dissolved the remaining

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holdings in keeping up chivalric appearances. Marchmont is in a royalist line but not entirely of it, for “[r]eason and experience had in a great measure conquered the prejudices which his father (a bigot to family pride, and to what used to be called Toryism) had taught him to cherish” (351). At the same time, however, Marchmont has an inner Burke: “[T]he sentiments of the old cavaliers, the blood of an ancient and high-minded family, acting on the warm and active spirits of three-and-twenty, were altogether of too inflammable a nature not to silence the voice of prudence” (351). It is difficult to sort out how this young cavalier feels about his own age’s revolutionary politics. Even a turn to his past does not help. Exploring an empty wing of Eastwoodleigh, Althea comes across Marchmont’s former room and notices some old books in a corner, including various school texts, “old acts of parliament,” and “a few leaves of the Eikon Basilike,” as though the young Marchmont had among his education the legislative history and monarchical propaganda so important to his family’s fate (102). The mature Marchmont, we later learn, had felt hopeful at the outbreak of the French Revolution, but he now distances himself from radical discourse, even cautioning his friend Eversley not to assume that he approves of “that universal license, that wild and impracticable scheme of general equality” that has “gained ground from the writings of visionary speculatists” (290). Marchmont might best be described as a disillusioned royalist who finds himself betrayed by a once-loved British power structure: I was brought up to think so highly of the government under which I was born, that I believed it faultless, incapable of losing its spirit of justice, and impossible to be amended: yet at the age when I am most susceptible of pain and pleasure, when I trust my mind is unadulterated by systems, and my heart untainted by either vice or prejudice—I find myself, by the abuse of those very laws I so highly venerated, condemned to become an exile from my country, or to add, in the very prime of youth, another unhappy victim to the numbers condemned to linger out their years in the squalid misery of legal confinement. (248)

Emigration or imprisonment: these are the unhappy choices. No wonder that from prison he is able to admire Madame Roland. Marchmont “feels ashamed of [his] own impatience” with his immurement when he “contemplate[s] the most illustrious woman of modern times, sitting in her dungeon” (387). If Roland’s participation in republican France “raised prejudice and hatred against her,” Marchmont insists that anyone “capable of feeling true greatness of mind” could never “contemplate without admira-

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tion and respect such sublimity of mind” (387). How does the novel guide our understanding of the hero’s politics? To Marchmont’s wavering sense of his own political sympathies, the narrator’s only comment is a terse aside on his “fluctuating philosophy” (387). It is with the appearance late in the novel of Marchmont’s uncle Desborough, who funds his release from prison, that Smith most explicitly stages the obfuscation of political allegiance. We learn something of Desborough’s character at second hand, as he says of Marchmont’s father: “He was what I called a tory, and he called me . . . not a whig, but a republican. I did not much quarrel with him for ranking me with such names as Sidney and Hampden” (408). But even Desborough the Commonwealth republican is soon enough rendered ambiguous. Although viewing chivalry as a superannuated fantasy, he is also bound up in the remnants of Burkean discourse: “[T]he name of Marchmont is no stranger to me; and though chivalry exists no longer, yet, in a point of real honour, I am sure I may trust to the descendent of the old cavaliers” (405). The issue of Desborough’s specific political beliefs is raised only to be quashed a few pages later, in a conversation between Marchmont and a debtor named Wingrove. “He is what is called a character,” Wingrove vaguely tells Marchmont, and when he mentions Desborough’s “doubtful principles,” a curious Marchmont asks for clarification: “Of what sort?” Wingrove replies that on both religion and politics Desborough has “very heterodox notions,” but the nature of this heterodoxy is not allowed to surface: “I have taken some pains to combat his unhappy prepossessions when we have talked together, but I grieve to think that he is most obstinately bigoted to a set of notions . . .” “Which cannot, however, be very prejudicial to society,” interrupted Marchmont, “since it appears that his life is passed, and his fortune expended, in doing good.” (411)

Marchmont’s interruption checks specification about Desborough’s “bigoted set of notions.” But Smith is not done: this interruption repeats in the redirection of narrative action. Wingrove is about to launch into the sort of political discourse that readers of Desmond would recognize, but Smith conspicuously evacuates the program: Mr. Wingrove, who had been educated in the strictest of what used to be called High-church principles . . . and had never ventured to entertain or listen to any ideas that favoured of schism, either in church or state, would now have entered into a long discourse, to prove that it was impossible any

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body could have common sense who did; but in the midst of the first head of this argument . . . Marchmont felt somebody touch him gently on the shoulder. He turned, and beheld in deep mourning his friend Eversley. (411)

This is the last we hear of Wingrove, as Smith taps the narrative itself on the shoulder, preventing Wingrove from bringing clear political coordinates into the novel. It was after an outburst of undisciplined speech (directed at the scheming Mohun) that Marchmont was imprisoned on charges of disturbing the peace, held on a penalty of £300, and ordered to find “two securities” of £300 each to guarantee that he will “keep the peace” upon his release (357). Through Marchmont’s time in prison Smith literalizes the language of confinement that suffuses the text, in which Britain seems, to borrow Coleridge’s figure from The Plot Discovered, a “vast aviary.” Althea’s own confinement in the “antique prison” of Eastwoodleigh comes as she is banished for declining the advances of Mohun, whom she refers to as “the great dictator of the party that frequents my father’s table in London” (67–8). To portray this “great dictator” Smith recruits the contemporary fear of overzealous ministers, as Althea is literally pursued by a member of parliament: the verb she most often uses to describe Mohun’s attention is “persecute.” Althea’s sense of Mohun’s persecutory terror is expressed in a stark image that rises before her when she hears him speak: “[I]t reminds me of the voice and manner of the man whom I heard plead against those poor creatures who were prisoners at Exeter” (18). The narrator affirms Althea’s sense of Mohun by reporting his response to her exile. “His conscience never gave him much trouble,” for “having been educated to plead as well against as for it, he seemed to think it a monitor which a man of sense might easily bribe to silence, if not entirely divest himself of the weakness of attending to it; though he thought it might be a bugbear very proper to terrify the vulgar, who could not be kept too much in awe” (75). Like Pitt himself—and indeed Smith takes care to tell us that Mohun “will undoubtedly be Chancellor”—Mohun realizes the importance of holding the populace in awe (20). This Machiavellian savvy is courted by Althea’s father, who has used his wealth to forge connections to powerful government figures (77). Pursuing these powers, he knows that “[n]o man’s abilities in political wrangling were more highly in repute than those of Mr. Mohun; no point, therefore, was more solicitously pursued by Sir Audley, and his employers, than to attach him firmly to his party” (77). Althea’s refusal to participate in this attachment results in her confinement, in which she initially enters

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into Michael Hardt’s undifferentiated “prison time”: there is no change or hope to give texture to the passing days, and “[a]ccustomed insensibly to her solitude, Althea passed her time without murmuring” (114). But once she learns of her shared status with Marchmont, Althea begins to recognize larger narratives of confinement, and Smith even ties their plight to familiar British discourses of imprisonment by having Marchmont explain that Richard Lovelace, “imprisoned in the Gate-house at Westminster,” is one of his ancestors (158). Hearing this report, Althea suddenly realizes the connection between this history and her own name. But this is no conventional felix carcer story. As Jane Spencer points out, “Marchmont has none of the serenity of Lovelace’s conviction that the mind can be free while the body is imprisoned.”30 And rather than an absent addressee, Althea is now a coprisoner who shares Marchmont’s plight. In the sociotext of Marchmont, confinement at King’s Bench and Eastwoodleigh functions as the carceral arm of a widespread system of surveillance. We have seen various warnings sounded at mid-decade about the paranoid life that would follow the government’s repressive laws. “Bloodhounds,” Beddoes shuddered, would swarm the country.31 This bleak forecast becomes everyday life in Smith’s novel, and to make it clear that the horror of Marchmont emerges from juridical corruption, she sources much of the machinery of surveillance to a shadowy lawyer named Vampyre. This villain is not a member of the undead, though as Marchmont’s friend realizes, his persecutory zeal has a chilling pedigree: Eversley, always fearful of the machinations of the fiend Vampyre, whose persecution he thought as inveterate and as much to be dreaded as the pursuit of the secret tribunal in the fifteenth century, had earnestly entreated Marchmont not to expose himself to a renewal of all the mischief this legal monster was capable of doing him, by appearing publicly. (337)

Smith dramatizes the social saturation effected by this legal monster by having two “alarming figures” arrive at Eastwoodleigh to interrogate the confused caretakers, Mr. and Mrs. Wansford. It is soon revealed that Marchmont has been hiding in a small passageway at Eastwoodleigh (Marchmont later explains to Althea that he suspects Vampyre of engaging the “myrmidons of the police” to track him down [148]). Faced with these men, soon identified as bailiffs, Althea and the Wansfords are “confused and alarmed by interrogations,” and afraid to tell the men to leave (127). The bailiffs are searching the house for an outlaw, but they refuse to name the subject or produce a

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warrant. The confusion about the target of their search extends to the neighbors, one of whom, Mrs. Wansford reports, “guessed that it was a Jacobine or Jacobite; I don’t know, not I, what they call ’em” (130). This confusion between 1790s radical and 1740s royalist is appropriate, Jane Spencer argues, “because Marchmont is in a sense both. His ancestors were Jacobites but his own initial reaction to the ‘auspicious appearance’ of the French Revolution aligns him with the Jacobins.”32 In “Smith’s attempt to read history with compassion,” Spencer proposes, “political allegiances matter less than human sympathy.”33 Yet we might also think of the uncertainty of these labels, like the name Marchmont itself, in terms of the political illegibility that Smith has carefully developed: one need not be a confused villager to find Marchmont’s political status perplexing. After being subjected to a flurry of questions—“whether I knew this person and that person in the neighborhood, and who lived in the house? and who came to the house?”—Mr. Wansford eventually learns that the bailiffs were hired by Vampyre—here described as “an attorney [who] has been the ruin of a great many families” (132). Amazed at Vampyre’s ability to wreak such havoc “in a country celebrated for its equal laws,” Althea begins to weigh Britain’s self-mythology of freedom and equality against things as they are, as Smith stages a process of coming-toawareness that parallels Marchmont’s, and that the novel’s “grumbling” marginal characters have already passed through (138). The surveillance and persecution that Althea now recognizes is more than the action of Vampyre and his myrmidons. It is government itself. Ministerial agents, such as one Mr. Platt, equate domestic spying with c­ areer prestige: “When he speaks of himself,” Forrester tells Marchmont of Platt, “it is always in the plural—‘We of the diplomatic corps—Persons of a certain description like us, entrusted by Government—We, the friends of Administration—To us, who are in the secret of all that’” (314). Forrester continues the profile of enterprising alarmists such as Platt, who is also among those who used to be called Croakers, but who have of late assumed the more tremendous title of Alarmists; insomuch that I have sometimes recommended it to him to recollect the fable of the boy and the wolf. To prove, however, at once, and exercise his sagacity, he is continually discovering plots and conspiracies—French agents, and lurking Jacobins: and it was probably some such character that he intended to fix upon you. (314)

The “friends of Administration” exist in a circuit of alarm: declarations of urgency demand proof, and so “proof ” is found. Smith shows that this is

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not just a matter of the rhetorical games of alarmists, for in Marchmont suspicion and spying lead to confrontation and arrest. Marchmont, walking across a field, notices a man skulking along beside him in the shrubs. “Had the man, whoever he was, still continued his way,” the narrator reports, Marchmont “would have concluded it to be a labourer, and would hardly have noticed him; but, as it was, there was an evident desire of concealment” (354). Soon afterward Marchmont is “roughly seized in the King’s name by two ill-looking fellows, while four others surrounded him” (356). The figure in the countryside was no pastoral farmer but just one more of the novel’s ubiquitous laborers in the field of surveillance. In this regime, Smith sketches a continuum of repression, from imprisonment and surveillance, to social isolation, and finally to the inhibition of speech. She stages the power to arrest discourse during Marchmont’s visit to Mohun’s office late in the novel. Marchmont explains the nature of his business in “a few words,” but not too few for Mohun, who, “interrupting him with a cold and supercilious air” and “putting out his hand as in the action of silencing a person,” says, “You need not trouble yourself to say any more” (346). Mohun’s power to silence also shapes his “persecutions” of Althea. When Mohun proposes that he would effect Marchmont’s release from King’s Bench Prison if Althea would consent to become his mistress, the narrator tells us that “Althea remained silent . . . not because she suffered it patiently, but amazement and terror took from her, for a moment, the power to answer” (398). This “amazement and terror” is generated not only by Mohun but by everyone in the surveillance network, including Vampyre and his myrmidons. This is the “awe,” Mohun knows, that is so useful for social control. This portrayal of frozen speech extends from thematics to formal trials in Marchmont. The shape of gagging is found first of all in performed interruptions, in which conversational redirection is followed by abrupt changes in the narrative more broadly. Pointedly staging elision, Smith uses interruption at those moments when political knowledge seems on the verge of revelation. But she also works a subtler mode of withheld information through focal shifts, as she moves from omniscient third person to restricted focalizations that leave the reader as much at a loss as one of the novel’s characters. Take the moment in which Althea’s father is talking to a dinner guest about Marchmont: “‘[W]e will unalterably abide by the resolution which I mentioned to you before dinner; and Mr. Marchmont must be positively given to understand, that . . .’ The conversation was now carried

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on in a lower tone; and Althea could only distinguish that it was inimical to poor Marchmont” (71). Here Smith blends Althea’s point of view into the narrator’s, as we are conspicuously not given precisely what it is that must positively be understood. The narrative world of Marchmont is less the scene of panoptical omniscience described by John Bender than a staged scene of paranoid nescience, as through subtle shifts in point of view, Smith shows that information is withheld even from the narrator.34 Such narrative withholding is definitive of Smith’s novel, as seen in the opacity of the title character: Marchmont’s, and Marchmont’s, motives and political alignments are explicitly scrambled. This is not the strategic obfuscation that we have seen in Caleb Williams’s attempts to preserve his own secrets. Instead, the political outlines of Marchmont are performatively vexed, he is a JacobiteJacobin, and a rare thing in 1790s Britain: a persecuted and imprisoned royalist. If, as Barbara Tarling has written, Smith’s writing in the 1790s developed “in response to changing events in France and increasing repression in Britain,” it is important to distinguish the national developments.35 The first, which gathers discourses of bloodshed and disenchantment, is familiar in Romantic critical history; the second, which issues concern for the dynamics of repression, fear, and silence, is at the heart of Marchmont. Smith’s apophasis conditions both the narrative mode and the depiction of a poisonous social life, in which characters are fearful of what to say and even, in the case of Marchmont the aspiring writer, of what may be put into print. These novelistic trials with discursive constraint and narrative fracture are pressed even further in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman, particularly in Wollstonecraft’s new interest in using forms of apophasis to render a terrified speech community.

“Whispered along the walls” Wollstonecraft admired Marchmont for its study of the destructive force of law in people’s lives. She reviewed Smith’s novel the same year that she finished her own exploration of the terrors of law in The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, a novel that marks a kind of Althusserian inversion in her thought.36 She had first examined the ideological apparatuses of church, school, and print culture in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, before turning a half decade later to their statal realizations in the madhouse, courtroom, and iron restraints of The Wrongs of Woman. But the most immediate difference between these two works might be felt in their rhetorical pulse. In Rights of

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Woman Wollstonecraft boldly announces her liberty of utterance: “I shall disdain to cull my phrases or polish my style,” she proclaims. “I aim at being useful, and sincerity will render me unaffected; for, wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in rounding periods” (75). Satirizing Burke’s baroquery, Wollstonecraft ties her own rhetorical freedom to a Paine­ite unaffectedness, as Rights of Woman presents a bold prospect of actual change energized by the French Revolution. Five years later in The Wrongs of Woman, the vision darkens and the language tremors, but the problem is less the state of affairs in France than the British political scene. “Why is it so necessary that I should return?” she wrote to Gilbert Imlay from France in 1795, in response to his suggestion that she move back to Britain; “brought up here, my girl would be freer.”37 Even amidst the aftermath of the Terror, notes Tom Furniss, Wollstonecraft had higher hopes for the revolutionary nation than for a Britain determined to prosecute a military campaign against France and an internal war against British reformers.38 Wollstonecraft registered the war at home acutely, as her friends and fellow writers in the Johnson circle were harassed, prosecuted, and in some cases imprisoned. If Rights of Woman drew on the lexicon of hope current in the response to the outbreak of revolution, in The Wrongs of Woman Wollstonecraft again turned to the national political climate, this time marshaling the tropes in circulation during the era of Pittite repression. Janice H. Peritz has argued that The Wrongs of Woman shows a profound “historical engagement with the political debates of 1796,” and has paid special attention to the novel’s implicit critique of Burke’s Letters on a Regicide Peace. I wish to extend Peritz’s study of the novel’s “radical politics of communication” by examining how Wollstonecraft registers both conceptually and formally the prohibition on communication. Replete with silences, stutters, fractured speech, and broken dialogues, her novel is an anthology of Gagging Acts form. We are already accustomed to thinking of The Wrongs of Woman as a splintered text, but for reasons different from those I wish to suggest. After Wollstonecraft’s death, Godwin published the work in its unfinished form accompanied by Wollstonecraft’s brief notes for the ending, explaining that her readers would “gladly accept” the “broken paragraphs and half-finished sentences,” for rather than knowing nothing of the novel’s ending, they would prefer “the most imperfect and mutilated information.”39 Godwin’s emphasis on the fragmentary state of the manuscripts—he gave the novel the subtitle “A Fragment in Two Volumes”—has tended to eclipse the pains

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Wollstonecraft took within The Wrongs of Woman to inscribe discursive fracture. “Mutilated information” describes not just the novel’s fate but its formal design.40 This purposeful rendering is clear at the end of chapter 14, which Godwin notes was the last chapter revised by Wollstonecraft, and which performs a conspicuous rupture. Writing a memoir for her daughter, Maria recalls the moment when she first regained consciousness in the madhouse: “I began, starting affrighted from the conviction, to discover where I was confined—I insisted on seeing the master of the mansion—I saw him—and perceived that I was buried alive.— “Such, my child, are the events of thy mother’s life to this dreadful moment—Should she ever escape from the fangs of her enemies, she will add the secrets of her prison-house—and—” Some lines were here crossed out, and the memoirs broke off abruptly with the names of Jemima and Darnford. (170)

Throughout the novel Wollstonecraft uses aposiopesis to figure suspended dialogue and interrupted thought. In this passage, the dash signals a final interruption of Maria’s prison narrative, and Wollstonecraft ends the chapter with a complex graphical uncertainty. Maria has broached the topic of the “secrets of her prison-house,” but what was to come is lost in a suspended conjunction. We cannot know what Maria was to write next, but Wollstonecraft does not end at this dash. Instead, her narrator glosses the fragment in order to emphasize its truncation. “Some lines were here crossed out”: this is Gagging Acts discourse, in which the emphasis falls less on radical sentiment than on the figuration of communicative foreclosure. What was written in the crossed-out lines? Who crossed them out? Do the names of Jemima and Darnford form a sketch outline, with Maria planning to write about them next? Or do they appear as witnesses, endorsed in their own hands? I want to emphasize that for the Gagging Acts novel the answers to these questions are less important than the fact that Wollstonecraft has staged them as questions. If Smith uses limited focalization to indicate the restriction of narrative knowledge, Wollstonecraft goes further, doubling the break in Maria’s memoirs in her abrupt termination of the chapter. Such ruptures occur strategically throughout the novel. In studying the inscriptions of apophasis in The Wrongs of Woman it is instructive to consider the status of silence, as both concept and figure, in Wollstonecraft’s earlier work. In Mary, a Fiction (1788), silence appears as a conventional trope for emotional overload. Take Henry’s declaration to the

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heroine: “‘Could I but offer thee an asylum in these arms—a faithful bosom, in which thou couldst repose all thy griefs—’ He pressed her to it, and she returned the pressure—he felt her throbbing heart. A mournful silence ensued! when he resumed the conversation . . .”41 This is silence as a marker of the ineffable, not as a figure for political repression. And in Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft’s aposiopesis indicates revolutionary sympathy rather than discursive constraint. After mentioning Richard Price, the famed dissenting minister and her own mentor at Newington Green, Wollstonecraft writes that his “memory demands a respectful pause,” and then evacuates the sentence with a dash (86). But Wollstonecraft does not use this truncation to jettison her larger assault, as she moves from attacking “the sacred majesty of Kings” to arguing against standing armies as “incompatible with freedom” (86). Her “respectful pause” functions as a tribute to the memory of Price but does not close or redirect her political excoriation. By the time of The Wrongs of Woman, however, Wollstonecraft has become interested in apophasis as an expressive mode for a repressive era. She enacts the culture of terror in frantic dashes, fractured sentences, and other performances of grammatical breakdown, and she ends chapters and conversations with the explanation only that they have been ended, leaving the fact of their foreclosure more important than speculations about what might have followed. Conceptually, structurally, and grammatically, The Wrongs of Woman everywhere portrays life lived in the world of discursive constraint: call it apophasiography. Constraint is apparent from our first encounter with Maria, as she is both physically and psychologically imprisoned, with her arms manacled and the shock of her capture having “suspended her faculties” (85). Wollstonecraft conjoins this confinement to enforced silence, as Maria’s first lesson of immurement is that her voice will not be heard: the “master of this most horrid of prisons” responds with a “malignant smile, when she appealed to his judgment,” a smile that “stifled her remonstrating complaints” (86). Her voice stifled, her pleas for justice capable only of generating violent retribution, Maria is left with the question that the narrator now turns to ask the reader. “By force, or openly, what could be done?” (86). This question unites The Wrongs of Woman with the story of Pitt-era Britain, and it is one that Wollstonecraft, with all politically committed writers, faced. By force, or openly, what could be done? Faced with this question, however, The Wrongs of Woman is more than a document of despair, for it shows the process by which something might be done, a process that requires surmounting the effects of fear and suspicion.

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Wollstonecraft depicts the rarity and brittleness of trust in this world, and in this regard it is important that she leaves the scene of Maria’s confinement ambiguous through the novel’s opening chapters. It begins as a generically gothic “mansion of despair” (85), but this soon becomes a “prison,” the most frequent descriptor. Maria is held in a “dreary cell,” a “most horrid of ­prisons,” and a “dungeon” (85–6, 88). In atmosphere and lexicon, the novel’s opening pushes past gothic convention to recall the memoirs of 1790s prisoners, as Maria’s experiences evoke those of Bonney, Montgomery, Thelwall, and the whole cast of the contemporary incarcerated. Like these prisoners, Maria’s punishment collapses corporeal and psychological pain, with solitary confinement torturing her soul as chains restrain her body (86). And widening the focus to allow us to see her cell, as Maria gazes blankly out a window grate, Wollstonecraft evokes the jailhouse descriptions of Howard’s State of the Prisons. It is only through Jemima’s narrative that we learn that Maria is confined in a “private receptacle for madness” (119). The uncertainty in which Wollstonecraft leaves the reader in the novel’s early chapters focuses Maria’s own confusion about her confinement, and about whether she is considered mad or criminal, or both.42 This confusion is essential to Wollstonecraft’s portrayal of the futility of reasonable remonstrance in the society beyond the madhouse’s walls. Wollstonecraft presents Maria’s decision to claim her freedom from Venables as an awakening of reason that recalls Bonney’s vision of Britons at last recognizing the schemes of the ministry: “And now the mist which veil’d men’s eyes,” Bonney wrote about the public’s resipiscence in his prison poem “Suspension,” “Before the sun of reason flies.”43 In similar language, Maria describes experiencing a sudden realization: I wondered (now the film seemed to be withdrawn, that obscured the piercing sight of reason) how I could, previously to the deciding outrage, have considered myself as everlastingly united to vice and folly! “Had an evil genius cast a spell at my birth; or a demon stalked out of chaos, to perplex my understanding, and enchain my will, with delusive prejudices?” (154)

Maria realizes that she has been living a blinkered life, one governed by the ideological delusions of Burkean prejudice. However, with a weathered but enduring conviction in the potential to overcome prejudice, Wollstonecraft shows that Maria is at least able to recognize the “demon” of ideology. But how successful is Maria at moving from recognition to liberation? Claudia Johnson has described Maria’s break from Venables as “an altogether ratio-

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nal, enlightened response to a man whose libertine habits she had been too benighted to recognize at first.”44 Hence the journal that Maria writes for her daughter is meant “to show that Maria was insane when she fell in love with her husband, not when she fell out of love with him.”45 But ­others have wondered how we are to understand Maria’s apparent clarity in light of what appears to be her faith in Darnford.46 These critics have asked how fully Maria recognizes the broader influences that shape her life. To approach this question we must trace Wollstonecraft’s description of the career of resistance through both Maria’s ordeal after leaving Venables and her subsequent experience of companionship in the madhouse. Wollstonecraft is careful to show that, once freed from the film that obscured reason, Maria must scramble for basic survival. “Hunted out like a felon,” her life is now defined by “pursuit and alarm” (160, 165), and she is spied on at every turn: “By watching my only visitor, my uncle’s friend, or by some other means, Mr. Venables discovered my residence and came to enquire for me” (161). As several critics have noted, this dynamic of flight and persecution recalls Caleb Williams, and just as Caleb is haunted by the broadsheet account of his supposed villainy, the hunt for Maria is assisted by newspaper notices threatening “any person harbouring her” with the “utmost severity of the law” (159). Amidst this dragnet, Maria changes her name and tries to flee to France, but en route to Dover she is drugged and carried to the madhouse, where “a monstrous dog darted forwards to the length of his chain, and barked and growled infernally” (169). “Infernally” evokes Maria’s earlier description of ideology as a “demon” that “stalked out of chaos”: through this collation Wollstonecraft underscores an escalation in techniques of social control, as carceral apparatuses are needed to secure the compliance once achievable through ideology alone. Wollstonecraft’s attention to how Maria’s emerging feminist resistance and quest for liberation collides with a climate of severe repression and carceral force is of particular importance in the latter years of the 1790s, which saw an amplification of ideas of domestic duty and female patriotic obedience. Writing that “conservatives in Britain in particular [saw] in the outbreak of the French Revolution a grim demonstration of the dangers that ensued when women were allowed to stay outside their proper sphere,” ­Colley notes that the onset of war with France made this fear especially urgent: “For some, indeed, the welfare of Great Britain made it absolutely vital that women should continue to behave in a traditional manner.”47 That some in Britain would register geopolitical stakes in Maria’s claim for inde-

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pendence is made clear in The Wrongs of Woman, as the judge in the trial scene near the novel’s close responds to Maria’s plea for justice by saying, “We did not want French principles in public or private life” (181). After announcing that he is “always determined to oppose all innovation,” the judge becomes, as Peritz has shown, a veritable mouthpiece for Burke’s linking of marriage and national stability in Letters on a Regicide Peace.48 In the Letters, Burke expresses alarm at the new availability of divorce in France: Other Legislators, knowing that marriage is the origin of all relations, and consequently the first element of all duties, have endeavored by every art to make it sacred. The Christian Religion, by confining it to the pairs, and by rendering that relation indissoluble, has by these two things done more towards the peace, happiness, settlement, and civilization of the world than by any other part in this whole scheme of Divine Wisdom. The direct contrary course has been taken in the Synagogue of Anti-Christ, I mean in that forge and manufactory of all evil, the sect which predominated in the Constituent Assembly of 1789. Those monsters employed the same or greater industry to desecrate and degrade that state, which other legislators have used to render it holy and honorable.49

In revolutionary France, divorce was made available, Burke fumes, and the “reason they assigned was as infamous as the act; declaring that women had been too long under the tyranny of parents and of husbands.”50 For Burke, it is a steep and slippery slope from this innovation to cannibalism, as his panic about the effects of female agency reaches a horrible pitch. Alongside this familiar linking of women’s claims to basic justice with “French principles” ran a discourse not only of gendered passivity but, especially after the outbreak of war, of female patriotism. “The conservative establishment, while it actively attempted to circumscribe writing that challenged orthodoxy,” Lisa Wood notes, “easily accommodated writing by women in an antirevolutionary cause, and promoted female agency in the implementation of conservative social practice.”51 A woman might speak out in favor of orthodoxy or passively accept it. But how, in this climate, could female opposition develop? And how could it find a public voice? The judge who accuses Maria of “French principles” stands in not only for Burke but for the phalanx of contemporary figures determined to quell female political resistance. A striking instance of this determination comes in Horace Walpole’s notorious 1795 letter to More in which he describes Wollstonecraft as a “Hyena in petticoats.” Walpole’s derisive epithet is well known, but the manuscript of his letter is an even stranger artifact than we

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might have supposed. At the end of the second page we find an inky frenzy at the mention of Wollstonecraft’s name. Here is the slur, contained within his sign-off to More: “Adieu! Thou excellent Woman! Thou Reverse of that Hyena in petticoats, Mrs. Wollstonecraft, who to this Day discharges her Ink and gall on Marie Antoinette, whose unparalleled Sufferings have not yet staunched that Alecto’s blazing ferocity.”52 Compare this to the original manuscript (see Figure 9). The provenance of the circle, overscore, and crossing out of Wollstonecraft’s name is unknown—it could have been made by More, by a later reader, or by Walpole himself. But it is the symbolic charge of this obliteration that I wish to emphasize, for in the figure of Wollstonecraft we see a graphic performance of two modes of repression that Wollstonecraft herself spent a career examining and combating. Walpole’s letter first subjects Wollstonecraft to the misogynist assault taken up by an array of contemporary writers, including Richard Polwhele, the scribes of the Anti-Jacobin, and Burke himself, for whom Wollstonecraft was one of the “Clan of desperate, Wicked, and mischievously ingenious Women, who have brought, or are likely to bring Ruin and shame upon all those that listen to them.”53 Burke’s words on Wollstonecraft come in 1795, as does Walpole’s letter to More, well before the 1798 publication of Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (sometimes thought to have inaugurated the vilification of Wollstonecraft). Memoirs provided additional fodder for a process that was well underway by the time Wollstonecraft began The Wrongs of Woman. The second mode of repression signaled in Walpole’s letter is seen in the attempt graphically to destroy Wollstonecraft’s name, a semiotic overkill that recalls the frenzied assaults on the effigies of Paine, and that evokes reactionary efforts to oblit-

Figure 9.  “Wollstonecraft.” Detail, letter from Horace Walpole to Hannah More, 24 January 1795. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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erate female voices of resistance.54 In The Wrongs of Woman, Wollstonecraft depicts the near impossibility of the development and expression of female resistance at this time, and in doing so she offers a striking answer to claims about female loyalist consensus. From compelled silences to the iron gates of the madhouse, Wollstonecraft reveals the horrible technology that stifles dissent and so allows for a show of public “consensus.” Narrating the emergence of female resistance to such consensus, The Wrongs of Woman is as concerned with the perils faced by those who come to political awareness as it is with celebrating achieved liberation. The problems encountered by women who resisted “things as they are” were often overlooked in politically progressive discourse, a myopia that Wollstonecraft devastatingly satirizes in her portrayal of a man whom Jemima contacts at one of the most desperate moments of her life. After the sudden death of the “worn-out votary of voluptuousness” with whom she had been living, Jemima wrote to one of his friends for assistance (113). This friend, she explains, “was an advocate for universal sincerity; and had often, in my presence, descanted on the evils which arise in society from the despotism of rank and riches” (115). Understandably anticipating help, Jemima instead receives a “long essay on the energy of the human mind,” complete with “continual allusions to his own force of character” (115). More than just a satire of the hypocrisy of some “friends of humanity” (in the vein of More’s The History of Mr. Fantom), Wollstonecraft here depicts a specific kind of obliviousness, as the man’s “­allusions” indicate his inability to understand the social conditions and prospects that Jemima faces. His next words, related by Jemima, are particularly self-damning: “[T]he woman who could write such a letter as I had sent him, could never be in want of resources, were she to look into herself, and exert her powers; misery was the consequence of indolence” (115).55 The account of this man’s insensitive response to Jemima’s plea triggers a crucial exchange between her and Maria, in which, as Peritz points out, we see Maria’s political education advancing: listening to Jemima “gives rise,” Maria says, “to the most painful reflections on the present state of society” (116).56 Mark Philp has argued that in her political tracts More sought “a bridge between respectable and vulgar culture, through which the latter might be transformed.”57 Noting a similar pattern of alliance, Colley has suggested that the war effort helped generate cross-class loyalist female networks, as “[w]omen from different social backgrounds would take part in pro-war activism.”58 In the growing relationship between Jemima and

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Maria, however, Wollstonecraft radically revises this idea, as Jemima’s narrative forwards Maria’s own developing political understanding, showing that “respectable” and “vulgar” women could come together not only in loyalism but also in resistance. It is in tracing the formation of this resistance that Wollstonecraft works a complex turn on felix carcer discourse. The scene of confinement in The Wrongs of Woman is not the space of Christian salvation imagined in the Cheap Repository Tracts but the setting for a revolutionary secular conversion narrative. As a social compact comes nervously into focus inside the madhouse, Wollstonecraft documents the difficulty that her characters have in entirely believing that they can now speak safely. Jemima, for instance, remains cautious as she listens to Maria’s account: “[W]hen her heart appeared for a moment to open, some suggestion of reason forcibly closed it, before she could give utterance to the confidence Maria’s conversation inspired” (93). In Rights of Woman, reason endorsed volubility; five years later, it counsels cautious reticence. As trust slowly forms, Jemima nonetheless continues to respond to triggers of threat, as though she knows the telling remains dangerous. Mounting a complaint about workhouses as merely prisons under another name, for instance, Jemima suddenly becomes “[a]larmed by some indistinct noise,” and “rose hastily to listen,” as though by voicing her opinions she activates a terror that she has internalized (119). The “indistinct noise” has no referent beyond Jemima’s own fear, but when she resumes her story, her attention has been lost to anxiety and she is “in haste to finish her tale” (119). Confessing to having witnessed “enormities” in her role as madhouse guard, a nervous Jemima now “lowered her voice,” weighing her desire for fellowship against fears of retribution for her too-free speech (119). But it is a risk that Jemima is willing and able to take, and what is most remarkable—and most revolutionary—in Wollstonecraft’s version of felix carcer is her depiction of the consequences of Jemima’s changed sympathies for the carceral dynamics that define the novel. Critics have recognized the revolutionary potential of the relationship between Maria and Jemima, particularly in the prospect it offers of an alternative to the heterosexual family. This prospect, argues Johnson, suggests that the “emancipated, sturdy, purposive, mutually respecting, and rationally loving couple Wollstonecraft spent her career imagining is, finally, a female couple.”59 It is within these radical gender politics that we see Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary turn on the felix carcer tradition. Jemima seems at first inured to the story of “Maria’s confinement on false

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pretenses,” for “she had felt the crushing hand of power, hardened by the exercise of injustice, and ceased to wonder at the perversions of the understanding, which systematize oppression” (88). But Maria’s story eventually works a change in her guard, as she is moved, observes Syndy Conger, from “compassion” to “active resistance to tyranny.”60 Conger charts the progression: “When Maria wishes to break her isolation by having books and writing tools, Jemima agrees to break the prison rules and provide them. Later a fellow prisoner asks to visit Maria in her cell, and again, Jemima agrees to break prison rules to bring them together. Finally, when Maria decides she must escape, Jemima . . . aids her in her flight.”61 Wollstonecraft depicts the movement of prisoners and prison guards “from despair to solidarity and civil disobedience.”62 This drift in a guard’s allegiance is not supposed to happen within the scene of confinement, in which “suspicion lurked in the passages, and whispered along the walls,” that is, in which agentless “suspicion” runs along the structure of confinement, bracing the stone walls with discursive girding to forestall social crossings-over, just as the walls prevent physical escape (106). This change in the sympathies of one charged with enforcing social control was a particular fear of the government. We have seen that a version of this threat prompted the Pitt ministry to pass the Incitement to Mutiny Act in 1797, which was meant to forestall the fellowship of people and force that Shelley would later imagine in The Mask of Anarchy—when soldiers “Will turn to those who would be free.”63 Two decades before Shelley’s vision, Wollstonecraft set out the blueprint for this revolutionary conversion. If some critics find in The Wrongs of Woman a Wollstonecraft suddenly pessimistic about the opportunities for freedom amidst interpellation, especially because the heroine’s fixation on the Imlay-like Darnford seems to signal a disappearing horizon of perplexed understanding, this critical sense of Wollstonecraft’s newfound pessimism may mistake literary exploration for political exposition. The Wrongs of Woman is not a utopian political tract; it does not set out a proposition for civic action or parliamentary remonstrance. But in its careful attention to the causes of interrupted and stifled discourse, it insists that we should not, like Burke, equate reticence with contentment, or, as Maria accuses Venables of doing, assume agreement in one’s refusal to speak (155). Wollstonecraft is aware of the gruesome reach of the “demon” ideology, but she is also interested, as she always has been, in the process through which ideology’s limits might be pressed, and through which dissent might be voiced.

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The ambiguities of Maria’s resistance witness Wollstonecraft’s attempt to explore the boundaries of ideology, both the times when it seems surpassable and those in which it seems to reassert control. The Wrongs of Woman is a threshold text, one that explores the difficult transit between interpellation and rebellion. What Wollstonecraft emphasizes is that resistance must be understood as a continual process and not simply as the condition of freedom achieved. In Pitt’s Britain, success did not appear to be coming anytime soon, rendering resistance-as-process all the more vital. Wollstonecraft’s interest in the necessity of resistance when one is vexed by the “threshold” is powerfully dramatized at the moment in which Maria and Jemima at last escape the madhouse. As they attempt to leave, a “being with a visage that would have suited one possessed by a devil, crossed the path, and seized Maria by the arm” (174). But Maria breaks away, while the “being, from whose grasp she had loosed herself,” grabs a stone, and “with a kind of hellish sport threw it after them,” but they were then “out of his reach” (175).64 As Maria and Jemima wrest themselves from the grip of one who collapses the roles of prison guard, inmate, and hellish personification of the “demon” of ideology, Wollstonecraft suggests that at least a temporary escape from ideological and physical fetters is possible. In the chill of post–Gagging Acts Britain, what matters most is continuing to resist the demons of constraint. Wollstonecraft shows that if a glimmer of trust can be established to allow for free discourse, a spirit of resistance, among both citizens and their guards, can develop into liberatory action, even when gagging is the order of the day.

ch ap te r

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“I cannot tell” Wordsworth’s Gagging Acts

Unlawful Societies It is not the death of a parent, the loss of a friend, or the outbreak of the French Revolution that Wordsworth names in The Prelude as the true rupture in the nature of his experience. All of his life “was progress on the selfsame path” until early 1793, when Britain went to war with France:                 No shock Given to my mortal nature had I known Down to that very moment—neither lapse Nor turn of sentiment—that might be named A revolution, save at this one time: All else was progress on the self-same path On which with a diversity of pace I had been traveling; this, a stride at once Into another region.1

The outbreak of war was the “revolution” for Wordsworth, and he confesses that in his anti-war commitment he “rejoiced” when British soldiers “by thousands were o’erthrown, / Left without glory on the field” (10.261–2). Given

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this lack of support for Britain’s war with France, Wordsworth felt his alienation from a community that seemed committed to military domination:              It was a grief— Grief call it not, ’twas any thing but that— A conflict of sensations without name, Of which he only who may love the sight Of a village steeple as I do can judge, When in the congregation, bending all To their great Father, prayers were offered up Or praises for our country’s victories, And, ’mid the simple worshippers perchance I only, like an uninvited guest Whom no one owned, sate silent—shall I add, Fed on the day of vengeance yet to come!

(10.263–74)

Silence is a meaningful condition, and here Wordsworth provides the referent. It signifies not only an absence, and not only a recusant’s private protest, but a powerful hunger for vengeance. In wartime Britain, the name for this “conflict of sensations” was treason. Four years later, in 1797, Wordsworth was a target of Home Office surveillance. We know this as the “Spy Nozy” affair, thanks to Coleridge’s comic rendition in Biographia Literaria. “After three weeks’ truly Indian perseverance in tracking us,” Coleridge wrote two decades later, a government agent decided that the Alfoxden circle posed no threat to national security, for the “Spy Nozy” the poets were discussing turned out to be Spinoza, “a man who had made a book and lived long ago.”2 At least, this was Coleridge’s supposition of the agent’s deduction. But as Roe and others have shown, the Home Office files tell a grimmer story. In August 1797, the Duke of Portland received the following account of a suspicious group living at ­Alfoxden manor, near the Somerset town of Kilve: “The man has Camp Stools, which he & his visitors carry with them when they go about the country upon their nocturnal or diurnal expeditions, & have also a Portfolio in which they enter their observations, which they have been heard to say were almost finished—They have been heard to say they should be rewarded for them.”3 This report prompted the Home Office to dispatch veteran spy James Walsh, instructing him, “[T]ak[e] care on your arrival so to conduct yourself as to give no cause of suspicion,” so that “if necessary they may be found on the spot.” From the Globe Inn at Stowey, Walsh

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reported on the “Sett of Violent Democrats” at Alfoxden. The house, he learned, had been “taken for a Person of the name of Wordsworth who came to It from a Village near Honiton in Devonshire, about Five Weeks since.”4 Walsh monitored their movements, and soon reported that along with Wordsworth was a “Mr Coleridge” who “has a Press in the House” and “prints as well as publishes his own productions.”5 As the Wordsworths and Coleridge were walking and conversing and composing the poems that would make up Lyrical Ballads, Pitt’s spies were watching. By 1797, a penchant for moonlight rambles and “philosophy” was enough to trigger Home Office attention. This episode illuminates the extension of the government’s surveillance network from London to the provinces in the latter half of the 1790s. The expanded surveillance was one upshot of the “success” of the 1795 Gagging Acts, which had curtailed radical activity in London. Mourning the death of the city’s political spirit in 1796, Joseph Johnson wrote to Joseph Priestley that the “people here are as quiet as lambs, hardly any grumbling, no seditious meetings or pamphlets, the minister does what he pleases.”6 In this register, “quiet as lambs” converts a trope of pastoral ease to a lament for enforced silence. The “grumbling” that remained was lampooned by Gillray in 1798, who portrayed the LCS, which had drawn hundreds of thousands to its outdoor meetings a few years earlier, as now a mere handful of disheveled conspirators (Figure 10). Watched over by portraits of Paine and Tooke, the remaining LCS members crowd together by candlelight in a cellar, shuddering over a list of “State Arrests.”7 With London radicals confined to a virtual dungeon of fear, the government turned to grumblings from the provinces in the post– Gagging Acts years. In keeping with this new attention to the countryside, in 1797 Pitt began to broadcast an alarm that agents from the United Irishmen were propagating radicalism in Scotland, and that this network was creeping down into England.8 The ministry wrote directly to provincial justices of the peace to urge their attention to this new threat. In early 1798, for instance, John King (the Home Office undersecretary who directed James Walsh’s report on ­Alfoxden) wrote to Thomas Bayley at Manchester (on behalf of Portland), to warn him that “great numbers of deluded Persons have entered into a Society, called, United Englishmen,” and that “a great number of them, are at Manchester:—His Grace will be very much obliged to You for such intelligence upon that Subject, as You can furnish him with, as far as respects Manchester and its neighborhood; as from the desperate lengths, to which

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Figure 10.  London Corresponding Society, alarm’d,­—Vide, Guilty Consciences, by James Gillray, 20 April 1798. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

such associations may, and have been carried, too much attention cannot be paid to them, in their Commencement.”9 In parliament, meanwhile, Pitt warned that this revitalization of the radical movement was giving fresh hope to the tattered remains of the LCS. Pamphlets began to appear warning Britons that the growing internal threat was as much a call for alarm as the movements of the French military. A broadside by “An Inhabitant

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and Friend to the Corps” published at Darlington on 21 April 1798 warned, “[W]e are threatened not only with an invasion from an inveterate enemy,” but “the seeds of treason and sedition are industriously sown amongst us.”10 Alongside this campaign of alarm, the parliament’s Secret Committee issued a report claiming evidence of “a systematic design” to “overturn the laws, constitution, and government,” a design traceable in “the institution of political societies, of a nature and description before unknown in any country, and inconsistent with public tranquility and with the existence of public government.”11 This new political initiative was known as the United English­men, and historians have wondered at the “startling contrast” between the “treasonable aims attributed to it by the secret parliamentary report” and the “documents produced as proof.”12 “The Report of the Committee of Secrecy,” recalled Francis Place, “exaggerated their proceedings in a most scandalous manner,” and in the Commons, George Tierney was even more direct, claiming that he “never saw a report made to this House that was so little supported by evidence.”13 When recalling the formation of the United Englishmen, Place remained convinced that the few activists who did meet were actually “prompted to continue their follies by government spies employed for the purpose.”14 “Government had nursed the United Englishmen,” Place maintained, “and when it was found that they could not be pushed on to any actual breach of the law, seized them as conspirators. . . . They had no specific charge with which they could go before a jury but alarmed as the people were it answered their purpose to make a pretended show of danger.”15 This “show of danger” included the Secret Committee’s warning that these radical societies “principally carried on their intercourse by agents, who went from place to place, and were recognized by signs, which were frequently changed” (PH, vol. 34, col. 601). Warnings of a resurgence of radical spirit left neighbors suspicious of one another’s political sympathies. Asking Lord Breadalbane for an acre of land for his cloth-bleaching work, one David Gardner felt the need to emphasize that he was no “democrat”: The very idea of my being considered as a person who would be accessory as far as lay in my power to the exchanging of a happy free and well governed realm, for that of anarchy and confusion which would prove destructive to the whole nation a few ambitious & designing men excepted who would also fall a sacrifice to succeeding tyrants whose motives might be ambitious also to grasp at power whatever crimes they might have committed before they attained their end. The very idea chills my blood with horror.16

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Place reminds us that the Pitt ministry made use of a concrete threat to claim the imminence of something “destructive to the whole nation”: as it had after the attack on the king’s carriage on 29 October 1795, the government rallied public fear around the “invasion scare” of 1797. In February of that year, an estimated twelve hundred French soldiers landed near the town of Fishguard, on the southwest coast of Wales. Hardly an elite corps, this motley group of “mostly convicts” ended up surrendering before any conflict arose.17 But if, as Roe points out, “it is easy to dismiss this abortive attempt as a hastily planned enterprise that was doomed from the start,” and if the Monthly Magazine viewed the “soldiers” as something more like refugees, and the “invasion” itself as a means to “rid the French Republic of a number of desperate persons,” Pitt was not about to squander so ripe an opportunity.18 Place criticized the prime minister’s manipulation of the incident, writing that public fears over a “French invasion had been pushed to the utmost.”19 Coupling the fear of a possible second French invasion with the specter of a new radical spirit gathering strength in the north, the ministry promoted a fresh round of repressive legislation.20 The Unlawful Societies Act, intended for “the more effectual suppression of societies established for seditious and treasonable purposes, and for the better preventing treasonable and seditious practices,” named the LCS, United Englishmen, United Scotsmen, United Irishmen, and United Britons as illegal groups.21 The ministry also suspended habeas corpus again, this time from 1798 until 1801; the LCS members who were arrested in April 1798 were left to rot in prison without trial.22 These were the conditions for oppositional discourse by 1798: “[A]ttacks on government policy,” Marianne Elliott observes, were “tantamount to treason.”23 Wordsworth’s friend James Losh commented in 1798 that “emigration would be a prudent thing for literary men and the friends of freedom.”24 While the 1795 Gagging Acts marked a legislative turning point in Pitt’s domestic terror, the ministry’s repressions did not ease as the decade unfolded. Arrests for sedition peaked in 1798, Romanticism’s annus mirabilis. Taking shape in this climate of repression and prosecution, Lyrical Ballads appeared as a dispatch from the provinces on poverty, starvation, and the horrors of Britain’s military and penal systems. In the Monthly Review Charles Burney expressed alarm at the alignment of compassion in the poems. Of an impoverished woman’s theft of firewood in “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” he protested: “[I]f all the poor are to help themselves, and supply their wants from the possessions of their neighbors, what imaginary

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wants and real anarchy would it not create?”25 Burney was not through: “The Female Vagrant” stamped a “general stigma on all military transactions, which were never more important in free countries than at the present period”; “The Last of the Flock” implied the necessity of “rigid equality of property”; “Old Man Travelling” was an unpatriotic utterance during a time of war; and as we have seen, “The Convict” wrongly sympathized with the rightfully imprisoned.26 Yet if Burney had little doubt about the radical politics of Lyrical Ballads, some modern critics have been less certain. Critical attention has been attuned to Wordsworth’s concern for the plight of vagrants and destitute rural workers, women forced into the urban commerce of prostitution, and the dislocations and tragedies of war, but the most influential work on the politics of Lyrical Ballads has come from what M. H. Abrams has called the “prosecutorial” approach of new historicism, which famously found in Wordsworth’s verse political evasion and historical erasure.27 Some critics in the tradition of E. P. Thompson have also been troubled by Wordsworth’s apparently faltering political commitment. Heather Glen has charged that the ending of “Simon Lee,” in which the narrator swiftly severs a tree root that old Simon had been laboring to cut, “makes all of Simon’s struggles with it irrelevant” and “completes that belittlement of him which has been implicitly present in the tone throughout.”28 For Glen, the trouble with Wordsworth’s poem is a crucial absence, for “Simon Lee” ends with “no urgent call to action” (a version of the silence critiqued by McGann, Levinson, and others).29 One may welcome attention to the historical contexts of Wordsworth’s work, yet still wonder why historicist readings of Lyrical Ballads rarely mention the severe restrictions on speech during the Pitt era. In exploring the larger context of “Tintern Abbey,” for instance, Levinson provides a diverse catalogue of “history,” from Henry VIII to Descartes to William Gilpin, but absent are Words­ worth’s visit to John Thelwall (then hiding out in Llyswen, Wales, after being acquitted of high treason), as well as Thelwall’s own visit to Alfoxden, the Home Office’s surveillance of the poets, the impending arrest and imprisonment of Wordsworth’s publisher Joseph Johnson, and the larger context of the ministry’s decade-long assault on freedom of speech. By bringing this history into view, we gain a better measure of what Levinson styles Wordsworth’s “particularly constrained manner” by thinking about Lyrical Ballads in terms of the particular constraints on discourse in Pitt’s Britain. In the spring of 1797, James Losh sent Wordsworth reading material that included Coleridge’s Conciones ad Populum and The Plot Discovered.30 The

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rhetoric of locked jaws and silenced communities we have seen in these tracts returns in the poems Wordsworth composed at Alfoxden, which stage scenes of broken dialogue and coerced speech. The significance of what is said and what is not said is central to “Simon Lee,” while the disjunctive interview of “The Discharged Soldier” suggests, among other effects, a caution about free conversation and social candor. Wordsworth’s interest in the politics of troubled utterance extends into poems such as “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” which constellates law, poverty, and voice to sketch a revenge narrative of folk resistance, and “Anecdote for Fathers,” a dramatization of interrogation and coercion that evokes Gagging Acts discourse. Words­ worth’s portrayals of discourse under pressure in the Alfoxden poems help us to reassess the formal effects of “Tintern Abbey,” a poem that everywhere signals the performance of a writer who cannot tell all he might about his life in the repressive 1790s.

Wordsworth and Silence In The Plot Discovered Coleridge warned of the “deathlike silence” that the government’s repressions would bring to the nation. When we turn to Wordsworth’s poetry, however, the phrase “deathlike silence” is more likely to conjure up Winander owls than 1790s political rhetoric. As I mentioned in the Introduction, a tradition of fine reading from David Ferry, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and Frances Ferguson has rendered it almost axiomatic that the Wordsworthian poetics of silence describes a metaphysical romance or epistemological threshold. But there is another register: the social silence that marks Wordsworth’s poems of dramatic encounter. In many of these works, what appear to be the simplest of social exchanges turn into calamities of broken conversation and ghostly discourse. We have seen two moments from Wordsworth’s life that illuminate the political urgency of “silence” in the 1790s. Against the claim of the Bishop of Llandaff (Richard Watson) that the execution of Louis XVI was a gruesome and unnecessary extension of revolutionary violence, Wordsworth’s Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff contends that the regicide was inevitable, though he is cautious enough to employ praeteritio (and his own starred ellipsis) when turning to the implications of his argument for the domestic scene: “Pure and universal representation cannot . . . exist together with monarchy. It seems madness. . . . They must war with each other, till one of them is extinguished. It was so in France, and * * * I shall not pursue

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this topic further.”31 The Letter, as several critics have noted, was a dangerous work. Writing in 1793, Wordsworth was well aware of the punishment meted out to printers and booksellers of Paine’s Rights of Man, which the Letter clearly echoes, and so he knew that Watson’s pamphlet need not be tightly argued: anyone “hardy enough” to challenge Watson would be subject to “the strongest of auxiliaries, imprisonment and the pillory.”32 With one eye on these auxiliaries, Wordsworth did not “pursue this topic further,” at least publicly. Had he published the Letter, he would have likely been confined to my chapter on Romantic-era prison writers. Though Wordsworth withheld the Letter, when the Pitt ministry revoked habeas corpus a year later, lawyer Richard Wordsworth took no chances, writing to William directly, instructing him to “be cautious in writing or expressing your political opinions,” for “[b]y the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Acts, the Ministers have great p ­ owers.”33 Dorothy Wordsworth replied to assure Richard of “William’s caution about expressing his political opinions,” continuing: “He is very cautious and seems well aware of the dangers of a contrary conduct.”34 Wordsworth seems to have heeded this warning, at least until November 1795, when amidst the explosion of oppositional activism that greeted the introduction of the treason and sedition bills, he wrote an unusually explicit political letter to his Cambridge friend Francis Wrangham. 35 This letter contained a poetic fragment of twenty-eight lines that Wordsworth intended for insertion into the imitation of Juvenal’s Eighth Satire that he and Wrangham had been working on together since July 1795. This joint endeavor was effectively a modernized version of Juvenal’s work, which had contrasted the degenerate leaders of his own day against the true heroes of the Roman past. For their update, Wordsworth and Wrangham attacked their own era’s aristocrats, as well as Britain’s unjust legal system and imperial plunder in India. This new take on Juvenal, Carol Landon and Jared Curtis write, was meant to express “moral outrage over what they saw as a self-serving and corrupt political and social scene in England.”36 The version of Wordsworth and Wrangham’s Imitation that has been recovered, amounting to 278 lines (written in spurts between summer 1795 and spring 1797), mourns the absence of brave Britons such as John Hampden and John Pym, whose memory is set against the drunken, lazy, gambling-addicted national leaders of 1795. Wordsworth and Wrangham’s Imitation ranges from personal attacks on the vices of these leaders to broader commentary on the state of the nation, such as a critique of the emergence of a treason-and-

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sedition-hunting industry (179–83). But the most daring political sentiment comes in the twenty-eight-line fragment that Wordsworth sent to Wrangham on 20 November 1795, during those charged six weeks in which the Gagging Acts were debated. Though aligned with the larger project of critiquing Britain’s leaders, Wordsworth’s fragment breaks away from the close imitation he and Wrangham had developed thus far. Of these new lines, Wordsworth conceded to Wrangham that “there is not a syllable correspondent to them in Juvenal.”37 Wordsworth’s letter was written the day before Godwin’s Considerations was published, and about a week before Coleridge delivered “On the Two Bills” in Bristol. The day of Coleridge’s lecture, 26 November 1795, Azariah Pinney wrote to ask Wordsworth’s opinion of the Gagging Acts, but since, as Stephen Gill notes, Pinney saw Wordsworth as “a committed radical,” he pauses in the letter to add, “I can almost anticipate what you think.”38 Pinney describes the “fearful cloud, ominous of destruction that hangs over the Political Horizon,” echoing the language of Coleridge’s lectures, which Pinney attended. Should the legislation pass, Pinney writes, “I dread the consequences—the murmurs of the people will for a time be suppressed by the military forces,” but eventually the suppression of “murmurs” will backfire, and “complaints will burst forth with the whirlwind’s fury.”39 Wordsworth’s twenty-eight-line fragment shares something of Pinney’s bold resistance, and his sense of the legislation echoes the ironic comment we have seen from Coleridge’s notebook, that the bills were the “masterpiece of a modern politician.”40 For Wordsworth, this tyrannical masterpiece achieves a new refinement on cruelty: “To hated worth no Tyrant e’er design’d / Malice so subtle, vengeance so refined.”41 Featuring his most direct attack on named political actors since his Letter of 1793, Wordsworth’s fragment continues: Even he who yoked the living to the dead, Rivall’d by you, hides the diminish’d head. Never did Rome herself so set at naught All plain blunt sense, all subtlety of thought. Heavens! who sees majesty in George’s face?

(5–9)

His return to the cruelty of Mezentius (portrayed by Virgil as a tyrant in the Aeneid, and notorious for executing his subjects by binding them to corpses), an allusion he had used in the Letter, indicates the extension of the spirit of the 1793 tract into these lines.42 Wordsworth’s affect then moves

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from condemnation to ironic concession, as he writes as though the laws had already passed: Is Common-sense asleep? has she no wand From this curst Pharaoh plague to rid the land? Then to our Bishops reverent let us fall, Worship Mayors, Tipstaffs, Aldermen and all. Let Ignorance o’er the monster swarms preside, Till Egypt sees her antient fame outvied. The thundering Thurlow, Apis! shall rejoice In rites once offered to thy bellowing voice. Insatiate Charlotte’s tears and Charlotte’s smile [Shall ape] the scaly regent of the Nile.43 Bishops, of milder Spaniel breed, shall boast The reverence by the fierce Anubis lost. And ’tis their due:—devotion has been paid These seven long years to Grenville’s onion head.

(15–28)

Loosened from the original text and fired by the energy of November 1795, Wordsworth’s fragment aims directly and boldly at the national scene, and as Johnston points out, closes fittingly with Grenville, who introduced the treason and sedition bills in the Lords.44 For Roe, the Imitation shows “how closely its authors were concerned with contemporary political life at a period when many commentators have assumed that Wordsworth in particular was turning away from public goings-on towards an exploration of inner life.”45 Roe suggests a middle ground, with the Imitation as a “threshold between the revolutionary political concerns of Wordsworth’s early career and the introspective universe of the later poetry.”46 But if the Imitation shows us Wordsworth watching the political scene at mid-decade, I would suggest that it is not necessarily followed by a turn away from political engagement in his subsequent work. Rather, the Imitation joins the bold spirit of late autumn 1795, while Wordsworth’s post–Gagging Acts poems index the consequences of these tyrannous laws in the paranoia and fear that came to define the nation. In other words, from directly engaging the ministry’s repressions in the Letter and the Imitation, Wordsworth turns in the Alfoxden poems to explore the social costs of such repressions. The Imitation (like the Letter) remained unpublished in Wordsworth’s lifetime. With the “nervousness of the political establishment in the 1790s,”

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Roe comments, “publication of the poem would certainly have resulted in a prosecution for seditious libel.”47 Even to have sent this twenty-eightline excoriation through the post was a risky act, the stakes of which are illuminated by the many contemporary letters that express fear about trusting political language to the post. Writing from Liverpool to a friend in Scotland, William Rathbone interrupted his thoughts on David Hume’s religious turn to ponder his own forthrightness: “I should write with caution on this and other subjects, for who now knows by whom his letters are to be read, and especially those between Liverpool and Glasgow, now that the secret Committee has deemed both places as the residences of Traitors and Conspirators.”48 This wariness toward political discourse was shared by the publishing industry. Charles James Fox believed that the 1798 trials of Joseph Johnson and Gilbert Wakefield signaled a “death blow to the liberty of the Press.”49 Writing to John Cartwright (who had sent his own anti– Gagging Acts petition to Fox in 1795), Fox exclaimed that after Johnson’s trial “one can hardly conceive how any prudent tradesman can venture to publish anything that can in any way be disagreeable to the ministers,” evoking Marchmont’s query in Smith’s novel, “What rich and substantial vendor would hazard anything like this in times like these?”50 Yet, if in the post–Gagging Acts years politics were warily discussed, “­silence” itself became a topic of conversation, as laments over the repression of speech and expressions of self-censorship became a new language of political opposition. Wordsworth’s relation to 1790s politics has sometimes been assessed as though he were operating within a sphere of perfect freedom of expression. Readings of “Old Man Travelling” offer a representative instance. The poem’s title figure is journeying on foot to take a “last leave” of his son, a sailor “dying in an hospital” at the military port of Falmouth.51 The subtitle advertises a “Sketch” of “Animal Tranquility and Decay,” but Charles Burney had no trouble recognizing that the poem is “pointed against the war,” and he complained that the author could just as easily have portrayed the son as having “died of disease” rather than the fatal “sea fight” that Words­ worth specifies.52 If we forget the repressive climate in which Wordsworth wrote and published works such as “Old Man Travelling,” we lose the force of the poem’s registration of contemporary politics. In this way, modern critics have faulted Wordsworth for his apparent refusal to recognize the radical potential of the scenes he has described. Heather Glen, for instance, reads in “Old Man Travelling” Wordsworth’s “failure to explore the relation

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between the polite assumptions which his poem so strikingly exposes and the world of actual human interaction.” For Glen, this “failure” is made apparent in the “baffled silence of his ending,” which exposes Wordsworth’s inability explicitly to name the “more radical implications of his own insights.”53 But this critique underemphasizes the significance of the discursive constraint under which Wordsworth was working. Less a sign of failed insight, “baffled silence” is the status of politically engaged writing in the post–Gagging Acts era.54 The specter of prosecution that haunted utterances of protest pushed Wordsworth to shape the politics of Lyrical Ballads not toward explicitly “radical implications” but into brief phrases and loaded words that could provoke political reflection while indemnifying author and publisher. One of Wordsworth’s key strategies in this effort is the inscription of “baffled silence” precisely at those moments that most invite direct elaboration and analysis. Conspicuously stopping short of explicating the political sentiments implicit in his poems, Wordsworth both stages the curtailment of open political expression and prompts readers to realize the polemic themselves. This is the political work of Wordsworth’s call to “silent thought” in the miserable social scene of “Simon Lee.” What Wordsworth foregrounds in this poem is the speaker’s intervention and moralizing about a general failure of charity, but what he spells out is a politically powerful account of rural abjection. As “Simon Lee” opens we learn that a British ancien régime of country house society has failed to provide for its laborers, who have been left, half dead, to fend for themselves. Simon Lee, with little property and less occupational training, is “forc’d to work,” and although he and his wife do their best, they remain “the poorest of the poor” (39, 60). Though Glen faults Wordsworth for failing to rally for revolution, even to stage Simon’s plight in 1798 amounts to courageous, politically laden poetry. But it is in Wordsworth’s poetics of “silent thought” that he urges the reader to supply the political thinking. Thus, at the precise moment we might expect either a raucous ballad or an explicitly radical statement about the fate of the superannuated rural poor, Wordsworth turns to the reader and solicits reflection: O reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle reader! you would find A tale in every thing.

(73–6)

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The reader’s “silent thought” is then subtly directed in the subsequent lines, which issue an invitation: What more I have to say is short, I hope you’ll kindly take it; It is no tale; but should you think, Perhaps a tale you’ll make it.

(77–80)

Critics have pointed to Wordsworth’s subversion of genre expectations at this moment, as the ballad, a plot-driven mode, is made to eschew its defining feature.55 The “more” that the narrator has to say concerns a brief episode in which he came across Simon “doing all he could / About the root of an old tree, / A stump of rotten wood” (82–4). Given Simon’s lean and sickly state, “The mattock totter’d in his hand” (85), and so the narrator asked for the tool, recounting, I struck, and with a single blow The tangled root I sever’d At which the poor old man so long And vainly had endeavour’d.

(93–6)

Glen argues that the narrator here further belittles the helpless Simon, and suggests that the “violence” of this action “seems almost like castration.”56 But the contemporary resonance of Wordsworth’s language opens an alternative reading. Having depicted a body blasted in loyal service to the British gentry, Wordsworth recruits one of the most prominent tropes of 1790s radical culture, “root and branch” reform. Thomas Spence turned to this figure when urging working Britons to demand a more equal distribution of property: “[I]f the Aristocracy arose to contend the matter,” he wrote in a 1795 pamphlet, “let the People be firm and desperate, destroying them Root and Branch.”57 Thomas Paine drew on the metaphor in his critique of primogeniture: “To restore . . . parents to their children, and children to their parents—relations to each other, and man to society—and to exterminate the monster Aristocracy, root and branch—the French Constitution has destroyed the law of Primogenitureship.”58 Paine also used the trope in his critique of the violence sanctioned in the government’s penal codes: “Lay then the axe to the root, and teach governments humanity. It is their

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sanguinary punishments which corrupt mankind. In England, the punishment in certain cases, is by hanging, drawing and quartering; the heart of the sufferer is cut out, and held up to the view of the populace.”59 It is to this vibrant contemporary discourse of “root and branch” reform that Wordsworth’s vignette steers the “silent thought” of the reader. In laying out the political grammar but refusing explicitly to utter the radical message, Wordsworth’s praeteritio assumes a pedagogical, communal force: he cannot tell readers to join in root and branch reform, but in his conspicuous performance of not telling resides both the poem’s engagement with the restraint on explicitly political language and its plea to readers to make the political tale themselves.

“A strange half-absence” In this register of political poetry, what Wordsworth focuses on is constrained speech, whether his own as narrator or that of others, such as a soldier he meets during an evening walk. “The Discharged Soldier,” written at Alfoxden as a stand-alone piece before its later incorporation into The Prelude, presents one of Wordsworth’s most haunting sketches of anxious speech in the repressive 1790s.60 We recognize this poem’s basic narrative structure from works such as “The Last of the Flock” and “Old Man Travelling” in which the narrator encounters a stranger on a rural byway and attempts a conversation. The stranger in this case has recently returned to Britain from service in the Caribbean. At the time of the poem’s composition, British military campaigns in “the tropic isles” were focused on San Domingue (Haiti). Four years earlier, Pitt had convinced white San Domingue property owners to accept British rule, and to protect this interest he ordered hundreds of thousands of British troops to the island during the slave rebellions of 1797 in an ill-conceived suppression attempt.61 Death tolls from fighting and yellow fever in 1797 were enormous (Robin Blackburn notes that Britain lost as many soldiers in the Caribbean as in Europe during the revolutionary era).62 Appearing now in the British countryside, Wordsworth’s soldier is one of the countless walking wounded of these military ventures. “The Discharged Soldier” offers a few details about the veteran’s ordeal, but this is no war story, as Wordsworth is more interested in dramatizing the man’s cautious speech.63 This concern with voice is adumbrated as the narrator, on first seeing the soldier, notices that “his mouth / Shewed

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ghastly in the moonlight” (50–1). Watching this ghastly aperture, he hears “murmuring sounds as if of pain / Or of uneasy thought” (70–1). Drawing on the etymology of “murmur”—to grumble, to complain (OED)—Words­ worth shades the soldier’s “sounds” into some manner of disquiet, specifying that he “Sent forth a murmuring voice of dead complaint, / A groan scarcely audible” (79–80).64 The narrator, as though seeking the cause of the complaint, warily approaches the soldier and “ask[s] his history.” “In reply,” the soldier Was neither slow nor eager, but unmoved, And with a quiet uncomplaining voice, A stately air of mild indifference, He told a simple fact: that he had been A Soldier, to the tropic isles had gone, Whence he had landed now some ten days past[.]

(96–101)

“Uncomplaining voice”: realizing that he is no longer alone, the soldier transforms “dead complaint” into its opposite. Wordsworth’s earlier draft of these lines is even more direct: when the soldier saw the narrator, “He ceased from all complaint” (95).65 Critical readings tuned to the resonances of this episode within the larger context of The Prelude tend to gauge the psychic impact that this encounter has on the poet, but the soldier’s own fears are also worth our attention. By the time the narrator encounters him, the soldier has already been shaken by the howling of a dog in the village. When asked why he “tarried there, nor had demanded rest / At inn or cottage” (126–7), the soldier replies that he stopped out of weakness, and would have been comfortable resting where he was, But that the village mastiff fretted me, And every second moment rang a peal Felt at my very heart. There was no noise Nor any foot abroad—I do not know What ail’d him, but it seem’d as if the dog Were howling to the murmur of the stream.

(131–6)

Through the keyword “murmur” Wordsworth ties the soldier’s “complaint” to the howling of the mastiff, which strikes the soldier’s “very heart.” The figure of the mastiff as a menace also appears in Wordsworth’s “The Con-

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vict,” in which the dog serves as an extension of carceral restraint. At night, rolling on his side in fetters, the prisoner is terrorized by the mastiff ’s bark: While the jail-mastiff howls at the dull clanking chain,     From the roots of his hair there shall start A thousand sharp punctures of cold-sweating pain,     And terror shall leap at his heart. (37–40)

The sharp “pain” caused by the howls of the watchdog is linked through rhyme to the “chain” that holds the prisoner, and like the soldier, the convict feels the “terror” of the mastiff ’s bark “at his heart.” The mastiff as a terrorizing figure of surveillance was a common trope in critiques of the Pitt ministry’s repressive zeal, from Thomas Beddoes’s fear of the “human bloodhounds” that he worried would emerge to enforce the Gagging Acts, to Coleridge’s lament in the Watchman that Burke had joined forces with the “Reeveses of the day” and was now “matched in mouth” with “Mastiff, bloodhound, mungril grim,” along with “the rest of that motley pack, that open in most hideous concert, whenever our State-Nimrod provokes the scent by a trail of rancid plots and false insurrections.”66 Wordsworth’s mastiffs participate in this broader cultural climate, and it is within the shared frame of social terror that the discharged soldier attempts to speak. His words come as the narrator asks him about his experiences with “hardship, battle, and the pestilence,” perhaps thinking of the slave revolts and Yellow Fever he may have faced in the Caribbean. In describing the soldier’s reply, Wordsworth does not tell us what he said but how he spoke: He all the while was in demeanor calm, Concise in answer: solemn & sublime He might have seemed, but that in all he said There was a strange half-absence, & a tone Of weakness & indifference, as of one Remembering the importance of his theme But feeling it no longer.

(140–6)

The soldier’s meaning is found in the manner of his utterance. “The paucity of speech reflects a maimed and exhausted state,” observes Alan Bewell of the soldier’s likely experiences in the slave trade; “[t]here is no celebration of the glory of battle or the extension of empire.”67 The soldier provides the narrator with the requested “solemn & sublime” story of warfare,

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but his affect undermines the telling, leaving his auditor troubled by the “strange half-absence” of his words. It is significant that the soldier speaks with neither jingoistic patriotism nor disaffected protest. Instead, his communication cautiously and strategically conveys the human cost of Pitt’s military ventures and the official indifference to these veterans who are no longer of use to the state and left, like Simon Lee, to shift for themselves in abject poverty after their loyal service. In Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation (1793), Barbauld urged readers to adjust their focus in their regard for the nation’s military work: “We must fix our eyes, not on the hero returning with conquest, nor yet on the gallant officer dying in the bed of honour, the subject of picture and of song, but on the private soldier, forced into the service, exhausted by camp-sickness and fatigue; pale, emaciated, crawling to an hospital with the prospect of life, perhaps a long life, blasted, useless and suffering.”68 “The Discharged Soldier” does not come framed by a political manifesto, but as Toby Benis has pointed out, the figure’s “very presence silently criticizes Britain’s leaders,” for his illness and plight are “direct products of government policy and military service.”69 While Benis reads in the soldier’s “very presence” a mode of political protest, other critics have judged the Wordsworthian narrator of “The Discharged Soldier” harshly. James McGavran writes that “one wants to hear more of this matter-of-fact, alienated, yet intimate voice, this voice eager to communicate information and emotion in spite of suffering, and less of the poet’s selfish delights, evasions, and exhortations.”70 Meanwhile, to Celeste Langan the narrator’s delivery of the soldier to a cottage off the public road seems a gesture of law enforcement: “Wordsworth performs a sever[e] intervention, analogous to the demand of the police to the vagrant: ‘Move on.’”71 But it is worth noting that the narrator does procure the soldier a bed for the night, and food, for which he offers to pay (152–5). The location of this solace is the nearby home of a “labourer,” who “will not murmur” when they interrupt him (157). The political valences of “murmur” echo here in the narrator’s assurance to the soldier that the laborer is trustworthy and hence not susceptible to “murmuring.” It is only at this moment, when the soldier has come to trust the stranger, that his voice is restored to social life: “[I]n a voice that seemed / To speak with a reviving interest, / Till then unfelt, he thanked me” (498–500). In this move from apprehension and fear, framed by the howling peals of the mastiff, to the establishment of mutual trust that “revives” the soldier from deathlike silence, Wordsworth traces both the perils and the possibilities of

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social exchange within a climate of fear and suspicion. Roe has shown how Wordsworth’s Racedown poems, especially the revised “Salisbury Plain” and “The Ruined Cottage,” are closely tied to the anti-war discourse circulating at the time.72 When we turn to the Alfoxden poems, we find a Wordsworth who, while not abandoning social issues (including the pains of war), has turned his attention to the inhibitions of speech that have come to define the repressive 1790s: the story the Discharged Soldier tells is the fear he has of telling his story.

Speech and Silence in Lyrical Ballads The phrases ring like charms in accounts of Romanticism: “the real language of men,” “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” “a man talking to men.”73 The sheer appeal of the utopian speech community envisioned in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads has eclipsed the breakdowns in communication dramatized in several of the poems that Wordsworth wrote a couple of years earlier at Alfoxden. Readers have wondered at the discrepancies between the Preface and the poems at least since Charles Lamb’s plea for Wordsworth to publish the essay as a “separate treatise.”74 But it is not enough to say that there is a disjunction between the Preface and the dystopic speech communities of the 1797–8 poems. The Preface belongs to a different national moment, and envisions communication as it might be as the Peace of Amiens approached, while the Alfoxden poems depict speech as it was in one of the most fraught years of Pitt’s regime. “I cannot tell,” a phrase that threads through the Alfoxden poems, counters the discursive idyll of the Preface, and serves as an emblem for Wordsworth’s depictions of troubled and arrested speech in poems such as “Anecdote for Fathers” and “Goody Blake and Harry Gill.” We have seen that “Goody Blake and Harry Gill” alarmed Charles Burney for seeming to condone the violation of property law. Burney’s complaint emerged from an important public discourse, as the mid- and latter 1790s saw some of the coldest winters in recorded history, bringing not only food shortages but intense pressure on the heating needs of the poor, and so too debates about how to alleviate widespread fuel shortages. The Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor paid particular attention to the problem of coal and firewood shortages and published accounts of plans to supply both at affordable rates.75 One report from the Society addressed the relationship between fuel avail-

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ability and the efficacy of anti-theft laws, arguing of one plan to make reasonably priced coal available that “no law will ever be made against wood stealing, that will so much operate to prevent it, as such a benefit for the provision of the poor.”76 Amidst this debate, Wordsworth’s poem depicts a particularly painful case of wood theft made necessary by the combination of cold and poverty. In the poem’s central action, wealthy farmer Harry Gill catches poverty-stricken Goody Blake stealing sticks from one of his hedges to feed her meager hearth. Although “wood gleaning” was on the books as a serious crime, it was generally tolerated in community tradition when small amounts were at stake.77 Harry’s zealous watchfulness is conspicuous in light of this customary practice: Now Harry he had long suspected This trespass of old Goody Blake, And vow’d that she should be detected, And he on her would vengeance take. And oft from his warm fire he’d go, And to the fields his road would take, And there, at night, in frost and snow, He watch’d to seize old Goody Blake.

(65–72)

Wordsworth’s rhyme reports Harry’s sense that “Blake” is merely another word for “take,” while Harry himself finds it a short trip from “suspected” to “detected.” Harry’s dedicated surveillance soon enough leads to an encounter with Goody which, as Susan Wolfson points out, echoes the coercive scene of “seizing” in “Anecdote for Fathers.”78 The confrontation comes as Harry catches Goody at his hedge: And fiercely by the arm he took her, And by the arm he held her fast, And fiercely by the arm he shook her, And cried, “I’ve caught you then at last!”

(89–92)

Harry’s aggressive surveillance and detection returns us to the warnings of Coleridge, Thelwall, Beddoes, and others of a society in which one’s friends and neighbors are always to be suspected and reported. But Wordsworth pushes his poem beyond these dystopian forecasts, for unlike the “deathlike silence” that Coleridge feared would blanket the entire nation, Words­ worth’s poem sentences Harry alone to suffer in silence.

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Harry’s inability to communicate is signaled in the queries that open the poem: “Oh! What’s the matter? What’s the matter? / What is’t that ails young Harry Gill?” (1–2). Answering these questions, we learn, is beyond Harry’s power—if we were to listen to him, the matter would be nothing more than a chatter of teeth. At one time, however, Harry not only could speak, but “His voice was like the voice of three” (20). In Erasmus Darwin’s version of this tale in Zoönomia on which Wordsworth drew, there is no mention of voice and no indication that the farmer lost his ability to communicate. In fact, while Darwin’s farmer eventually freezes to death, he is all the while heard “always saying that nothing made him warm.”79 Revising this story, Wordsworth allows Harry to live, but leaves him to face the death of his ability to communicate, so that his once-strong voice now redounds back upon him as he suffers in isolation: No word to any man he utters, A-bed or up, to young or old; But ever to himself he mutters, “Poor Harry Gill is very cold.”

(121–4)

In a counteraddress to Pitt’s program of sanctioned surveillance, Words­ worth sentences Harry to the close confinement of his own silence, ever unable to reach the ears of the community from which he is estranged. But this is not the final word, as Wordsworth closes the poem with an imperative, “Now think, ye farmers all, I pray, / Of Goody Blake and Harry Gill” (127–8), as though to warn other Harry Gills who may be all too eager to “suspect” and “detect” their own neighbors. These lines linger as a “vaguely threatening conclusion,” notes Johnston, and though Wordsworth does not explicitly name the threat, he trusts that if landowners think, then perhaps a tale they’ll make it.80 Wordsworth’s interest in dramatizing the dynamic of power and vocal agency also shapes “Anecdote for Fathers,” a poem that we are accustomed to reading as a key site for Wordsworth’s array of two consciousnesses, adult rationality and childhood mystery.81 But a political text has also been recognized by David Simpson, Damian Walford Davies, and Judith Thompson, who emphasize the long shadow that Thelwall casts across the poem—Thompson argues that Thelwall’s presence explains the “extraordinary anxiety and repressed violence that informs the apparently innocent choice between Kilve and Liswyn.”82 These readings find a pedigree in the

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first historicist reading of “Anecdote for Fathers,” Wordsworth’s own 1843 note that set the ballad in the context of his friendship with Thelwall: The name of Kilve is from a village on the Bristol Channel, about a mile from Alfoxden; and the name of Liswin Farm was taken from a beautiful spot on the Wye. . . . Mr. Coleridge, my Sister, and I, had been visiting the famous John Thelwall who had taken refuge from politics, after a trial for high treason. . . . He really was a man of extraordinary talent. . . . Though brought up in the city on a tailor’s board he was truly sensible of the beauty of natural objects. I remember, once when Coleridge, he, and I were seated together upon the turf on the brink of a stream in the most beautiful part of the most beautiful glen of Alfoxden, Coleridge exclaimed, “This is a place to reconcile one to all the jarrings and conflicts of the wide world.” “Nay,” said Thelwall, “to make one forget them altogether.” The visit of this man to Coleridge was, as I believe Coleridge has related, the occasion of a spy being sent by government to watch our proceedings.83

Nearly a half century on, Wordsworth’s note recovers the turbulent political moment of the composition of “Anecdote for Fathers,” replete with the 1794 treason trials, the brutal plight of Thelwall, and the spy network of the Pitt ministry. Wordsworth’s recollections of 1843 sharpen our attention to the virtual interrogation at the heart of the poem. “My little boy, which like you more”: the father presents the child with the apparently whimsical choice between “Kilve” and “Liswyn,” and the child’s need to supply a preference where none exists is the cause of his “lie” (25). But the narrative action accompanying the father’s query in line 26 and the corresponding lines in the two subsequent stanzas bring a jarring physical coercion to the questioning: “I said and took him by the arm” (26), “I said and held him by the arm” (30), “While still I held him by the arm” (34). Presumably to stop the interrogation, Edward supplies an answer, reading his father’s signals of “delightful” and “smooth” to wager that “Kilve” is the word that would set him free. No such luck. The querying only intensifies, though its terms change. Now that Edward has offered an answer, the terms of the question shift from preference to motivation, and confused by this heated interrogation, Edward at last sighs, “I cannot tell” (39). Edward begins to seem like a defendant being grilled by an aggressive prosecutor. In this exchange, and in Edward’s plea that he “cannot tell,” Wordsworth cannily evokes the interrogations that the current tenant of Llyswen farm underwent at the hands of the Pitt ministry. “I cannot tell,” “I cannot say,” “I do not recollect”: much

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to the frustration of Lord Chief Justice Eyre, Attorney General John Scott, and other government prosecutors, these phrases appeared throughout the treason trials, the closest thing that Thelwall and others had to a courtroom strategy. Here, for example, is Joseph Johnson, responding to questions about his sales of Paine’s Rights of Man at Hardy’s trial: Q. Did you sell any? A. Yes. Q. How many copies—I do not ask you to within a thousand,—but about how many do you think you sold? A. I cannot tell.

Here is LCS member David Martin, being questioned about Joseph Gale: Q. He was a printer at Sheffield? A. Yes. Q. He was an active man in the Society? A. He was. Q. What is become of Mr. Gale? A. I cannot tell.

Giving up on Gale, the attorney general shifts course and asks Martin about another LCS member: Q. Was he a Sheffield man? A. I believe not. Q. What brought him to Sheffield? A. I cannot tell.

Throughout the trials, “I cannot tell” sounds as resistant discourse to the government’s probing questions.84 This performance of spoken recusal appears in “Anecdote for Fathers” not only to stage the social saturation of paranoid language but as part of Words­worth’s self-reflexive poetic exploration, one related to the poem’s subtitle, “Shewing How the Art of Lying May be Taught.” The poem was composed in April 1798, by which point the Wordsworths had learned that they would not be permitted to renew their occupancy of Alfoxden, reportedly because of the distress caused by Thelwall’s visit there the previous summer. And as we have seen, April also saw a rash of arrests of those still active in the LCS, as well as a new suspension of habeas corpus. To Thelwall and his friends, it must have seemed that the trials and imprisonments of

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May 1794 were starting up all over again, while Wordsworth was busy pondering just what kind of language one could safely use. Wordsworth’s attention to the liberatory potential of the “art” of evasive speech shapes the climax of “Anecdote for Fathers,” when after what is apparently his father’s fifth inquiry, Edward at last names a motive for his choice of Kilve over Llyswen farm: Then did the boy his tongue unlock, And thus to me he made reply; “At Kilve there was no weather-cock, “And that’s the reason why.”

(53–6)

Edward’s answer appears arbitrary: he lifted his head, saw the weather-cock, and recruited it to his salvation. In poetic rhetoric, however, this seems a motivated sign, an instrument for detecting the path of invisible wind, and so an irony against the instrumental interrogator.85 But a political wit is in the air, too.86 Read in this register, the real “lesson” of “Anecdote for Fathers” is that the only mode of discourse available under intense coercion is what Wordsworth’s subtitle terms “the art of lying.” Wordsworth’s phrase recalls a cluster of eighteenth-century pamphlets that tie this “art” to resistant discourse, such as The Art of Lying and Rebelling, Taught by the Whigs, or a Detection of Many Notorious Falsehoods and Palpable Forgeries contain’d in that vile Pamphlet, the 8th Edition of whereof is now publish’d and spread abroad to promote Treason, and revile Kingly Government (1713).87 But in his attention to the art of lying, Wordsworth is concerned less to revile monarchy through what Scrivener and others have called seditious allegory than to stage an allegory of repression. And in this sense, of equal importance is Wordsworth’s title keyword, “Anecdote.” This is a common enough term, but one infrequently used by Wordsworth, and one that has an important status as a genre marker for this poem. The word derives from the Greek ἀνέκδοτα, “things unpublished.”88 Indicating discourse that is not published, Wordsworth’s paradox is purposeful, for his “Anecdote,” while composed for publication, examines the dynamic by which language is both secreted and made public. Wordsworth’s allegory of repression presents a particularly direct version of the incitement to discourse, with coerced speech produced by a scene of interrogation, but it also shows the possibility for both agential language and self-preservation amidst such coercion. The “Anecdote,” as the paradox of the utterance not published, is a genre

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figure for the mode of saying the unsayable ( praeteritio, occupatio) that defines Gagging Acts discourse. This is the art of the repressive 1790s, the art that unlocks one’s tongue to the performance of the repressive moment: “I cannot tell.” If evasive speech allows one to unlock one’s tongue in Pitt’s Britain, might this very mode of discourse be turned from political to poetic “art”? Might we hear this art in the lines of the volume’s most famous poem, the one composed a few miles from Thelwall’s place of exile, on the eve of Bastille Day, 1798?

“Uncertain Notice”: The Case of “Tintern Abbey” “Tintern Abbey” is an uneasy utterance, rhetorically and politically. Critics have famously charged Wordsworth with eliding the industrial pollution and social suffering he would have encountered at the abbey, and with this information his own political investments. “Erased,” writes McGann, are the “abbey, the beggars and displaced vagrants, all that civilized culture creates and destroys, gets and spends. We are not permitted to remember 1793 and the turmoil of the French Revolution, neither its 1793 hopes nor— what is more to the point for Wordsworth—the subsequent ruin of those hopes.”89 This argument has been contested in terms of both information and poetic texture. James Heffernan notes that Wordsworth in fact reports what some critics say he elides: “[W]e may wonder just how hard he tries to suppress politics and history when his very title begins to display their tracks.”90 David Miall and Charles Rzepka, meanwhile, have variously challenged the new historicist reading by revisiting the scene of the Wye valley as it was in 1798. Comparing Wordsworth’s sketch of the landscape “a few miles” from the abbey with other descriptions of the region, Miall places the scene of the poem well out of sight of the ruined structure, and so dismisses the readings of McGann and Levinson, which depend, he argues, on the premise that Wordsworth set the poem in the direct vicinity of the abbey.91 Rzepka, too, returns to the Wye, and even as he values historicist readings for offering a “corrective to the bucolic pastoralism” of some critical accounts, he cautions against accepting the bleak scene of industrial pollution, vagrancy, and indigence emphasized in this line of critique.92 Rzepka’s suggestion that some critics have misrepresented the conditions at Tintern exposes an ironic reciprocal to the very charges leveled against Wordsworth. What is present to all readers, however, is the language of “Tintern Abbey,” which is historically informed and rhetorically marked by the repressive era.

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What Levinson refers to as the “constrained manner” of the speaker allows a political scene to shimmer into view beneath the pastoral idiom. The opening paragraph introduces the “uncertain notice” that characterizes the poem. Reposing under a “dark sycamore,” the speaker surveys the landscape:           Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms Green to the very door; and wreathes of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees, With some uncertain notice, as might seem, Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some hermit’s cave, where by his fire The hermit sits alone.

(15–23)

As Heffernan points out, Wordsworth does not “erase” the marks of land enclosure, the “hedge-rows.” Nor is this an anti-enclosure polemic: the “hedge-rows” are soon “hardly hedge-rows” and then “little lines,” as Words­ worth explicitly stages the curtailing of political language. When he sees with “uncertain notice,” the noun is there, but protected by the adjective. Wordsworth’s uncertain verse is described by Wolfson as a “fretful stir of qualifications, hesitations, and perplexed recognitions,” rendering the poem “a peculiarly strained utterance.”93 In the halting style of the speaker’s words, “Tintern Abbey” begins to seem “not a monologue but half of a dialogue with a questioning voice that, though silent, affects the way the poet speaks.”94 Readers are then tempted to supply this missing frame, as “we find ourselves interrogating the directions and indirections of speech.”95 Where Wolfson teases out an “interrogative presence” of divided consciousness, now certain, now in doubt, other critics have been inclined to interrogation—what Abrams calls the “prosecutorial” mode. Abrams’s adjective is apt, for this mode of critique performs the 1790s discourse of suspicion that I would suggest forms the absent frame of the poem, and which Words­ worth’s language is set against. To bring Wolfson’s formalist attention to the field of interest in which the “prosecutorial” critique has operated, a political subtext that seems willfully erased, is to reconsider “Tintern Abbey” as not an exercise in false consciousness but a poem that formally enacts its cultural moment. Wordsworth stages explicit political references, such as the “hedge-rows” that mark enclosure or the smoke that signifies a homeless population, only to transform them into formal effects: the “hedge-rows”

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shift into “little lines,” and the referent of the smoke a mere guess at the proposal in the poem’s lines. Wordsworth leaves the reader’s silent thought to register the truncation and supply the political subtext. In gauging the uncertain notice of “Tintern Abbey,” it is important to recall the stakes of Wordsworth’s exposure to the surveillance apparatus of the Pitt ministry, and in this, too, the poem’s date is significant. The Words­worths had agreed to a one-year lease at Alfoxden the previous July, but having been refused a renewal, they were now, as Thelwall had been, forced to leave Somerset over whispers of political intrigue. In July 1798, Wordsworth was without a home, and found himself, like Thelwall (whom he visited during the trip), in exilic limbo in Wales.96 This is the setting for Wordsworth’s self-accounting in “Tintern Abbey,” and he was not alone in taking stock of his life at this moment. By the end of the decade the radical’s reflection had become something of a genre.97 On 5 November 1800, LCS founder Thomas Hardy looked back over the past half decade, tracking his movement from “obscure” shoemaker to political cynosure and back again to his “humble” trade: “Six years have elapsed,” Hardy records, “since it was declared that treason was abroad and I an obscure individual was seized in my dwelling and arraigned and tried at the bar of my country.”98 But Hardy is grateful that the “firmness of an English jury” acquitted him after “the most tedious criminal case on the records of British jurisprudence.” Having traced this familiar story, he then develops a report of what followed the trial: On the agents and on the motives of the prosecution I would be silent. To my compatriots it is known that after a laborious investigation during nine days into the conduct of my life my unspotted fame was restored to me at the solemn tribunal of the land. From this situation of painful responsibility I returned to the humble occupation which early habits had assigned to me. The liberal encouragement I have received in the discharge of its duties I take this opportunity of cheerfully and gratefully acknowledging to my friends and the public.99

Now returned to his “humble occupation,” Hardy takes the occasion of the anniversary of his acquittal subtly to advertise his services. Thelwall was glad to learn that Hardy’s business was thriving in the latter 1790s, writing on 24 May 1798 (in response to a letter from Hardy) that he was “very much gratified” at Hardy’s “great increase of business,” and happy to see “an honest, unshrinking down right Democrat getting forward in the world in spite of the integrity of his principles.”100

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Meanwhile, James Losh, whom William and Dorothy visited at Bath on 8 July 1798, in advance of their walk to Tintern, likewise cast his glance over his activities of the past several years, and traced his path through political turmoil, though he wished to withdraw even farther than Hardy. A note from his diary expresses his turn from political activity to self-imposed silence in 1798: “Tho’ I retain my opinions of the value of Liberty in general, and of the corruptions of our own government in particular, I am resolved to withdraw forever from Politics, never to interfere farther than by calm discussion, and when that cannot be had I am determined to be silent.”101 The other friend they visited on this trip, Thelwall, was also busy writing an autobiographical narrative, reflections that were eventually shaped into a “Prefatory Memoir” for Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement (1801).102 “During seven years of his life,” Thelwall records, writing in the third person, it has been his fortune sometimes to stand connected, and sometimes to contend, with men relative to whose real conduct and characters posterity cannot fail to be interested; and if other more imperious duties do not prevent, he will feel himself bound to leave behind him (perhaps as a sole legacy to his offspring) an unsophisticated detail of those transactions “All of which he saw, and part of which he was.” In the mean time (for peace sake— and for the sake of his unoffending family) he is desirous that the politician should be forgotten; and that, till the prejudices of party shall subside into the candour of unimpassioned appreciation, he should henceforth be known and noticed (as here he is introduced) only as a candidate for poetical and moral reputation. (ii)

This is a cagey opening, one that is less about Thelwall himself than the impossibility of self-accounting at this moment.103 But as we have seen, rural retirement is not necessarily synonymous with political annulment: in the “Prefatory Memoir” Thelwall returns over and again to his battles with the Pitt ministry and its network of spies. And in private letters he was sure to remind friends that his politics had not changed. In his 24 May 1798 letter to Hardy he excoriated George Tierney, usually an opponent of Pitt, for voting in favor of the new suspension of habeas corpus in April: “I cannot help being sorry when such fellows pretend to democracy; because sooner or later they are sure to disgrace the cause.”104 The verse memoir of “Tintern Abbey,” though not as scarred as Thelwall’s autobiographical essay, is politically conscious, and shows a sharp awareness of what can happen if one speaks out loudly and boldly about the condition of Britain in 1798.105 Wordsworth opens his self-account with

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attention to the passing of years, using a subjective chronometry to register the vanquishing power of time in a deadening environment. Though the calendar tells Wordsworth that he last visited the Wye valley “five summers” ago, life in Pitt’s Britain, including the arrest and imprisonment of some of Wordsworth’s friends and literary colleagues, has made this stretch of time feel like “five long winters.” This is the deep freeze that Coleridge and o­ thers warned about on the eve of the Gagging Acts’ passage, and it is a freeze of which Wordsworth, evicted from Alfoxden for simply allowing Thelwall into his house, has come to feel the bite. Just as Coleridge had been in The Plot Discovered, Wordsworth is led to recall another British writer who lived through an era of frozen speech. Through a subtle allusion to Milton in “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth aligns himself with a tradition of writing within a politically volatile atmosphere. A few years earlier in “Salisbury Plain,” as Roe has shown, Wordsworth had alluded to Milton’s “On the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester” in wondering “what can war but endless war still breed.”106 But as Wordsworth now turns his attention to the trials of living and writing in a repressive era, he appropriately alludes to the post-Restoration Milton. About three-quarters of the way through the poem, Wordsworth describes his vision of a beneficent nature that will “inform” and “impress” in order to “feed,” unlike a government that would subject a famine-plagued populace to surveillance and forced military service (126–8). “Neither evil tongues,” Wordsworth writes, “rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men” can convince him that the landscape he surveys holds anything other than “blessings” (129–35). Alluding to Milton’s lines from Paradise Lost, “On evil dayes though fall’n, and evil tongues” (7.25–6), Wordsworth not only “attempt[s] to evoke Milton’s republican vision,” as one critic has proposed, but signals that he is working within a powerful tradition of poetic composition amidst state repression.107 Milton was not living at this hour, however, and Wordsworth had to find his own way to unlock his tongue. Through the oblique style he generates, a language of qualifications, reservations, occupatio, and praeteritio, Wordsworth performs the impossibility of direct and open expression. In this regard, political readings of “Tintern Abbey” have sought the “politics” of the poem in the wrong place—its explicit content, or elisions thereof. But Wordsworth is writing along a different rhetorical axis: his point is to indicate that he “cannot tell” all he might about the political scene of the past half decade, and his mode of communication is a poetics of suggestion,

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truncation, and uncertain report. Through these formal effects he registers the political scene of late-1790s Britain. It is there in the wrenching litotes— “Nor, perchance, / If I were not thus taught, should I the more / Suffer my genial spirit to decay” (112–4)—and in the failures of recollection— “unremembered pleasure” (32), “unremembered acts” (35), “recognition dim and faint” (60)—which lead to the occupatio sigh: “I cannot paint / What then I was” (76–7). James Chandler has read in this last utterance Words­ worth’s unwillingness to acknowledge his younger radical self: “It is as if, to avoid having to reconstruct his thought in the revolutionary period, he simply suggests that he had not at the time had any thoughts at all.”108 Though I share Chandler’s sense of the political inflections of Wordsworth’s occupatio patterning, I want to emphasize the contemporary constraints on discourse that contour this evasion. Wordsworth “cannot paint” a portrait of his true political self, unless he should want to end up like the alienated ex-prisoner Thelwall, or perhaps even like the reform leaders imprisoned in April 1798. Yet, if he cannot paint this self-portrait, he can, in the shape of his brushstrokes, represent the uncertainty, nervousness, and fear that have come to inflect even the most personal of self-accounts in Pitt’s Britain. The strange half-absence of Wordsworth’s own language limns an anxious self-monitoring at every turn, as though the howls of the mastiff were still pealing through the air.

Afterword

This book has proposed a critical model of early Romantic writing that is as attuned to the repressive 1790s as the field has long been to the radical 1790s. The legislative initiatives of the British government, with the massive punctual event of the 1795 Gagging Acts, offer an inaugural logic for this study, but it would be difficult to name as ready a terminus. Although the laws surveyed in the Introduction appeared within a particularly charged cluster of years, they had disparate lifespans, and faded out at different rates over subsequent years and decades. The arcs of the two Gagging Acts are illustrative: while the Seditious Meetings Act expired in 1798 (a fact brought in as one justification for the new suspension of habeas corpus that year), the Treasonable Practices Act, though subject to various repeal efforts, stayed in effect until 1848.1 Just as these juridical strikes followed different chronological arcs, one might, as I have noted, extend this study well beyond the latter 1790s, to the events at Spa Field and Pentrich, to the imprisonment of figures such as John and Leigh Hunt, and especially to the Six Acts of 1819, the parliamentary and extraparliamentary debates over which uncannily replayed the contest over the 1795 Gagging Acts. The longue durée of this story might even stretch to trace the genealogy of Britain’s modern CCTV

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obsession (“the most watched citizenry in Europe,” as Benjamin J. Goold reports) to the machinery of what Coleridge referred to as the “State Argus” that grew up in the wake of the democratic agitations of the 1790s.2 This long view would, however, entail a flattening of which we should be cautious. The second half of the eighteenth century’s closing decade saw a rapid extension of surveillance and prosecution that deserves close consideration. Though the long history of repression and cultural engagement of course outlasts the Pitt era, we can make out something of a reprieve as we move into the first years of the nineteenth century. E. P. Thompson has described a particular mode of tourism that came with the Treaty of Amiens, as thousands of British travelers, “some of them, like Thomas Poole, former Jacobins, were pouring across the Channel to gape at republican France.”3 There was relief at the cessation of conflict, and curiosity about the state of France a decade after the fall of the Bastille, but this moment also came with its own reservations. For Wordsworth, one of those “tourists” of 1802, “republican France had betrayed herself beyond redemption,” Thompson writes, “by acclaiming a general as first consul for life.”4 This statement comes as part of Thompson’s reassessment of Wordsworth’s budding patriotism at the turn of the century, yet for all that was happening in France, equally significant were the changes at home. February 1801 saw the resignation of Pitt, and a month later the restoration of habeas corpus, and with this the longawaited release of the LCS members who had been imprisoned since April 1798 (having never been convicted of a crime).5 Plans for ending the war with France were underway in advance of Pitt’s departure (Thelwall would later recall that the prospect and achievement of peace “gave to all parties, in this country, time to recover a portion, at least, of their bewildered senses”).6 While Thompson has emphasized the events in France, I would propose that domestic politics, and Pitt’s resignation in particular, were no less significant for Wordsworth and many other writers who lived through the repressive 1790s. More than a default for Wordsworth’s hopes, Britain at this moment seemed a genuinely different country from what it had been for most of his mature life. Wordsworth was thirteen years old when Pitt became prime minister. He had just turned twenty-three when the 1792 Proclamation Against Seditious Writings was issued and the arrests of those involved in printing and distributing the writings of Paine began. He had yet to publish his first book. But now, at the opening of the new century, the Britain that Wordsworth had known seemed ready to return to the basic liberties that Coleridge,

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Godwin, and so many others had spent the 1790s pleading with the Pitt ministry to honor. Real political change finally appeared possible in Britain. If in 1793 Wordsworth had stashed a political missive in his desk drawer, in 1801 he felt able to send his poetry to a member of parliament.7 In The Convention of Cintra (1809), Wordsworth explained that at the end of the previous decade he had not abruptly transformed from pro-French radical to jingoistic Tory. He was against tyranny, then and now: what had changed, he insists, was its location. Hence Britain’s war, not against the French Republic but against the French Empire, was a necessity that was “by none more clearly perceived, or feelingly bewailed, than by those who had most eagerly opposed the war in its commencement, and who continued most bitterly to regret that this nation had ever borne a part in it.” The conduct of the opponents of the war, Wordsworth continues, “was herein consistent: they proved that they kept their eyes steadily fixed upon principles; for, though there was a shifting or transfer of hostility in their minds as far as regarded persons, they only combated the same enemy opposed to them under a different shape; and that this enemy was the spirit of selfish tyranny and lawless ambition.”8 It is important to recognize, however, that this “transfer of hostility” did not entail an indemnification of the Pitt ministry. Although Wordsworth felt that the revolution’s democratic spirit had been lost in Napoleon’s rise— as he put it in the Prelude, the French had “become oppressors in their turn” by exchanging a “war of self-defence / For one of conquest” (10.791–3)—his relationship to his own government remained strained, and he insisted that post-Amiens patriotism should not be mistaken for an endorsement of the Pittite 1790s: [I]n opposition to French tyranny growing daily more insatiate and implacable, [the people of England] ranged themselves zealously under their Government; though they neither forgot nor forgave its transgressions, in having first involved them in a war with a people then struggling for its own liberties under a twofold affliction—confounded by inbred faction, and beleaguered by a cruel and imperious external foe.9

Even at the event of Pitt’s death, Wordsworth was unwilling to laud the plans that were being made for a grand state funeral. Writing to Sir George Beaumont, one of Pitt’s champions, Wordsworth confesses that he still recalls Pitt’s “grievous mistakes,” and regrets that he “may differ greatly” from his friend on the first minister’s legacy.10 Wordsworth’s letter to Beaumont

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signals something of the contempt that surfaces in book 10 of The Prelude. Wordsworth here offers a rare comment on the actions of the Pitt ministry, after mentioning how Britons succumbed to a pernicious Francophobia at mid-decade (10.623–4): “To a strain / more animated I might here give way,” he hints, a strain that would record “What in those days through Britain was performed / To turn all judgments out of their right course” (10.635–6, 10.638–9). Language so often applied to the revolution here describes the scene in Britain, in which what was “performed” by the ministry with an intention of disorienting all manner of judgment left Britons in a state of moral chaos. Wordsworth does not fully give way to this strain of censure, but he does offer a brief account of the government’s actions “in those days”: Our shepherds (this say merely) at that time Thirsted to make the guardian crook of law A tool of murder. They who ruled the state, Though with such awful proof before their eyes That he who would sow death, reaps death, or worse, And can reap nothing better, childlike longed To imitate—not wise enough to avoid. Giants in their impiety alone, But in their weapons and their warfare base As vermin working out of reach, they leagued Their strength perfidiously, to undermine Justice, and make an end of liberty. (10.645–56)

In this vision of the repressive 1790s, with the “child-like” Pitt imitating Robespierre, Wordsworth figures government spies as “vermin working out of reach,” or, as Jonathan Wordsworth has glossed this phrase, as “rats under the floorboards,” returning us to the language of surveillance we have seen in Coleridge’s The Plot Discovered and Thelwall’s lecture on the ubiquity of government spies.11 When on the occasion of Pitt’s death Wordsworth still insisted on registering the first minister’s transgressions, this was an expression of the abhorrence he felt at how the Pitt regime “Thirsted to make the guardian crook of law / A tool of murder,” but it may also have been prompted by the legacy that these fraught years had left behind. We have seen that in 1809 Words­ worth was still made nervous by the shadow of Newgate that he saw rising above the Lakeland horizon when he lifted his pen to comment on national

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politics. Pitt was dead. The bleakest years of repression had passed. But the memories of Flower, Wakefield, Thelwall, and of all those lives brutalized or destroyed still haunted the land. Toward the close of The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson pauses to propose that the “twenty-five years after 1795 may be seen as the years of the ‘long counter-revolution.’”12 I have tried to show that the first half decade of this long arc changed the direction of British literary history, and while there was widespread relief at Pitt’s resignation and the Peace of Amiens, it was the relief of promise, not transformation. The cultural freeze of the repressive 1790s continued to send a chill through the nation. This chill is as crucial to our understanding of British Romanticism as the hot energy of the summer of 1789.

Notes

Introduction 1.  Kenneth R. Johnston, “Whose History? My Place or Yours?: Republican Assumptions and Romantic Traditions,” in Romanticism, History, Historicism: Essays on an Orthodoxy, ed. Damian Walford Davies (New York: Routledge, 2009), 90. Johnston’s larger portrait, Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. 2.  Johnston, “Whose History?,” 91. 3.  E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class inspired both enduring attention to the loud radicalism of the first half of the 1790s and a special interest in writers and political activists such as Thomas Spence and Richard “Citizen” Lee who sustained the career of radical culture through the later 1790s and across the years of the Napoleonic Wars. Thompson’s attention to figures such as Spence and Lee has been of particular importance to works such as Iain McCalman’s Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and David Worrall’s Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1790–1820 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992); a related interest in the antinomian politics of William Blake focuses on Jon Mee’s Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), Thompson’s own Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and Saree Makdisi’s William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 4.  E. P. Thompson, “Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon,” originally published in 1969. Thompson turned to the force and even violence of the counterrevolutionary effort in this essay as well as in “Wordsworth’s Crisis” (1988), “Hunting the Jacobin Fox” (1994), and other pieces posthumously collected in The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age, ed. Dorothy Thompson (Suffolk, UK: Merlin Press, 1997), 33–74. 5.  Attention to John Thelwall has been central to recent work on the counter­ revolutionary pressures of the 1790s, and given his importance to the decade’s political and literary culture, shining a light on Thelwall’s story quickly illuminates the wider implications of Pittite repression. See, for instance, Michael Scrivener’s

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Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2001), Damian Walford Davies’s Presences That Disturb: Models of Romantic Identity in the Literature and Culture of the 1790s (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), and Judith Thompson’s John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle: The Silenced Partner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Broader works on ­Romantic-era writing and repression that have informed my study include Nicholas Roe’s Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) and The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries (London: Macmillan, 1992), and John Barrell’s Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 6.  A manuscript containing Bonney’s prison poems is held at the British Library (Add. MS 46870). 7.  William Godwin, Things as they are, or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle, rev. ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 3–4. 8. Ibid., 149. 9. Ibid., 152. 10.  Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 15. 11.  T. E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism,” in The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 62. 12.  Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 175. 13.  Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); David Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (New York: Methuen, 1987); and Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989). 14.  Lucyle Werkmeister treats the Proclamation at length in A Newspaper History of England, 1792–1793 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967). 15.  See Frank O’Gorman, “The Paine Burnings of 1792–1793,” Past and Present 193.1 (2006): 111–55, as well as Nicholas Rogers, “Burning Tom Paine: Loyalism and Counter-Revolution in Britain, 1792–1793,” Social History / Histoire Sociale 32.64 (1999): 139–71. 16.  Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 17.  Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 76. 18.  Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). H. T. Dickinson notes that essential to the effort to create consensus was an “outpouring of loyalist propaganda” meant to “arouse a deep

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hatred of the French, as Britain’s traditional enemy, and a profound loathing for those British radicals who seemed ready to follow the violent example of their near neighbors” (“Popular Loyalism in Britain in the 1790s,” in The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Eckhart Hellmuth [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990], 511). 19.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). 20.  On the Aliens Act, see Werkmeister, Newspaper History, 179–86. 21.  Mary Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 33. 22.  Public Advertiser, 14 March 1793 (qtd. in Werkmeister, Newspaper History, 249). 23. Favret, Romantic Correspondence, 33. 24. The 1679 legislation, titled “An Act for Better Securing the Liberty of the Subject,” guaranteed that a suspect could not be detained for more than fortyeight hours without access to an arrest warrant giving the reason for imprisonment. Paul D. Halliday helpfully situates the 1679 act in a longer legal history in Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010). 25.  Thomas Erskine May, The Constitutional History of England, Since the Accession of George the Third, 1760–1860, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1865), 2:266. On the parliamentary debates over the suspension of habeas corpus and its relevance to the 1794 treason trials, see Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, esp. 231–51. 26.  5 January 1795, The Parliamentary History of England (London: R. Bagshaw, T. Longman, 1806–20), 31:1066. 27.  John Thelwall, “On the Moral Tendency of a System of Spies and Informers,” in Political Lectures No. 1 (London: Printed for the Author, 1794), 6. 28.  The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years 1787–1805, eds. Ernest de Selincourt and Chester L. Shaver, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 121. Hereafter referred to as EY. 29. Ibid., 125. 30.  See, for instance, An Account of the Seizure of Citizen Thomas Hardy, Secretary to the London Corresponding Society; with Some Remarks on the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act (London, 1794); Serious Consequences Attending the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act (London, 1794); The Rights of Britons, Extracted from Magna Charta, the Bill of Rights, and, the Habeas Corpus Act (London, 1795); and Speech of Mr. Francis, on the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act (London, 1795). Cara Norris argues that the 1794 suspension of habeas corpus animates Wordsworth’s “representation of social paranoia” in the thirteenth-century world of The Borderers (“The Suspension of Habeas Corpus and Narrative Proliferation in Wordsworth’s The Borderers,” European Romantic Review 17.2 [2006]: 197–203). 31.  As I discuss in Chapter 5, habeas corpus was again suspended from April 1798 to March 1801. 32.  “On the Suspension of The Habeas Corpus Act,” The Cabinet (Norwich, 1795): 10.

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33. Ibid., 11. 34.  My focus on the second half of the 1790s is not meant to suggest that the intense repressions of this era abruptly dissolved with the resignation of Pitt or the Peace of Amiens. The story of repression inaugurated by the 1792 Proclamation might be plotted along arcs of different lengths—one may trace subsequent events (Spa Field, Pentridge, Peterloo, Cato Street), subsequent targets (Despard, Wooler, Wedderburn, Hone, Thistlewood, Davidson), and subsequent repressive legislation (especially the Six Acts of 1819). I have focused on the latter 1790s, as these years witness a particularly sharp interfusing of political repression and literary form. 35.  The Incitement to Mutiny Act received royal assent on 6 June 1797. 36.  Also intended to prevent foment within the military were the Unlawful Oaths Act (1797), which forbade the use of oaths among and between military members and democratic organizations, and the Certain Mutinous Crews Act (1797), designed to forestall a repeat of the Spithead and Nore mutinies. 37.  Thompson, “Disenchantment or Default?,” 59. Dickinson notes that “although never called upon to meet the French, the Volunteers did become a major police force dedicated to the preservation of internal order” (“Popular Loyalism,” 524). And there was a continuum from enforcement to “encouragement”: “The Volunteers sought not only to intimidate their radical opponents, but to encourage loyalty and patriotism among the public at large” (525). 38.  See Mary Thale, “London Debating Societies in the 1790s,” Historical Journal 32 (1989): 57–86. 39.  This work in part addressed Thompson’s perceived underreporting of both plebeian loyalism and the counterrevolutionary effort (see, for instance, Geoffrey Best’s review of The Making of the English Working Class, Historical Journal 8.2 [1965]: 271–81). Clive Emsley has sought to measure the accuracy of the fact that “British radicals and reformers during the 1790s believed that they were experiencing a reign of terror” by gauging the breadth and depth of government actions in response to the threat perceived from domestic radicalism (see “An Aspect of Pitt’s ‘Terror’: Prosecutions for Sedition during the 1790s,” Social History 6.2 [1981]: 155–84, and “Repression, ‘Terror’ and the Rule of Law in England during the Decade of the French Revolution,” English Historical Review 100.397 [1985]: 801–25). Steve Poole offers a substantive challenge to some of Emsley’s claims (and data) in “Pitt’s Terror Reconsidered: Jacobinism and the Law in Two South-western Counties, 1791–1803,” Southern History 17 (1995): 65–87. 40. Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, 17. 41.  Pierre Bourdieu, “Censorship and the Imposition of Form,” in Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 137–8. 42.  Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 5. 43. Most forceful in this argument are Richard Burt, Licensed by Authority: Ben Jonson and the Discourses of Censorship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

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Press, 1993), and Cyndia Clegg, especially Press Censorship in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Related work includes Richard Dutton, Licensing, Censorship, and Authorship in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave, 2000), Janet Clare, Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), and Andrew Hadfield, ed., Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 44.  Michael Holquist, “Corrupt Originals: The Paradox of Censorship,” PMLA 109.1 (1994): 16. 45.  Qtd. in Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, 29. 46.  This warning, included in the revised edition of Censorship and Interpretation (1992), was written in part, Patterson explains, to answer Christopher Hill and others who thought that she had diminished the status of punitive censorship in favor of a model of Foucauldian dispersal. Patterson writes that her aim has been to “preclude a naïve, black and white version of the liberal position on censorship, without ever denying that, in certain circumstances, censorship can be extremely, perhaps disastrously, repressive” (29). 47.  Wakefield discussed his imprisonment in the correspondence he maintained from his Dorchester cell with Charles James Fox (see Correspondence of the Late Gilbert Wakefield, B.A. with the Late Right Honorable Charles James Fox [London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1813]). 48.  Richard Watson, An Address to the People of Great Britain (London: Printed for the booksellers in town and country, 1798). Wakefield’s response was titled A reply to some parts of the Bishop of Llandaff ’s address to the people of Great Britain (London: J. Cuthell, 1798). 49. Wakefield, A reply, 15. 50.  On Wakefield’s trial, see F. K. Prochaska, “English State Trials in the 1790s: A Case Study,” Journal of British Studies 13.1 (1973): 75. The trial is also treated in Memoirs of the Life of Gilbert Wakefield, B.A. (London: Printed for J. Johnson, 1804), 2:115–265. 51.  John Aikin, “Sketch of Mr. Wakefield,” Monthly Magazine 12, pt. 2 (1801): 229. 52.  Memorials and Correspondence of Charles James Fox, ed. Lord John Russell (London: Richard Bentley, 1857), 4:67. Examining Wakefield’s frustrated attempts, after his release, to bring attention to the brutal conditions at Dorchester Gaol, Michael Ignatieff has noted that he was unable to marshal supporting witnesses because “prisoners still in confinement were unwilling to corroborate his allegations for fear of reprisals” (A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 [New York: Pantheon, 1978], 126). See also Memoirs of the Life of Gilbert Wakefield, 2:266–82. 53.  Kenneth R. Johnston examines a case in which recklessness was chosen over recusal in the instance of Thomas Muir, who could well have opted to emigrate to America (or elsewhere) to avoid a trial for sedition (Muir received a sentence of fourteen years’ transportation to Botany Bay). See Johnston’s “The First and Last British Convention,” Romanticism 13.2 (2007): 99–132.

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54.  Phillips (1767–1840), bookseller, printer, and journalist, established the oppositional Leicester Herald in 1792. He is perhaps best known as the founder of the Monthly Magazine, which he set up in 1796. 55.  The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, eds. James King and Charles Ryskamp, vol. 4, Letters 1792–1799 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 352. 56.  Ibid. In an earlier draft of this letter, Cowper had written, “[Y]ou would not wish me to exercise a heroism so expensive to myself, which would probably by its consequences be my own destruction” (Cowper, Letters, 4:352n3). 57.  On Cowper’s uncertain response to the rise of revolutionary politics, see Maurice J. Quinlan, “William Cowper and the French Revolution,” Journal of ­English and Germanic Philology 50.4 (1951): 483–90. 58. Cowper, Letters, 4:108. London bookseller Thomas Rickman (1760–1834) provided Paine with a room in the city while he was writing Rights of Man. Rickman’s Life of Thomas Paine was published in 1819. 59.  Rights of Man was purchased by a government informant at Phillips’s bookshop on 6 December 1792, but Paine’s trial was not until 18 December, at which point the work was legally proclaimed a seditious libel. 60.  Richard Phillips, Original Papers Published at Different Times in the Leicester Herald, Intended to Elucidate the Extraordinary Prosecution, Trial, and Sentence of R. Phillips (Leicester Gaol, 1793), 8. 61. Ibid. 62.  The sonnet to Phillips is included within Cowper’s 18 June 1793 letter to Samuel Rose (Cowper, Letters, 4:355). 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid., 356–7. 65. Coleridge, The Plot Discovered; or, An Address to the People Against Ministerial Treason, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Lewis Patton and Peter Mann, vol. 1, Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1971), 289. Hereafter abbreviated as PD and cited parenthetically within the text. 66.  On Godwin’s interest in the case of Crichton, who was imprisoned for drunkenly proclaiming “Damn the King,” see Chapter 4. 67.  Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 2–5. 68.  Fredric Jameson, Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 1983), 64.

Chapter One 1.  A Warning Voice to the People of England, on the True Nature and Effect of the Two Bills Now Before Parliament (London: Richard White, 1795), 21. John Barrell offers a comprehensive account of both the unfolding of the events of 29 October 1795 and the legislative process through which the treason and sedition bills passed before receiving royal assent. See Imagining the King’s Death, 554–67, 573–82. On the extraparliamentary agitation against the legislation, see also Albert Goodwin’s

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The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 389–95. 2.  The full titles of the bills were “A Bill for the More Effectually Preventing Seditious Meetings and Assemblies,” introduced in the Commons by Pitt, and “A Bill for the Safety and Preservation of His Majesty’s Person Against Treasonable Practices and Attempts,” brought by Grenville to the Lords. On the calls for a legislative response to the attack, Barrell notes that the ministerial True Briton seemed “more outraged than the king himself ” (Imagining the King’s Death, 559). Citing John Gurney’s assertion in An Appeal to the People, on the Two Despotic Bills Now Depending in Parliament (London: D. I. Eaton, 1795) that “whenever the Ministers have intended to take any step which would naturally alarm the people’s minds, they have always prepared the public for it by proposing it first in the publications of some of their hirelings” (33), Barrell proposes that the response of loyalist writers was “almost certainly the Government’s way of representing the action it was about to take as a response to public opinion” (Imagining the King’s Death, 571). 3.  E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), 145. The LCS went so far as to “hail” the “fortunate, though awful crisis” for engendering the “hearty co-operation between the people and their parliamentary leaders” that was necessary to “smooth the way to Parliamentary Reform” (The Speech of John Thelwall at the Second Meeting of the London Corresponding Society and the Other Friends of Reform [London: Published by J. Thelwall, 1795], ii). 4. Coleridge, The Plot Discovered, 277–318; Godwin, Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills, Concerning Treasonable and Seditious Practices, and Unlawful Assemblies, in The Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), 2:125–62 (hereafter referred to as Considerations and cited parenthetically within the text). Other respondents to the proposed laws include Thomas Beddoes, A Word in Defence of the Bill of Rights against Gagging Bills (Bristol: N. Biggs; London: J. Johnson, [1795]); Thomas Bigge, An Address to the Inhabitants of Northumberland and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Who Petitioned against the Two Bills Lately Depending in Parliament (London: J. Johnson, [1796]); John Cartwright, A Letter to the High Sheriff of the County of Lincoln, Respecting the Bills of Lord Grenville and Mr. Pitt (London: J. Johnson, 1795); James Roper Head, An Essay on the Causes Which Have Produced, the Principles Which Support, and the Consequences Which May Follow, From the Two Bills (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1796); Andrew Larcher, The Last Advice but One of a Lover of the British Constitution, . . . Respecting the New Sedition and Treason Bills (London: H. D. Symonds, 1795); [James Sansom], Cursory Remarks on the Convention Bill Now Pending in Parliament. To Be Continued Every Morning During the Discussion. By a Liveryman of London (London: J. Davenport, 1795); Henry ­Symonds, Symonds’s Abstract of the Two Bills . . . To Which Are Added, the Bill of Rights: the Coronation Oath: and Magna Charta (London: H. D. Symonds, 1795); and William Wilson, A Dialogue upon the Two Bills Now Depending in Parliament, Relative to the Rights of the People (London: J. Owen, 1795).

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5.  Along with Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–2), responses to Burke include Catharine Macaulay’s Observations on the Reflections of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke (1790), Joseph Priestley’s Letters to the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke (1791), James Mackintosh’s Vindiciae gallicae (1791), and James Parkinson’s Address to the Hon. Edmund Burke from the Swinish Multitude (1793). Amanda Goodrich supplies the full catalogue in Debating England’s Aristocracy in the 1790s: Pamphlets, Polemics, and Political Ideas (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2005), 46–52. 6.  Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in The French Revolution, 1790–1794, ed. L. G. Mitchell, vol. 8 of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 136. 7.  On Coleridge’s evolving interest in linguistics, see James McKusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986). 8.  Eliza Fenwick, Secresy; or, the Ruin of the Rock, ed. Isobel Grundy (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 1998); Ann Yearsley, The Royal Captives: A Fragment of Secret History (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1795); Thomas Morton, Secrets Worth Knowing: A Comedy, in Five Acts (London: Printed for T. N. Longman, 1798); and Rev. John Corbet, Self-Employment, in Secret (Hull: J. Ferraby, 1795). Paul Keen has observed that in Fenwick’s novel “secrecy is consistently identified as the greatest obstacle to a truly virtuous society” (The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 127). On the status of secrecy in Fenwick’s text, see also Meghan Burke, “Making Mother Obsolete: Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy and the Masculine Appropriation of Maternity,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 21.3 (2009): 357–84. 9.  James Boaden, The Secret Tribunal: A Play (London: T. N. Longman, 1795). 10.  Ibid., lines 63–8. 11.  “Trial by Jury,” writes the Welsh poet Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams), “though long familiar to the willing ear of Britons, must continue to generate new veneration.” See Trial by Jury, the Grand Palladium of British Liberty, A Song, sung at the Crown and Anchor, Feb. 4, 1795 (London, [1795]), 2. 12. Coleridge, Conciones ad populum, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, eds. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann, vol. 1, Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 61–2. Coleridge’s likely reference is to Lydia Hardy, who died while her husband Thomas Hardy, confined to the Tower, awaited trial. A number of poems memorialized Lydia Hardy. Journalist, political prisoner, and poet James Montgomery (discussed in more detail in Chapter 2), under the name “Paul Positive,” wrote “Verses Occasioned by the visit of Thomas Hardy, immediately after the Acquittal, to the Grave of his Wife,” in which Lydia Hardy’s death is blamed on the arrest of her husband: “From that distracting moment, quick decay / Crumbled her poor remains of life away” (Prison Amusements [London: J. Johnson, 1797], 155–60). 13.  Thomas Holcroft’s response to his 1794 arrest reveals the turbidity that amplified the suffering of many writers and activists at the hands of the legal system: “Locked within the walls of Newgate, Mr. Holcroft had full time for meditation.

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His first duty was to defend himself by shewing the falsehood of the accusation: but it was a duty which at this time he knew not how to discharge. He had no documents, nor could he tell of what he was accused” (The Life of Thomas Holcroft [London: Longman, 1816], 2:177). 14.  John Thelwall, The Tribune: A Periodical Publication (London: Printed for the Author, 1795), 1:90. 15.  Thelwall, “On the Moral Tendency of a System of Spies and Informers,” in Political Lectures No. 1 (London: Printed for the Author, 1794), 6–7. 16.  Pigott, author of the satiric A Political Dictionary: Explaining the True Meaning of Words (London: D. I. Eaton, 1795), grew ill and died as a result of his confinement in Newgate. Pigott gives an account of his arrest and imprisonment in Persecution. The Case of Charles Pigott (London: D. I. Eaton, 1793). See also Werkmeister, Newspaper History, 435, and Jon Mee, “‘A bold and free-spoken man’: The Strange Case of Charles Pigott,” in Cultures of Whiggism: New Essays on English Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. David Womersley (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2005), 330–50. On the charged political atmosphere of coffee houses in the 1790s, see also Barrell’s Spirit of Despotism, chap. 2. 17.  The position of secretary of state for war was created in July 1794. See R. R. Nelson, The Home Office, 1782–1801 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1969), 19–20. 18. Ibid., 72–3. 19.  Elizabeth Sparrow, “The Alien Office, 1792–1806,” Historical Journal 33.2 (1990): 363. 20.  Qtd. in Nelson, The Home Office, 130. The Alien Office was formed out of the Home Office in 1793 to enforce the Aliens Act (8 January 1793), which legislated the documentation of the entrance and travel of foreigners within Britain (Nelson, The Home Office, 126). For a broad view of this legislation, see J. R. Dinwiddy, “The Use of the Crown’s Power of Deportation under the Aliens Act, 1793–1826,” Historical Research 41.104 (1968): 193–211. 21.  The Reign of the English Robespierre. Addressed to the Nation (London: T. G. Ballard, 1795), 6. 22.  Pitt Correspondence, MS Add. 6958.1588, Cambridge University Library. 23.  The papers were letters written by an agent who, the Pitt circle believed, was sent by Fox to St. Petersburg to “thwart the Negotiations then carrying on by the English Ministers” (18 February 1797; Pitt Correspondence, MS Add. 6958.2078, Cambridge University Library). 24.  The Parliamentary History of England (London: T. C. Hansard, 1818), vol. 32, col. 273 (hereafter abbreviated as PH and cited parenthetically by volume and column numbers). 25.  Lee was best known for the flurry of ultraradical texts he issued in the 1790s, such as King Killing and The Happy Reign of George the Last. He also recorded the debate on the treason and sedition bills in pamphlets such as Account of the Proceedings of a Meeting of the People, In a Field Near Copenhagen-House, Thursday, Nov. 12 (London: Printed for Citizen Lee, 1795), Speech of Mr. Erskine, in the House of Com-

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mons, Tuesday, November 17, 1795, on the Detestable Convention Bills (London: Printed for Citizen Lee, 1795), and Account of the Proceedings of a Meeting of the Inhabitants of Westminster in Palace Yard, Monday, Nov. 26, 1795 (London: Printed for Citizen Lee, 1795). See Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, 607–22, and Mee, “The Strange Career of Richard ‘Citizen’ Lee: Poetry, Popular Radicalism and Enthusiasm in the 1790s,” in Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1650–1830: From Revolution to Revolution, eds. Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 151–66. 26.  Pitt was urged by some in his own party to temper the severity of the legislation. Even Grenville wrote privately after a discussion at Downing Street, and though he apologized for offering advice to Pitt on domestic surveillance (“a subject on which I would naturally have felt it my business rather to learn from you”), he nonetheless troubled over the “degree of constraint” Pitt was proposing (12 November 1795, Pitt Correspondence, MS Add. 6958/9/1855, Cambridge University Library). 27.  A Warning Voice to the People of England, 6, 20. 28. Ibid., 31. 29.  The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, vol. 1, 1794– 1804 (New York: Bollingen Foundation and Pantheon Books, 1957), 110.G104. 30. Ibid. 31. Thompson, Making, 146. 32.  William Wilson, A Dialogue upon the Two Bills, 35. The Reign of the English Robespierre critiques Pitt’s foreign policy in both Europe and the Caribbean. 33.  Pitt is here made to ventriloquize an infamous remark made by Samuel Horsley (Bishop of Rochester). During the parliamentary debates, Rochester argued that the legislation was “merely directed against those idle and seditious public meetings for the discussion of the laws where the people were not competent to decide upon them,” and, going further, said that he “did not know what the mass of the people in any country had to do with the laws but to obey them” (11 November 1795, PH, vol. 32, col. 258). Horsley’s widely circulated (and excoriated) comment provided Coleridge with the opening for The Plot Discovered (285). 34.  The Perth petition is addressed to MPs Dundas and Mansfield (Perth and Kincross Council Archive, B59/34/96/3). Some loyalist petitions were supervised by the ministry before their presentation to parliament. From Stowe, the Marquis of Buckingham wrote to Grenville, “I enclose to you a draft of our address which you will alter if you do not like it; and you will in that case mix the ingredients as you please” (Baron William Wyndham Grenville, The Manuscripts of J. B. Fortescue [London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1892–1927], 3:45). 35.  History of Two Acts (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1796) offers a full list, 826–7. 36.  The Proceedings and Speeches, at the Meeting the Seventeenth November, 1795, at St. Andrew’s Hall, Norwich. To Petition Parliament against Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Treason and Sedition Bills (Norwich: John March, 1795), 2. 37. Ibid., 8. 38. Ibid., 13–4.

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39. Ibid., 16. Barrell notes that some opponents even argued that the bills might actually endanger, rather than protect, the life of the king (see Imagining the King’s Death, 599–602). 40. Thelwall, The Speech of John Thelwall at the Second Meeting, 19. 41. Cosmopolite, To the British Nation (London: D. I. Eaton, 1795), 4. 42.  Edmund Burke, Reflections, 136. 43. Ibid., 138. 44.  Peter Pindar [John Wolcot], “The Convention Bill,” in The Works of Peter Pindar in Four Volumes (London: Printed for John Walker, 1796), 4:494. 45. Pindar, Liberty’s Last Squeak, lines 1–4. 46.  Pindar, “Pitt’s Translation,” from “The Convention Bill,” in The Works of Peter Pindar, 4:492. Pindar’s epigraph from one of Horace’s odes reads “Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo / Favete linguis” (“I hate the profane crowd and keep it at a distance / Be favorable with your tongues” (David West, translation of Horace: Odes II: Vatis Amici [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], 93). 47. Pindar, One Thousand Seven Hundred and Ninety-Six, in The Works of Peter Pindar, 4:3–22. Founder of the Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, Reeves (1752–1829) was a popular target in oppositional discourse. On Reeves and the Association, see Austin Mitchell, “The Association Movement of 1792–3,” Historical Journal 4.1 (1961): 56–77; E. C. Black, The Association: British Extraparliamentary Political Organization, 1769–1793 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); Dickinson, “Popular Loyalism”; Michael S. Smith, “Anti-Radicalism and Popular Politics in an Age of Revolution,” in Partisan Politics, Principles, and Reform in Parliament and the Constituencies, 1689–1889, eds. Clyve Jones, Philip Salmon, and Richard W. Davis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 71–92; and chap. 1 of Gilmartin’s Writing against Revolution. 48. Beddoes, A Word in Defence of the Bill of Rights, 5. Father of poet and political activist Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Thomas Beddoes resigned his Oxford University post in 1792 amidst complaints about his support for the principles of the French Revolution. On the Home Office’s investigation of Beddoes, see Mike Jay, The A ­ tmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiments of Dr. Beddoes and His Sons of Genius (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 68–72. 49. Beddoes, A Word in Defence of the Bill of Rights, 5. Similar warnings about the nation’s health came from a pamphlet titled Ten Minutes Advice to the People of England, on the Two Slavery-Bills Intended to be Brought into Parliament the Present Sessions (1795), written by “Common Sense,” who appropriately borrowed Paineite syntax to argue that “there never was, there never can be a nation, which enjoys the unviolated exercise of its rights, on which silence is imposed, and to which discussion is denied” (6). 50. Ibid., 5. 51. Coleridge, Conciones, 27. 52.  “Star Report of the Bristol Guildhall Meetings of 17 and 20 November 1795,” in Coleridge, Lectures 1795, 361.

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53.  The Plot Discovered has often been bundled with other work that Coleridge composed at Bristol in 1795 in studies of his early political writing. Treatments of the tract on its own have sourced some of the passages on parliamentary process to James Burgh’s 1774 Political Disquisitions (Lucyle Werkmeister, “Coleridge’s The Plot Discovered: Some Facts and a Speculation,” Modern Philology 56.4 [1959]: 254–63), and examined the cloudy matter of the essay’s exact publication date (Peter Kitson, “Coleridge’s The Plot Discovered: A New Date,” Notes and Queries 31.1 [1984]: 57–8). Victoria Myers, however, has argued that The Plot Discovered deserves specific attention, “both for the part it plays in the development of Coleridge’s modes of argumentation and for its interpretation of the polemical scene he joined” (“The Other Fraud: Coleridge’s The Plot Discovered and the Rhetoric of Political Discourse,” in Romanticism, Radicalism, and the Press, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997], 74). The most sustained reading of The Plot Discovered is offered by political historian Pamela Edwards, who examines Coleridge’s fear that the Gagging Acts were meant to transfer ultimate power from the king to the prime minister (The Statesman’s Science: History, Nature, and Law in the Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge [New York: Columbia University Press, 2004], 47). 54.  Prompted by Pitt’s legislation, this conviction was also inflected by the stormy events of Coleridge’s own life in late 1795. As the Gagging Acts were introduced in parliament, he was weathering a painful break with Robert Southey, and along with it the loss of any hope for the realization of Pantisocracy (Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 1, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956]; hereafter cited parenthetically as CL). On the historical resonances of “plot” in the title of Coleridge’s pamphlet, see Edwards, Statesman’s Science, 48. 55. Coleridge, Conciones, 52–3. 56.  Scrivener has shown that the term “Jacobin” came to signify virtually any “democratic or reformist expression” (Seditious Allegories, 30). “Parliament” is from the French parler, to speak. 57.  Patton and Mann suggest that Coleridge neither delivered nor composed the planned “On the Liberty of the Press” (see their introduction to Coleridge, Lectures 1795, xi). 58.  Coleridge would return to this etymology (for which, as H. J. Jackson points out, there is “no lexicographical authority”) in an 1800 newspaper piece, and again in the 1830s (H. J. Jackson, “Coleridge, Etymology, and Etymologic,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44.1 [1983]: 76–7). 59.  The cockatrice is traceable to Isaiah 14.29: “[O]ut of the serpent’s roote shall come forth a cockatrice, and his fruite shall be a fiery flying serpent” (The Bible: Authorized King James Version, eds. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], 778). The cockatrice often appears as a synonym for evil: George Herbert compared his errant thoughts to a cockatrice in “Sinnes Round” (1633), for example, and in Caleb Williams, Falkland’s old servant Thomas names Caleb the “spawn of a cockatrice” (183). Coleridge returned to the image again a year and a half later when writing about his 1795 break with Southey: “some most false, / False and fair-foliag’d as the Manchineel, / Have tempted me to slumber

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in their shade” (“To the Rev. George Coleridge,” in Poetical Works: Poems (Reading Text), ed. J. C. C. Mays [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001], 1:326–8). 60. Coleridge, Notebooks, 1:1387. See also Angela Esterhammer, The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 163. 61.  Steven E. Cole, “Coleridge, Language, and the Production of Agency,” Modern Philology 88.2 (1990): 118. 62.  Paul Hamilton, Coleridge’s Poetics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 72. 63. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, or, Biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions, eds. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 82. 64. Coleridge, Lectures 1795, 94. 65. Esterhammer, Romantic Performative, 163. 66. Ibid., 164. 67. Coleridge, Notebooks, 1:99.G53. 68.  John Milton, Areopagitica (in The Major Works, eds. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 247). Coleridge was not alone in looking back to republican Milton. Areopagitica had become a virtual genre amidst the Pitt ministry’s assaults on the press. Complete with a defense of Galileo, Robert Hall’s An Apology for the Freedom of the Press (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1794), for example, sticks close to Milton’s tract: “However some may affect to dread controversy, it can never be of ultimate disadvantage to the interests of truth, or the happiness of mankind. Where it is indulged in its full extent, a multitude of ridiculous opinions will, no doubt, be obtruded upon the public; but any ill influence they may produce cannot continue long, as they are sure to be opposed with at least equal ability, and that superior advantage which is ever attendant upon truth” (3). 69. Coleridge, Notebooks, 1:99.G.93. 70.  William St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 137. Godwin’s diary for 22 November 1795 records the note “Write Petition.” Glossing this entry, the editors of The Diary of William Godwin comment that “Godwin seems to have written a petition against the Two Acts” (The Diary of William Godwin, eds. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp [Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010]). 71.  Transported to Australia in 1795, Gerrald, like so many sentenced to transportation, barely survived the appalling voyage, and died on 10 March 1796. On Godwin’s involvement in Gerrald’s case, see “Godwin’s Letter to Joseph Gerrald,” Caleb Williams, 355–8. 72.  Patton and Mann, introduction to Coleridge, Lectures 1795, li. 73. Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, vol. 3 of Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), 13. 74.  Charles Cestre, John Thelwall: A Pioneer of Democracy and Social Reform in England during the French Revolution (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1906), 137.

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75. Thompson, The Romantics, 99. 76. Ibid., 98. In “Wordsworth’s Crisis,” Thompson went so far as to claim that Godwin’s pamphlet “afforded legitimation, and from the ultra-radical wing, to the authors of the Two Acts” (The Romantics, 89). 77.  B. Sprague Allen, “William Godwin’s Influence upon John Thelwall,” PMLA 37.4 (1922): 671. Of early commentators, George Woodcock was exceptional in insisting on Godwin’s critique of Pitt and Grenville (William Godwin: A Biographical Study [London: Porcupine Press, 1946], 115, 113); more recently, Mark Philp has offered a strong resistance to the conventional reading of Considerations, arguing that Godwin views the legislation as “bordering on despotism.” For Philp, the complex argument of Considerations needs to be understood against a wider cultural matrix of flexible, non-Manichaean political thought (and so not made to fit a familiar Burke/Paine binary). While I agree with Philp’s sense that Considerations has been strangely misread, I suggest that Godwin inhabits only to empty out the loyalist discourse of the tract’s opening pages. For Philp’s reading of Considerations, see “Thompson, Godwin, and the French Revolution,” History Workshop Journal 39 (1995): 89–101, and “Godwin, Thelwall, and the Means of Progress,” in Godwinian Moments: From the Enlightenment to Romanticism, eds. Robert M. Maniquis and Victoria Myers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 59–82. 78.  Qtd. in St. Clair, The Godwins, 136. 79.  To the People! 27 November 1795 (Add. 6958, box 9, Cambridge University Library). 80.  In a similar case, Thelwall was riled by a passage in Coleridge’s The Plot Discovered, though Coleridge patiently wrote to Thelwall to explain his use of irony: “The words ‘unsupported Malcontent’ are caught up from the well-known contemptuous pages of Aristocratic Writers & turned upon them: they evidently could not be spoken in my own person” (CL, i.122). 81.  Monthly Review, unsigned review of Godwin’s Considerations (1795), 451. 82. Ibid., 452. 83.  “Mr. Godwin,” in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: J. M. Dent, 1933), 16:394. 84.  See, for example, Gary Handwerk, “Of Caleb’s Guilt and Godwin’s Truth: Ideology and Ethics in Caleb Williams,” English Literary History 60.4 (1993): 939– 60; David McCracken, “Godwin’s Literary Theory: The Alliance between Fiction and Political Philosophy,” Philological Quarterly 49.1 (1970): 113–33; and Evan Radcliffe, “Godwin from ‘Metaphysician’ to Novelist: ‘Political Justice,’ Caleb Williams, and the Tension between Philosophical Argument and Narrative,” Modern Philology 97.4 (2000): 528–53. 85. Godwin, Caleb Williams, 349. 86. Ibid., 351. 87.  William Hazlitt, “William Godwin,” in Complete Works, 11:24. 88.  Francis Horner, The Horner Papers: Selections from the Letters and Miscellaneous Writings of Francis Horner, M.P., 1795–1817, eds. Kenneth Bourne and William Banks Taylor (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), 48.

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89. James Harris, Diaries and Correspondence of James Harris, First Earl of Malmesbury, 2nd ed. (London: R. Bentley, 1845), 3:246. 90. Ibid., 248. Beddoes also noticed a growing discontent with the prime minister among his previous supporters, who “have in great measure withdrawn their confidence from Mr. Pitt. The warmest of his admirers cannot now believe him a tenth part of the man he promised he would be at his outset” (A Word in Defence of the Bill of Rights, 2). 91. The 1715 Riot Act gave local officials broad power to disperse political gatherings. 92.  Charles James Fox, Memorials and Correspondence of Charles James Fox, ed. Lord John Russell (London: Richard Bentley, 1856), 3:129–30. 93. Coleridge, The Watchman, vol. 2 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Lewis Patton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 127. 94. Thompson, Making, 147.

Chapter Two 1.  Howard’s text is a clinical indictment of prison conditions. He describes witnessing at Plymouth Town Gaol, for instance, convicts in a group cell gasping “by turns for breath” at a “wicket in the door seven inches by five” (John Howard, The State of Prisons in England and Wales [Warrington: William Eyres, 1777], 380). Howard would later visit prisons outside Britain, leading to his publication of An Account of the Principal Lazarettos in Europe (Warrington: William Eyres, 1789). 2.  William Bowles, Verses on Reading Mr. Howard’s Description of Prison, printed in Sonnets and Other Poems, 3rd ed. (Bath: R. Crutwell, 1794), 49–55, 59–65; Samuel Bishop, The Poetical Works of Rev. Samuel Bishop (London: A. Strahan, 1796), 2:254; Bernard Barton, New Year’s Eve and Other Poems (London: John Hatchard and Son, 1828), 165–6; Thomas Dermody, The Harp of Erin (London: Richard Phillips, 1807), 1:172–8. For the influence of Howard’s State of the Prisons on the portrayal of jail conditions in Caleb Williams and other 1790s novels, see Mona Scheuermann, ­Social Protest in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985), and Alexander H. Pitofsky, “‘What Do You Think Laws Were Made For?’: Prison Reform Discourse and the English Jacobin Novel,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 33 (2004): 293–312. 3.  The catalogue of 1790s writing about imprisonment includes William Gadesby’s An Account of the Life and Transactions of William Gadesby . . . Written by Himself, When in Prison (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1791); Assassination of the King! The Conspirators Exposed, or, an Account of the Apprehension, Treatment in Prison, and Repeated Examinations Before the Privy Council, of John Smith and George Higgins, on a Charge of High Treason (London, 1795); William Hodgson’s The Case of William Hodgson, Now Confined in Newgate (London: Printed for the Author, 1796); and Cold Bath Fields Prison, by Some Called the English Bastille! by Francis Burdett (London, [1799]). Additionally, a number of tracts from the Civil War period were reprinted, such as Richard Coppin’s A Blow at the Serpent; or a Gentle Answer from

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Maidstone Prison (1653; reprint, London, 1796). Adding to these publications were the private letters of inmates. On 30 January 1794, for instance, Thomas Lloyd wrote from the “Felons Side of Newgate” to John Horne Tooke to explain “to what impositions those who are imprisoned here are subjected” and to ask him “to interpose on the ground of the law you will judge.” Lloyd explains that he has also written to “both the President of the U.S. and to Congress” (National Archives, TS 11/956). While in prison, Lloyd kept a journal and also wrote a pamphlet protesting prison conditions titled Impositions and Abuses in the Management of the Jail of Newgate (London, 1794). Lloyd’s prison journal and pamphlet are both reprinted in Newgate in Revolution: An Anthology of Radical Prison Literature in the Age of Revolution, eds. Michael T. Davis, Iain McCalman, and Christina Parolin (New York: Continuum, 2005), 69–80, 81–116. 4.  Thelwall, “Prefatory Memoir,” in Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement (Here­ ford: W. H. Parker, 1801), xxviii. 5.  Ibid., xxix; Coleridge, CL, i:307. 6.  M. H. Abrams, “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” in ­Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970), 201. 7.  Victor Brombert, The Romantic Prison: The French Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 8.  Leo Bersani, “The Subject of Power,” Diacritics 7.3 (1977): 9. 9.  Jonathan Wordsworth, introduction to Poems Written in Close Confinement in the Tower and Newgate, under a Charge of High Treason, by John Thelwall (Otley, UK: Woodstock Books, 2000), 3. 10.  “The Convict,” likely one of Wordsworth’s Racedown fragments from ca. 1796, was first printed in the Morning Post on 14 December 1797. See Stephen Maxfield Parrish on the differences between this version and the one included with Lyrical Ballads (The Art of the Lyrical Ballads [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973], 191–5). After the 1798 Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth never again published the poem. Citations of “The Convict” are hereafter parenthetical by line number. 11.  Burney called the poem’s sympathy for the prisoner “misplaced commiseration,” and scolded: “We do not comprehend the drift of lavishing that tenderness and compassion on a criminal” (Charles Burney, review of Lyrical Ballads, Monthly Review 29 [1799]: 210). 12.  Godwin uses the language of organic “transplant” in his discussion of penology in Political Justice: “Surely it would be better in this respect to imitate the system of the universe, and, if we would teach justice and humanity, transplant those we would teach into a natural and reasonable state of society” (William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, vol. 3 of Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp [London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993]), 404. For the influence of Godwin’s version of transportation on Wordsworth’s poem, see Toby Benis, “Transportation and the Reform of Narrative,” Criticism 45.3 (2003): 285–99. 13. More, Village Politics (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1792), 6.

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14. More, The Gin-Shop; Or, a Peep into a Prison (Bath: S. Hazard, 1795), lines 8, 29 (hereafter cited parenthetically by line number). 15.  The Society for the Discharge and Relief of Persons Imprisoned for Small Debts was established in 1773 (see James Neild, An Account of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Society for the Discharge and Relief of Persons Imprisoned for Small Debts [London: Nichols and Son, 1802]). Contemporary pamphlets argued that the laws affecting debtors were both inefficient and unnecessarily punitive. See, for instance, Thomas MacDonald’s A Treatise on Civil Imprisonment in ­England . . . As it Respects the Interests of Creditors, and the Punishment or Protection of Debtors (London: J. Murray, 1791). For a modern account of the plight of debtors in the eighteenth century, see Philip Woodfine, “Debtors, Prisons, and Petitions in Eighteenth-­ Century England,” Eighteenth-Century Life 30.2 (2006): 1–31. 16. More, The History of Mr. Fantom: The New-Fashioned Philosopher and His Man William (London: J. Marshall, [1797]), 8 (hereafter cited parenthetically). 17.  Jack Brown in Prison (London: J. Marshall, [1796]) (hereafter cited parenthetically). 18.  John Horne Tooke, The Prison Diary (16 May–22 November 1794) of John Horne Tooke, eds. A. V. Beedell and A. D. Harvey (Leeds: Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1995), [179] 41. 19.  The Affecting Case of James MacCurdy is printed as an appendix to The Case of Thomas Spence, Bookseller (1792; reprint, [London], 1793), 13–4. On the conditions of late eighteenth-century prisons, see Philip Woodfine, “Debtors, Prisons, and ­Petitions,” and Anthony Babington, The English Bastille: A History of Newgate Gaol and Prison Conditions in Britain 1188–1902 (London: Macdonald, 1971). 20.  The Affecting Case of James MacCurdy, 15. 21.  Hodgson spent two years in Newgate for a pub-room toast to the “French Republic.” His sentence was extended indefinitely when he was ordered to pay a fine of £200, along with a £400 security—unmanageable sums for Hodgson. See The Case of William Hodgson, 8–9. 22.  They were an able group for this venture: the incarcerated included John Horne Tooke, Thomas Spence, Benjamin Flower, Gilbert Wakefield, Richard Brothers, Charles Pigott, John Wolcot (Peter Pindar), Thomas Holcroft, John Frost (attorney and SCI member), William Winterbotham (radical preacher), Daniel Holt (writer and newspaper editor), Richard Newton (engraver for the publisher William Holland), Thomas Muir and Thomas Palmer (the “Scottish Martyrs,” who were eventually transported to Australia), Jeremiah Joyce (LCS member and tutor of the Earl of Stanhope’s children), and Sampson Perry (newspaper editor), as well as publishers and booksellers Joseph Johnson, Daniel Isaac Eaton, James Ridgeway, William Holland, and Henry Symonds. For a full catalogue, see McCalman, “Newgate in Revolution: Radical Enthusiasm and Romantic Counterculture,” Eighteenth-Century Life 22.1 (1998): 99; Manogue, “The Plight of James Ridgway, London Bookseller and Publisher, and the Newgate Radicals, 1792–1797,” Wordsworth Circle 27.3 (1996): 158–66; and Werkmeister, Newspaper History. James Epstein examines the imprisonment of John Frost in “‘Equality and No King’:

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Sociability and ­Sedition: The Case of John Frost,” in Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–1840, eds. Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 43–61. See John Issitt, ­Jeremiah Joyce (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2006), for details of Joyce’s arrest and imprisonment, and for an account of Joseph Johnson’s ordeal, see Jane Worthington Smyser, “The Trial and Imprisonment of Joseph Johnson, Bookseller,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 77 (1974): 418–35. Davis, McCalman, and Parolin helpfully collect the writings of several of these political prisoners in Newgate in Revolution. 23.  McCalman, “Newgate in Revolution,” 107. 24.  Jeremiah Joyce, A Sermon Preached on Sunday, February the 23rd, 1794 . . . to Which is Added An Appendix, Containing an Account of the Author’s Arrest for “Treasonable Practices” (London: Printed for the Author, 1795), app. 11. 25. Joyce, A Sermon Preached, app. 12. The prison diary of John Augustus Bonney suggests that he was sometimes able to host guests in his cell, though he also records, in an entry on 1 August 1794, the close surveillance under which he was kept: “Liberty to walk about the Tower accompanied by a warder allowed to all the prisoners, but not to speak to any one” (Roe, Politics of Nature, 133). 26.  James Boaden records that “when Holcroft was committed to prison on a charge of High Treason,” Elizabeth Inchbald “went immediately with Robinson the publisher in a coach to Newgate to visit him” (Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald [London: Richard Bentley, 1833], 1:330). Along with Inchbald, McCalman also lists Maria Reveley, Amelia Alderson (later Opie), and Polly Levi as prison visitors (“Newgate in Revolution,” 102). The Welsh poet Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg), after visiting Winterbotham at Newgate, penned “Newgate Stanzas” (Davies, Presences That Disturb, 151). And it was to Ridgeway in Newgate that Southey, on some reports, gave the manuscript of Wat Tyler, about the British folk hero who led a storming of Newgate, such as it was, in 1381. The manuscript eventually found its way to Winterbotham. For more on Southey and Winterbotham’s knotty relationship, see Ralph Manogue, “Southey and William Winterbotham: New Light on an Old Quarrel,” Charles Lamb Bulletin 38 (1982): 104–15. 27.  Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 135–6. Godwin’s diary lists at least eighteen visits to Newgate: 7 August 1793, 28 March 1794, 2 April 1794, 21 May 1794, 16 July 1794, 12 August 1794, 23 August 1794, 30 September 1794, 14 October 1794, 16 October 1794, 20 October 1794, 21 October 1794, 22 October 1794, 24 October 1794, 25 October 1794, 15 November 1794, 23 November 1794, and 29 November 1794 (The Diary of William Godwin). 28.  Michael Hardt, “Prison Time,” Yale French Studies 91 (1997): 65. 29. Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 404. 30. Ibid., 404. 31.  Abrams, “Structure and Style,” 201. 32. Ibid., 202. 33. Ibid., 212. 34.  On Bonney’s arrest and imprisonment, see Roe, Politics of Nature, 120–30.

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Roe suggests that Bonney’s defense of reformers (including Eaton and J. S. Jordan, the publisher of Paine’s Rights of Man) left him “an obvious target for prosecution, and ensured his arrest” (124). 35.  Smyser, “The Trial and Imprisonment of Joseph Johnson,” 427. 36.  Alan Wharam, The Treason Trials, 1794 (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1992), 146. 37.  The manuscript contains poems that Bonney wrote between 23 June and 22 September 1794 (Add. MSS 46870, British Library, London). References to Bonney’s verse are hereafter given parenthetically by line number. 38.  Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower from 1603 to 1616, and executed in 1618 after another brief term in jail. William Russell and Algernon Sidney were imprisoned in Newgate and the Tower by Charles II in 1683, and both were executed that year. 39.  Entry from 20 July 1794, Tooke’s Prison Diary, [194] 56. 40. Coleridge, CL, i.102. 41.  J. Holland and J. Everett, The Memoirs of James Montgomery (London: Longman, 1854), 202. Coleridge toured the Midlands to secure subscriptions for the Watchman in January and February of 1796 (see Holmes, Coleridge, 106–16). Out of respect for the circulation numbers of Montgomery’s Iris, Coleridge left Sheffield without asking for subscribers (CL, i.102). On Montgomery’s first conviction, see his own pamphlet, The Trial of James Montgomery for a Libel on the War (Sheffield: J. Montgomery, 1795), and for a full account of his ordeal, see Isaac and Schmoller, “Letters from a Newspaperman in Prison,” Library 4.2 (2003): 150–67. 42.  Joseph Gales (1761–1841), treated in more detail in Chapter 3, was a founding member of the Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information. In the final issue of his Sheffield Register (27 June 1794), Gales declared, “I shall seek that livelihood in another land which I cannot peaceably gain in this.” He eventually settled in America. 43.  James Montgomery, letter to Joseph Aston, January 1795; MSS SLPS 37(1)4b, Sheffield City Archives. 44.  Paul Positive [James Montgomery], Prison Amusements: And Other Trifles: Principally Written During Nine Months of Confinement in the Castle of York (London: J. Johnson, 1797). Montgomery sent a few of his poems directly from his cell to John Pye Smith, who was running the Sheffield Iris in his absence. He began preparing Prison Amusements after his release, writing to Joseph Aston on 11 July 1796 about his plans for a volume of prison poems (MSS SLPS 37(1)9, Sheffield City Archives). 45. Thelwall, Political Lectures, 23. 46.  For a helpful survey of Thelwall’s 1787 Poems on Various Subjects, see Vernon Owen Grumbling, “John Thelwall: Romantick and Revolutionist” (PhD diss., University of New Hampshire, 1977), 159–66. Judith Thompson, introduction to The Peripatetic, by John Thelwall (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 11. 47. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, 97, 78. 48. Thelwall, Close Confinement, i. 49.  Ibid., ii.

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50. Ibid. 51. On the prison experiences of Ridgeway, Symonds, and Eaton, see McCalman, “Newgate in Revolution”; and on Eaton in particular, see Michael T. Davis, “‘That Odious Class of Men Called Democrats’: Daniel Isaac Eaton and the Romantics, 1794–1795,” History 84.273 (1999): 74–92, and “‘Good for the Public Example’: Daniel Isaac Eaton, Prosecution, Punishment, and Recognition, 1793–1812,” in Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775–1848 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000), 110–32. Milton spent a few months in prison in late 1660 (Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000], 401). 52.  This epigraph evokes, as Scrivener notes, the political voices of seventeenthcentury Britain, and indicates that “Milton and other examples of Republican virtue,” such as Russell, Sidney, and Hampden, offered Thelwall “ethical models that gave meaning to his imprisonment in 1794 and provided continuity with an English past” (Michael Scrivener, “John Thelwall and the Revolution of 1649,” in Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1650–1830: From Revolution to Revolution, eds. Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 120). Thelwall excerpts lines 662–5 from Comus—Milton’s full line 664 reads, “With all thy charms, although this corporal rinde.” 53.  See Scrivener, “Revolution,” 121, as well as Grumbling, “John Thelwall,” 168. 54.  On the relation between Thelwall’s 1790s sonnets and Wordsworth’s 1802–3 sequence, see Judith Thompson, John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle, chap. 9. 55.  Thelwall’s report of Muir’s death-by-transportation was exaggerated, though not greatly: Gerrald and William Skirving, Muir’s fellow Scottish activists, died soon after arriving in Australia, but Muir in fact survived the grueling voyage, finally dying in 1799. On Muir, Skirving, and Thomas Fyshe Palmer, see Kenneth R. Johnston, “The First and Last British Convention.” 56. Thelwall, Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, viii. 57. Thompson, The Romantics, 159. 58.  George Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Lovers’ Progress [1646], in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), vol. 10, V.i.87–90. Thelwall’s lines from Beaumont and Fletcher are unaltered except for the addition of “the” in the fourth line of the epigraph. 59.  On the history of scaffold discourse within Britain, see Leigh Yetter’s collection Public Execution in England, 1573–1868, 8 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009–10). 60.  Hazlitt, “On Genius and Common Sense,” in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: J. M. Dent, 1930), 1:264–79. 61.  Written in the last few years of the decade, Thelwall’s Llyswen lyrics were published in Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, his most substantial volume as a poet. This collection contains about three dozen pieces, including a series of “effusions” on the death of his daughter Maria, fragments from a projected epic (The Hope of Albion), and a “dramatic romance” titled The Fairy of the Lake.

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62. Thelwall, Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, xxxiv. 63.  Ibid., i–ii. 64.  Ibid., xxxiii. 65.  Ibid., xxxiv. 66.  Letter from Thelwall to Hardy, 24 May 1798; MS 2010.58, Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. 67.  Qtd. in Thompson, The Romantics, 178. For a similar report, see Thelwall’s 24 May 1798 letter to Hardy (cited in note 66), in which he writes that he decided not to visit his friends “lest it should be made a pretence for seizing us under a charge of negociating a French invasion.” 68.  P. J. Corfield and Chris Evans, “John Thelwall in Wales: New Documentary Evidence,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 59.140 (1986): 236–7. The archives hold a number of similar reports. On 23 April 1798, Lord Dynevor wrote to the Home Office requesting that troops be stationed at Carmathen, Wales, because of the “threat” that Thelwall posed: “Mr Thelwall and several more of the Corresponding Society have paid us a visit and been endeavouring to enlighten us” (GD51/1/923, National Archives of Scotland). Two days later, Roderick Gwynne, “an Officer and a loyal subject,” sent the Home Office a report on Thelwall’s activities: “When he first arrived he went round to the different houses of people whom he considered as favorable to his principles, in order to procure some pecuniary assistance,” adding, “he constantly writes and receives from twelve to twenty letters daily: his correspondents are supposed to be members of the Corresponding Society” (Corfield and Evans, “John Thelwall in Wales,” 236). On Thelwall’s warranted sense of persecution, see also Thompson, The Romantics, especially 44–9. 69. Davies, Presences That Disturb, 207. 70.  Andrew McCann, “Politico-Sentimentality: John Thelwall, Literary Production and Critique of Capital in the 1790s,” Romanticism 3.1 (1997): 48. 71.  Tracing a complex poetic conversation between Thelwall and Coleridge, Judith Thompson points out that Thelwall here returns to the gesture of Coleridge’s letter of 17 December 1796: “I would to God we could sit by a fireside & joke viva voce, face to face—Stella & Sarah, Jack Thelwall & I” (CL, i.295), and argues that in broader terms “Lines, written at Bridgewater” can be read as Thelwall’s response to Coleridge’s “Ode on the Departing Year” (John Thelwall, 37). 72.  Margaret E. Poole Sandford, Thomas Poole and His Friends (New York: Macmillan, 1888), 1:235. 73. Coleridge, CL, i.343–4. 74.  I discuss the Home Office’s report on the Wordsworth circle at Alfoxden in greater detail in Chapter 5. 75.  “The Woodbine,” composed in 1797, was included in Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement. 76.  Thelwall is central to the opening sections of The Making of the English Working Class, and Thompson expanded his case for Thelwall’s cultural significance in “Hunting the Jacobin Fox.” 77.  See Judith Thompson, “‘An autumnal blast, a killing frost’: Coleridge’s Po-

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etic Conversation with John Thelwall,” Studies in Romanticism 36.3 (1997): 427–56. More recently, Thompson has argued that Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” has a pretext in Thelwall’s “To Stella” (John Thelwall, 42). In similar terms, Damian Walford Davies has suggested that Thelwall’s elegies on the death of his daughter offer an “intertextual dialogue” with both Coleridge and Wordsworth (Presences That Disturb, 194), and Michael Murphy has proposed Thelwall’s influence on Coleridge’s depiction of alienation in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (“John Thelwall, Coleridge, and the Ancient Mariner,” Romanticism 8.1 [2002]: 62–74). The relation between Coleridge’s poetry on the topic of confinement and Thelwall’s poems about actual imprisonment has been noted by Keane, Mays, Roe, and Mee. For an alternative reading of the relationship between the prison poetry of Coleridge and Thelwall, see Mee’s “‘The Dungeon and the Cell’: The Prison Verse of Coleridge and Thelwall,” in John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, ed. Steve Poole (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), 107–16. 78. Holmes, Coleridge, 33. 79. Coleridge, Poetical Works, 1:560–67. 80.  “The Dungeon” and “The Foster-Mother’s Tale” were both excerpted from Coleridge’s drama Osorio (in 1813 retitled Remorse), written on and off from March through September 1797. 81.  Paul Magnuson, Reading Public Romanticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 82. Coleridge, CL, i.334. 83.  Charles Lamb and Mary Anne Lamb, The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 1:117. 84. Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions, 152. The imprisonments of the 1790s brought a corresponding attention to psychiatric confinement. Just as Godwin had visited Newgate, for instance, he also, together with Mary Wollstonecraft and Joseph Johnson, visited Bedlam in February 1797. 85.  R. A. Durr, “‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ and a Recurrent Action in Coleridge,” English Literary History 26.4 (1959): 517; Anne K. Mellor, “Coleridge’s ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ and the Categories of English Landscape,” Studies in Romanticism 18.2 (1979): 268. 86.  Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 37. 87.  Coleridge’s pseudonym, “ESTEESI,” was both a playful phonetic for his own initials and a transliteration of the Greek Eστησε, which Coleridge translated in a letter as “He hath stood,” insisting that this was “no unmeaning signature” in “these times of apostasy.” See Magnuson, Reading Public Romanticism, 59.

Chapter Three 1.  Wordsworth to Daniel Stuart, 3–4 May 1809, in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, Part 1, 1806–1811, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Mary Moorman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 327 (hereafter abbreviated as MY and cited parenthetically).

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2.  Hutchinson’s note is in a postscript to Wordsworth’s 5 May 1809 letter to De Quincey (MY, 330). 3.  Dorothy Wordsworth to De Quincey, 6 May 1809 (MY, 336). 4. Coleridge’s Watchman, printed every eight days to avoid the stamp tax, ran for ten issues from 1 March to 13 May 1796. See Lewis Patton’s introduction to The Watchman, as well as David Jasper, “Preserving Freedom and Her Friends: A Reading of Coleridge’s ‘Watchman,’” Yearbook of English Studies 19 (1989): 208–18. 5. Coleridge, Watchman, 374. 6. The Cambridge Intelligencer was the first venue for Coleridge’s impressive early poem “Ode to the Departing Year” (31 December 1796), as well as his “Lines Written at the King’s Arms, Ross” (27 September 1794), “Sonnet (Anna and Harland)” (25 October 1794), “Sonnet (Geneviere)” (1 November 1794), “Addressed to a Young Man of Fortune” (17 December 1796), and “Parliamentary Oscillators” (6 January 1798). On other pieces possibly by Coleridge that appeared in the Cambridge Intelligencer, see David V. Erdman, “Unrecorded Coleridge Variants,” Studies in Bibliography 11 (1958): 143–62. 7.  E. P. Thompson, “Disenchantment or Default?” in The Romantics, 166. 8.  Flower’s annual income at the time of the 1799 trial was £140. 9.  Timothy D. Whelan, introduction to Politics, Religion, and Romance: The Letters of Benjamin Flower and Eliza Gould Flower, 1794–1808 (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 2008), xiii. 10.  As Jonathan Mulrooney notes, while the newspaper remains understudied, Jon Klancher, Kevin Gilmartin, and others have drawn critical attention to influential Romantic-era periodicals, especially the Edinburgh Review, Quarterly Review, and Blackwood’s (Jonathan Mulrooney, “Reading the Romantic-Period Daily News,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 24.4 [2002]: 351–77). On Romantic-era periodicals, see Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Gilmartin, Print Politics; Mark Parker, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Mark Schoenfield, British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The “Literary Lower Empire” (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and David Stewart, Romantic Magazines and Metropolitan Literary Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 11.  Most significant are the 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers, the 19th Century British Library Newspapers, and the Times Digital Archive. 12.  Wordsworth to Matthews, 23 May 1794, EY, 119. 13.  Wordsworth to Matthews, 7 November 1794, EY, 135. 14.  Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 315–26; Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge, 276–9. 15.  Arthur Aspinall, Politics and the Press, c. 1780–1850 (London: Home and Van Thal, 1949); Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion in Late ­Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 16.  Mulrooney, “Reading the Romantic-Period Daily News,” 353. 17. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 65.

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18.  This revisionary criticism has tended to focus on the various public spheres (or “counter–public spheres”) left uncharted by Habermas’s map, influenced by the broader critiques of Habermas by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993]), Geoff Eley (“Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992]), and Terry Eagleton (The Function of Criticism: From the Spectator to Post-Structuralism [London: Verso, 1984]). Gilmartin offers a helpful account in Print Politics, 3–4, and Barrell questions the usefulness of Habermas’s model for Romantic-era coffee shops in particular in The Spirit of Despotism, 79–82. 19. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 62. 20.  Donald Read, Press and People, 1790–1850 (London: Edward Arnold, 1961), 106. On newspapers and journalists subject to state pressure and persecution, see Werkmeister, Newspaper History. Jon Mee examines one of Pitt’s agents of propaganda, George Rose, in “The ‘insidious poison of secret Influence’: A New Historical Context for Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose,’” Eighteenth-Century Life 22.1 (1998): 111–22. 21.  Along with Flower’s Cambridge Intelligencer, oppositional newspapers included Joseph Gales’s Sheffield Register (which became James Montgomery’s Sheffield Iris), Richard Phillips’s Leicester Herald, Walker and Cooper’s Manchester Herald, and Sampson Perry’s Argus, as well as the Liverpool Herald, Leicester Chronicle, Newcastle Chronicle, Bury and Norwich Post, Worcester Herald, and Salopian Journal. The most prominent loyalist newspapers were the Sun and the True Briton, set up by the Pitt ministry in 1792; other loyalist venues were the Star, Observer, Leicester Journal, Manchester Mercury, York Courant, Liverpool Phoenix, Hampshire Chronicle, ­Nottingham and Newark Journal, Newcastle Courant, Caledonian Mercury, and the Edinburgh Herald (see H. T. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in EighteenthCentury Britain [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995], 272). 22. Read, Press and People, 105. 23. Thompson, Making, 151. 24.  John Feather, “Cross-Channel Currents,” Library 2.1 (1980): 1–15. 25.  Craig Horner, “The Rise and Fall of Manchester’s ‘Set of Infernal Miscreants’: Radicalism in 1790s Manchester,” Manchester Region History Review 12 (1998): 18–26. 26. Read, Press and People, 71. See also Thomas Walker, A Review of Some of the Political Events Which Have Occurred in Manchester, During the Last Five Years (London: J. Johnson, 1794), 24–5, and Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, 228–30. 27. Walker, Review, 25. 28.  Qtd. in Read, Press and People, 71. 29. Walker, Review, 55. Alan Booth has examined the attack on Walker in the broader context of regional loyalism in “Popular Loyalism and Public Violence in the North-West of England, 1790–1800,” Social History 8.3 (1983): 295–313. 30. Walker, Review, 55.

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31.  Violent Dissolution, Being the last Exit of Mons. Herald of Manchester, a near relation of Mons. Argus of London, who expired Saturday last to the great regret of the Jacobin Paineites, &c. Broadsheet published at Manchester, 6 April 1793 (Ref. No. GB127. Broadsides/F1793.16), Manchester Archives, Greater Manchester County Record Office; qtd. in Craig Horner, “The Rise and Fall.” 32. Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, 220. 33. Read, Press and People, 69. 34. Ibid., 70; Michael J. Murphy, Cambridge Newspapers and Opinion, 1780–1850 (Cambridge, UK: Oleander Press, 1977), 19. 35.  In his 27 August 1790 editorial, for example, Gales announced that Olaudah Equiano (also a member of the LCS) was in Sheffield, and invited his readers to meet the ex-slave in person. Gales’s request was taken up—Equiano left the city with many new supporters, and published a note in the 2 September 1790 issue that indicates his success there in gathering subscriptions for his Interesting Narrative. See my “The Other Interesting Narrative: Olaudah Equiano’s Public Book Tour,” PMLA 121.5 (2006): 1436–8. 36.  Robert Eadon Leader, Reminiscences of Old Sheffield. Its Streets and Its People (Sheffield: Leader and Sons, 1875). 37.  For a helpful account of Gales’s career as an oppositional journalist, and his eventual decision to flee the country, see W. H. G. Armytage, “The Editorial Experience of Joseph Gales, 1786–1794,” North Carolina Historical Review 28.3 (1951): 332–61. 38. Read, Press and People, 70. As we saw in Chapter 2, the editorial duties of the Sheffield Register were subsequently taken over by James Montgomery. 39.  Benjamin Flower, Statement of Facts, Relative to the Conduct of the Reverend John Clayton (Harlow: B. Flower, 1808), xxiii. Flower served as European agent for Tiverton wool manufacturer Nicholas Dennys (whose children Flower tutored when he was in England). 40.  Benjamin Flower, The French Constitution; with Remarks on Some of its Principal Articles; in Which Their Importance in a Political, Moral and Religious point of View, is Illustrated; and the Necessity of A Reformation in Church and State in Great Britain, Enforced, 2nd ed. (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1792), 445. 41. Ibid., 447. 42.  Monthly Review 8 (1792): 285. Flower was also singled out for critique in a letter printed in the Public Advertiser, which explained that The French Constitution made a rebuttal necessary because it was “both in its stile and manner much superior in point of strength and candor to most who have written upon the same subject” (4 September 1793). 43.  Whelan, introduction to Politics, Religion, and Romance, xxii. Francis Hodgson, editor of the Cambridge Chronicle, publically declared his support for the Pitt ministry and the war with France in the 22 February 1793 issue (Murphy, Cambridge Newspapers and Opinion, 25). 44. Murphy, Cambridge Newspapers and Opinion, 24. The anti-Paine demonstrations were reported in the Cambridge Chronicle on 4 January 1793.

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45. Frend’s Peace and Union Recommended to the Associated Bodies of Republicans and Anti-Republicans appeared in February 1793, leading to his eventual departure from Cambridge. See Frend’s An Account of the Proceedings in the University of Cambridge Against William Frend (Cambridge: B. Flower, 1793) and A Sequel to the Account (London: Robinson, 1795). Frida Knight offers a biographical account in University Rebel: The Life of William Frend, 1757–1841 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1971), and Roe studies Frend’s ordeal within the larger context of the political scene of early 1790s Cambridge (Wordsworth and Coleridge, 13–19, 84–117). 46.  Richard Flower’s partners included Henry Gunning (1768–1854), a graduate of Christ’s College and Esquire Bedell at Emmanuel College for five decades. See Henry Gunning’s Reminiscences of the University, Town and County of Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 47.  Flower’s works from this period include The Principles of the British Constitution Explained (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1793); National Sins Considered (Cambridge: Printed by the Author, 1796); The Proceedings of the House of Lords in the Case of Benjamin Flower (Cambridge: B. Flower, 1800); Reflections on the Preliminaries of Peace, Between Great Britain and the French Republic (Cambridge: B. Flower, 1802); and An Address to the Freeholders of Cambridgeshire on the General Election (Cambridge: B. Flower, 1802). 48.  Anna Letitia Barbauld, Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation, in Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose, eds. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002), 312. 49.  On poetry published in the Cambridge Intelligencer, see Poetry and Reform: Periodical Verse from the English Democratic Press, 1792–1824, ed. Michael Scrivener (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 53–60, as well as British War Poetry in the Age of Romanticism, 1793–1815, ed. Betty T. Bennett, rev. digital edition, ed. Orianne Smith, Romantic Circles, www.rc.umd.edu/editions/warpoetry. 50.  A similar print, titled A Sociable Meeting; or Old Friends with New Faces!!! Mum, is the order of the Day!! (pub. William Holland, December 1795) shows a forlorn Sheridan and Fox sitting face-to-face with matching padlocks across their mouths (British Library, George 8709). 51.  In early February 1796, Eliza Gould, Flower’s future wife, who was then one of the distributers of the Cambridge Intelligencer (at South Molton, north of Exeter), wrote to report that in her town she has been called a “broacher of Sedition, & one that in defiance of the whole corporation had taken in a Seditious newspaper, & persevered in doing so in contradiction to their injunctions.” Gould follows this account with a hope that “the reign of despotism might be short—I anticipate its termination with pleasure & confidence” (in Whelan, Politics, Religion, and ­Romance, 31). Gould had earlier written to Flower, asking him to address any letters to her not in her name but with an X marked in the corner, explaining, “I find the necessity of being strictly on my guard” (19 May 1795, ibid., 12–3). 52. Whelan, Politics, Religion, and Romance, 115. 53. See The Spirit of the Public Journals for 1800 (London: James Ridgway, 1801),

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4:213. For a version of cross reading from the Regency-era press, see Gilmartin, Print Politics, 95–6. 54.  Anti-Jacobin, 7 May 1798, 264. 55. Ibid., 265. The Cambridge Intelligencer’s circulation was 2700 by January 1797 (Whelan, introduction to Politics, Religion, and Romance, xxiii). 56.  Anti-Jacobin, 7 May 1798, 265. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., 268–9. Williams was sentenced to a year in prison for publishing Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason. Williams’s case triggered a flurry of pamphlets, including one by Paine himself: A Letter to the Hon. Thomas Erskine, on the Prosecution of Thomas Williams, for Publishing the Age of Reason (Paris: Printed for the Author, 1797). John Marsom responded to Paine with Falsehood Detected: Being Animadversions on Mr. Paine’s Letter to the Honorable Thomas Erskine, on the Trial of Thomas Williams, for Publishing “The Age of Reason” (London: Printed by the Author, 1798). Meanwhile, Williams’s own lawyer John Martin published A Letter to the Hon. Thomas Erskine, with a Postscript to the Right Hon. Lord Kenyon, upon their Conduct at the Trial of Thomas Williams for Publishing Paine’s Age of Reason (London: H. Smith, 1797). See also The Speeches at Full Length, of the Honorable Thomas ­Erskine, and Stewart Kyd, Esq. on the Trial of Thomas Williams, Indicted for Publishing Thomas Paine’s “Age of Reason” (London, [1797]). 59.  “The fleet at Portsmouth” refers to the Spithead mutiny. 60.  Benjamin Flower, Proceedings of the House of Lords, xi. “Breach of Privilege” referred specifically to impediments to the regular running of Parliament, but also comprehended “offences against its authority or dignity, such as disobedience to its legal commands, or libels upon itself, its members, or its officers” (Thomas Erskine May, Parliamentary Practice, 21st ed. [London: Butterworths, 1989], 69). 61. Flower, Proceedings of the House of Lords, xiv. 62.  Ibid., xv. 63.  Ibid., xvii. 64.  Ibid., xviii–xix. 65.  Ibid., xx. 66.  Ibid., xxvii. 67.  Ibid., xi–xii. Flower was first taken to a sheriff ’s officer in Chancery Lane. At this point he was relatively calm, though in his Proceedings he paused to mention the fleecing practices of these holding houses: “The treatment he met with at the house was civil,” he reports, writing in the third person, “but from the charge attending one night’s lodging, (seven shillings and six-pence, for the room merely,) the propriety of such places being called sponging-houses cannot be doubted . . . he could not but reflect on the necessity of a Reform” (xiii). 68.  Letter to Edith Southey, 15 May 1799, in New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 1:186–9. Flower commented on jail keeper Kirby’s humane conduct on a few occasions. In the 7 September 1799 issue of the Cambridge Intelligencer he ran an open letter to Kirby written by five Newgate prisoners who were grateful for the jail keeper’s treatment

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(Whalen, Politics, Religion, and Romance, 55). Flower was thankful that Kirby charged him only “10 guineas” for his room: “What a contrast is his moderation to that abominable extortion at the Kingsbench, where Johnson paid £150 for a room for six months, (the same term as mine) and Wakefield £70 for about six weeks!” (20 October 1799; qtd. in Whelan, Politics, Religion, and Romance, 161–2). 69.  Flower later published this account both in the Cambridge Intelligencer and as a stand-alone pamphlet. 70. Flower, Proceedings of the House of Lords, 95–6. 71. Ibid., 96. 72. Ibid. 73.  Flower to Eliza Gould, 26–8 October 1799 (qtd. in Whelan, Politics, Religion, and Romance, 173). 74.  Whelan, introduction to Politics, Religion, and Romance, xxxviii. 75.  Cambridge Intelligencer, 18 June 1803. 76. Ibid. 77.  Miscellaneous Works of Robert Robinson (Harlow: Printed by B. Flower, 1807). Flower’s other publications from Harlow included, among much else, his own Statement of Facts (1808). 78.  Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth, a Biography. The Later Years: 1803–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 143. 79.  J. E. Cookson, The Friends of Peace: Anti-War Liberalism in England, 1793– 1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 99, 102. 80.  Jeremy Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 188.

Chapter Four 1.  See, for instance, Kevin Gilmartin, Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 150, and Miriam L. Wallace, Revolutionary Subjects in the English “Jacobin” Novel, 1790–1805 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2009), 184–7. 2.  Anti-Jacobin novels are usually seen to share a cluster of features, such as the portrayal of a disjunction between revolutionary theory and real-world experience, the depiction of the perfidy of “democrats,” and a healthy dose of Godwinian parody. M. O. Grenby has offered the most sustained attention to this mode, though he tends to reduce the diversity of anti-Jacobin novels by reading them as a corporate body, “as if they came from the pen of just one aggregate author” (The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 170). The nuances within this body are studied by Gilmartin (Writing against Revolution, chap. 4); Wallace (Revolutionary Subjects, chaps. 6–7); Lisa Wood, (Modes of Discipline: Women, Conservatism, and the Novel after the French Revolution [Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2003]); April London (“Novel and History in Anti-Jacobin Satire,” Yearbook of English Studies 30 [2000]: 71–81); and Nicola Watson (Revolution and the Form of the British Novel [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994]). On the anti-Jacobin novel’s virtual

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obsession with Godwin, see Peter Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 211–3, and chapter 4 of Grenby. 3.  Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 16. 4.  Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Wallace, Revolutionary Subjects, 16. See also Nancy E. Johnson, whose definition of the “English Jacobin novel” follows a “criterion of a clear contribution to the development of a theory of rights in the social contract” (The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property and the Law: Critiquing the Contract [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004], 8). We might also include here Watson’s argument that Rousseau’s Julie; or, La Nouvelle Héloïse functions as an ür-text for the 1790s novel (see Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, chap. 1). 5.  As G. E. Bentley, Jr., notes, “Edgerton” likely refers to Thomas Egerton, who had published earlier works by Cumberland (and who would go on to publish Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park). See Bentley’s “The Suppression of George Cumberland’s Captive of the Castle of Sennaar (1798): Liberty vs. Commerce,” Yale University Library Gazette 71.3/4 (1997): 155–8. Cumberland’s novel finally appeared in 1810. 6. Gilmartin, Writing against Revolution, 166. 7.  Amy Garnai, “The Alien Act and Negative Cosmopolitanism in Letters of a Solitary Wanderer,” in Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism, ed. Jacqueline Labbe (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), 111. Judith Davis Miller has argued in similar terms that “Smith’s sense of despair at the changing political climate of England” is signaled by “her exile of characters in [The Banished Man] and her succeeding novels” (“The Politics of Truth and Deception: Charlotte Smith and the French Revolution,” in Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, eds. Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke [Albany: SUNY Press, 2001], 350). 8.  On Smith and inheritance law, see, for instance, Jacqueline Labbe, “Metaphor­ icity and the Romance of Property in The Old Manor House,” Novel 34.2 (2001): 216–31. 9.  The letters, dated 1 and 8 February and 26 and 30 March, are reprinted in Uncollected Writings, 1785–1822, eds. Jack W. Marken and Burton R. Pollin (Gainesville, FL.: Scholars’ Facsimiles, 1968). 10. Ibid., 114. On the Association and its ties to the Pitt ministry, see Mark Philp, “Vulgar Conservatism,” 46–7, and Michael Duffy, “William Pitt and the Origins of the Loyalist Association Movement of 1792,” Historical Journal 39.4 (1996): 943–62. 11. Godwin, Uncollected Writings, 114, 121, 125. 12.  Godwin, “Of History and Romance,” in Caleb Williams, 361. 13. Ibid., 362–3. 14.  Godwin, preface to Caleb Williams, 1. 15.  Maurice Hindle, introduction to Caleb Williams, xxiv; Monika Fludernik, “William Godwin’s Caleb Williams: The Tarnishing of the Sublime,” English Literary History 68.4 (2001): 857–96; A. A. Markley, “‘The Success of Gentleness’:

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Homosocial Desire and the Homosexual Personality in the Novels of William Godwin,” Romanticism on the Net 36–7 (2004); Rudolf F. Storch, “Metaphors of Private Guilt and Social Rebellion in Godwin’s Caleb Williams,” English Literary History 34.2 (1967): 188–207; Marilyn Butler, “Godwin, Burke, and Caleb Williams,” ­Essays in Criticism 32.3 (1982): 237–57; James Thompson, “Surveillance in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams,” in Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression, ed. Kenneth Wayne Graham (New York: AMS, 1989), 173–98; Ian Ousby, “‘My Servant Caleb’: Godwin’s Caleb Williams and the Political Trials of the 1790s,” University of Toronto Quarterly 44 (1974): 47–55; and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., “‘A Story to be ­Hastily Gobbled Up’: Caleb Williams and Print Culture,” Studies in Romanticism 32.3 (1993): 323–37. For Quentin Bailey, Godwin’s concern for the technologies of social control in Caleb Williams can be read not only in light of the immediate moment of the 1790s, but also against the previous decade’s debates about the police (“‘Extraordinary and Dangerous Powers’: Prisons, Police, and Literature in Godwin’s Caleb Williams,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 22.3 [2010]: 525–48). 16.  Tilottama Rajan, “Wollstonecraft and Godwin: Reading the Secrets of the Political Novel,” Studies in Romanticism 27.2 (1988): 223. Caleb’s sincerity usually passes unmentioned, though a few critics have gauged his success (or lack thereof ) as a memoirist: see, for instance, Evan Radcliffe, “Godwin from ‘Metaphysician’ to Novelist: ‘Political Justice,’ Caleb Williams, and the Tension between Philosophical Argument and Narrative,” Modern Philology 97.4 (2000): 528–53; Kristen Leaver, “Pursuing Conversations: Caleb Williams and the Romantic Construction of the Reader,” Studies in Romanticism 33.4 (1994): 589–610; and Jacqueline T. Miller, “The Imperfect Tale: Articulation, Rhetoric, and Self in Caleb Williams,” Criticism 20 (1978): 366–82. On Caleb’s earnestness, especially regarding his motives in his impassioned concluding speech, see Rajan, “Wollstonecraft and Godwin,” as well as Randa Helfield, “Constructive Treason and Godwin’s Treasonous Constructions,” Mosaic 28.2 (1995): 43–62, and Nicholas M. Williams, “‘The Subject of Detection’: Legal Rhetoric and Subjectivity in Caleb Williams,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9.4 (1997): 479–96. 17.  St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 127. 18.  Jonathan H. Grossman, The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 52. 19.  E. P. Thompson, “Wordsworth’s Crisis,” London Review of Books, 22 October 1988, 3–4; reprinted in The Romantics, 86. 20. Cestre, John Thelwall, 203. 21.  While I propose that Godwin’s novel does not cleanly fit the Foucauldian model, a few critics have drawn on Foucault’s study of panopticism to assess C ­ aleb’s subjectivity. In Revolutionary Subjects, for instance, Wallace argues that Caleb’s narrative “reveals the limitation of speaking ‘truth’ to power; power may in fact be speaking us” (44). For Clemit, the device of the unreliable narrator allows Godwin to register interpellative power by showing “Caleb’s complicity with the existing system,” which is most apparent in Caleb’s turn to Falkland-like discourse: “Caleb’s unwitting collusion with Falkland’s false eminence is reflected in the erosion of his

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own linguistic resources, gradually replaced by the attitudes and values of his master’s rhetoric” (The Godwinian Novel, 60). For a similar reading of Caleb’s apparent interpellation, see Gary Handwerk, “Of Caleb’s Guilt and Godwin’s Truth: Ideology and Ethics in Caleb Williams,” English Literary History 60.4 (1993): 949–50. 22.  D. A. Miller, “Secret Subjects, Open Secrets,” Dickens Studies Annual 14 (1985): 19. 23.  Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies,” American Journal of Sociology 11.4 (1906): 464. 24.  Miller, “Secret Subjects,” 25. 25.  Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 106. While Desmond has attracted the most critical notice, Judith Davis Miller has considered Smith’s later novels within and against Godwin’s ideas about “sincerity” in Political Justice (“The Politics of Truth”); and in a superb essay, Harriet Guest reads the status of surveillance in Smith’s later novels as a “symptom of the social atomization characteristic of modernity,” arguing that these novels, and especially The Young Philosopher, by registering “the fragmentation of English culture under the pressure of an oppressive modernity,” can be read as “inverted national tales” which query the “unity of Englishness not from its colonial or postcolonial margins but from within” (“Suspicious Minds: Spies and Surveillance in Charlotte Smith’s Novels,” in Land, Nation and Culture, 1740–1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste, eds. Peter de Bolla, Nigel Leask, and David Simpson [London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005], 170, 179). 26.  Charlotte Smith, Desmond, eds. Antje Blank and Janet Todd (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1997), 154–5. 27.  John Thelwall, Political Lectures. Volume the First—Part the First: Containing the Lecture on Spies and Informers (London: Printed for the Author, 1795), 6. 28.  Introduction to Marchmont, by Charlotte Smith, eds. Kate Davies and Harriet Guest (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006), xviii. Further references to this edition are given parenthetically in the text. 29. Pigott, Political Dictionary, 50. 30.  Jane Spencer, “Women Writers and the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 231. 31. Beddoes, A Word in Defence of the Bill of Rights, 5. 32.  Spencer, “Women Writers,” 230. 33. Ibid., 231. 34.  Bender argues that the rise of the novel anticipated and perhaps helped to create the conceptual possibility of the penitentiary (Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987]). 35.  Barbara Tarling, “‘The Slight Skirmishing of a Novel Writer’: Charlotte Smith and the American War of Independence,” in Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism, ed. Jacqueline Labbe (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), 72. 36.  Mary Wollstonecraft, review of Marchmont, Analytical Review 25 (1797): 523.

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Wollstonecraft reviewed Emeline in the first volume of the Analytical Review (1788): 327–33, Ethelinde in 1789 (5:484–5), Celestina in 1791 (10:409–11), and Desmond in 1792 (13:427–30). 37.  Wollstonecraft to Imlay, 19 February 1795, in The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 280. 38.  Tom Furniss, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s French Revolution,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 68. 39.  “Advertisement,” in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, eds. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (New York: NYU Press, 1989), 1:171. On Godwin’s editorial self-­ positioning, see Tilottama Rajan, “Framing the Corpus: Godwin’s ‘Editing’ of Wollstonecraft in 1798,” Studies in Romanticism 39.4 (2000): 511–31; and on his paratexts (especially his selective use of Wollstonecraft’s May 1797 letter to George Dyson) and the version of the story of the manuscripts of The Wrongs of Woman they tell, see Gerard Goggin, “Editing Minervas: William Godwin’s Liminal Maneuvers in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman,” in Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship, eds. Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 81–99. 40.  Nicola Watson refers to the novel as “radically unstable” (Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 54), and Mary Poovey argues that its fractured quality shows the genre of the sentimental novel collapsing as the result of its internal contradictions (The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985], 108). Tilottama Rajan mentions the novel’s frequent “awkward interruptions,” and suggests that “the way it fragments narrative prevents us from settling into any story of how things are” (“Wollstonecraft and Godwin,” 228, 230). 41. Wollstonecraft, Mary, a Fiction, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 1:67. 42.  Claudia Johnson addresses the “dual nature” of Maria’s confinement in Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 60. 43.  Bonney, “Suspension” (Add. MSS 46870, British Library, London). 44.  Claudia Johnson, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Novels,” in Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 202–3. 45. Ibid., 201. 46.  Nicola Watson, for instance, argues that Maria’s novel reading, and in particular her exposure to Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, have delivered her “to the point where she cannot perceive the man himself at all, preferring to rehearse the self-destructive story of excessive sensibility” (Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 52). 47. Colley, Britons, 240. 48.  Janice H. Peritz, “‘Necessarily Various’: Body Politics and Discursive Ethics in Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman,” European Romantic Review 21.2 (2010): 251–66. On the trial scene in The Wrongs of Woman, see also George E. Haggerty, Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later 18th Century (Bloomington:

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Indiana University Press, 1998), 117; Grossman, The Art of Alibi; and Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism, 210–22. 49.  The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 9, ed. R. B. McDowell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 243. 50. Ibid., 244. 51. Wood, Modes of Discipline, 31. 52.  Walpole to More, 24 January 1795 (Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with Hannah More, eds. W. S. Lewis, Robert A. Smith, and Charles Bennett, vol. 31 of The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961], 397). The manuscript letter is held at the Lewis Walpole Library (Farmington, CT). Walpole’s comments follow Wollstonecraft’s 1795 Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (vol. 6 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, eds. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler [New York: NYU Press, 1989]). This work (like Flower’s Cambridge Intelligencer) is a post-regicide project: it was written throughout the Terror as Wollstonecraft received news of the execution of Marie Antoinette, the imprisonment and execution of Girondins, and the mass arrests of British citizens in Paris. Although it emerges from this moment, the French Revolution does not signal the panic, let alone the disenchantment or regret, that conventional accounts of Romanticism have taught us to expect. Rather, Wollstonecraft argues that revolutionary violence is a necessary step in a process that will issue a reimagined France and with it a reformed Europe. 53. Burke, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, vol. 8, ed. R. B. McDowell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 304. 54.  Walpole’s contrast of More and Wollstonecraft, a staple of counterrevolutionary discourse, instances the connection between assaults on female progressivism and lauds of loyalist female consensus. Reexamining the More/Wollstonecraft pairing, however, a few modern critics have noted overlooked continuities between their works. See, for instance, Donna Landry, “Figures of the Feminine: An Amazonian Revolution in Feminist Literary History?,” in The Uses of Literary History, ed. Marshall Brown (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 107–28; and Mitzi Myers, “Reform or Ruin: ‘A Revolution in Female Manners,’” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 11 (1982): 199–216. 55.  With Jemima’s complaint that she has often heard “that every person willing to work may find employment” (115), Wollstonecraft gestures toward the contemporary concern for the paucity of real vocational options for women (Jemima’s words anticipate Priscilla Bell Wakefield’s argument about female employment in Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex [London: J. Johnson, 1798]). 56.  Peritz, “‘Necessarily Various,’” 259–60. 57.  Philp, “Vulgar Conservatism,” 68. 58. Colley, Britons, 250. 59. Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 69. On the radical gender potential of the relationship between Maria and Jemima, see also Anne K. Mellor, “Righting the Wrongs of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts

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19.4 (1996): 413–24, and Mary Poovey, “Mary Wollstonecraft: The Gender of Genres in Late Eighteenth-Century England,” Novel 15.2 (1982): 111–26. 60. Syndy M. Conger, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility (Ruther­ford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994), 163. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63.  Shelley, “The Mask of Anarchy,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, eds. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), 326. 64.  On the biblical resonances of this moment, see Peritz, “‘Necessarily Various,’” 258.

Chapter Five 1. Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), 10.233–41. I refer to the 1805 edition, hereafter cited parenthetically by book and line number. 2. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, eds. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 106. 3.  A. J. Eagleston has transcribed the letters (from PRO HO 42/41) in “Words­ worth, Coleridge, and the Spy,” Nineteenth Century 64 (1908): 300–10. See also Roe’s thorough account of the incident in Wordsworth and Coleridge, 248–62. 4. Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge, 260. 5. Ibid. 6.  Persecuted in Britain for his open support of the French Revolution, Priestley had emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1794 (Jenny Graham, Revolutionary in Exile: The Emigration of Joseph Priestley to America, 1794–1804 [Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1995], 21–42). Johnson’s letter, dated 24 August 1796, is in the “Joseph Johnson Letterbook, 1795–1810” held at the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library. 7.  Reform leaders were arrested on 18–20 April 1798, and on 19 April habeas corpus was again suspended. In a return to the terror and confusion of the summer of 1794, the prisoners were held without trial, though this time the confinement lasted three years, until the restoration of habeas corpus in March 1801. 8.  E. W. McFarland, Ireland and Scotland in the Age of Revolution: Planting the Green Bough (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), 155. 9.  King’s letter to Bayley is dated 21 February 1798 (PRO HO 43/10, fo. 288). For Bayley’s response, including his efforts to draw information from members of the Manchester Corresponding Society, see Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, 439–40, 461–3. 10.  Townsmen, at a Crisis like the Present (Darlington, 21 April 1798). 11.  Secret Committee report of 15 March 1799 (PH, vol. 34, cols. 579–656). 12.  Marianne Elliott, Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 147. 13.  The Autobiography of Francis Place (1771–1854), ed. Mary Thale (Cambridge:

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Cambridge University Press, 1972), 178; The Parliamentary Register (London: J. Debrett, 1799), 8:463. 14. Place, Autobiography, 178. 15. Ibid., 180. 16.  Letter from David Gardner to Lord Breadalbane, 25 April 1798, GD112/11/ 6/3/58, National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh. 17. Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge, 252. 18. Ibid., 252–6. 19. Place, Autobiography, 176. 20.  The ministry was also emboldened by public fears over the naval mutinies at Spithead and Nore. The Spithead uprisings ran from 16 April to 15 May 1797; the mutiny at Nore (along the Thames Estuary) broke out on 12 May and lasted for just over a week. 21.  On the end-of-decade legislation, see Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, 453–5. 22. Thompson, The Romantics, 50. 23. Elliott, Partners in Revolution, 189. 24. Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge, 270. 25.  Burney, review of Lyrical Ballads, 202–10. 26. Ibid., 206–10. 27.  M. H. Abrams, “On Political Readings of Lyrical Ballads,” in Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory, ed. Michael Fischer (New York: Norton, 1989), 376. Work attuned to specific political issues includes David Simpson, “What Bothered Charles Lamb about ‘Poor Susan’?,” Studies in English Literature 26.4 (1986): 589–612; Gary Harrison, Wordsworth’s Vagrant Muse: Poetry, Poverty, and Power (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994); John Rieder, Wordsworth’s Counterrevolutionary Turn: Community, Virtue, and Vision in the 1790s (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1997); Alex J. Dick, “Poverty, Charity, Poetry: The Unproductive Labors of ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar,’” Studies in Romanticism 39.3 (2000): 365–96; and David Chandler, “Wordsworth versus Malthus: The Political Context(s) of ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar,’” Charles Lamb Bulletin 115 (2001): 72–85. 28.  Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 237. 29. Ibid., 240. 30.  The reading material also included Thomas Erskine’s A View of the Causes and Consequences of the Present War, and Edmund Burke’s Letter to the Duke of Portland and Letters on a Regicide Peace. See Moorman, The Early Years, 310. 31. Wordsworth, Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, eds. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 1:41. 32. Ibid., 46. As I mentioned in the Introduction, the Proclamation (21 May 1792) prompted several arrests for printing or selling Paine’s Rights of Man (see Thompson, Making, 102–14). Roe also proposes that Wordsworth may have been aware of the fates of William Frend and John Frost, both of whom had learned

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the cost of using language similar to that in Wordsworth’s Letter (Wordsworth and Coleridge, 104, 157). 33.  EY, 121. 34. Ibid. 35.  Francis Wrangham (1769–1842) lost a hoped-for fellowship at Cambridge in August 1793 because of his support for the principles of the French Revolution. 36.  Carol Landon and Jared Curtis, introduction and notes to Wordsworth, Early Poems and Fragments, 1785–1797 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 786. Citations from the poem are given parenthetically by line number. 37.  EY, 157. 38.  Azariah Pinney to Wordsworth, 26 November 1795 (qtd. in Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989], 96). 39. Ibid. 40. Coleridge, Notebooks, 1:110.G104. 41.  This twenty-eight-line fragment from 20 November 1795 is lineated separately by Landon and Curtis (under the heading “Unplaced Lines”). Subsequent citations are given parenthetically by line number. 42.  Wordsworth’s figure for an eclipsing force, “hides the diminish’d head,” adapts Paradise Lost 4.35. On the politicians and aristocrats mocked by Wordsworth throughout the fragment (Eden, Londsdale, Norfolk, Thurlow, Grenville, and the king himself ), see the introductory note from Landon and Curtis, as well as Johnston, Hidden Wordsworth, 329–34. 43.  Landon and Curtis note that the bracketed phrase is written in pencil in the manuscript, perhaps an addition from Wrangham. 44. Johnston, Hidden Wordsworth, 334. 45.  Nicholas Roe, “Wordsworth’s Lost Satire,” London Review of Books, 6 July 1995. 46. Ibid. 47.  Ibid. In an 1806 letter, Wordsworth discouraged Wrangham’s plan to publish the Imitation: “I cannot lend any assistance to your proposed publication. The verses which you have of mine I should wish to be destroyed” (MY, 89). In 1822, Wrangham sent an excerpt to William Blackwood, and offered to provide the whole, apparently for publication in Blackwood’s, but the poem never appeared in print. See Landon and Curtis, notes to Wordsworth, Early Poems and Fragments, 791–3. 48.  Rathbone was a founder of the Liverpool Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. His letter, dated 26 March 1799, is to Dugald Bannatyne of Glasgow. See Eleanor F. Rathbone, William Rathbone: A Memoir (London: Macmillan, 1905), 21. 49.  Fox to Dennis O’Brien, 29 July 1798 (qtd. in L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992], 155). 50. Smith, Marchmont, 383. Fox’s letter is printed in The Life and Correspondence of Major Cartwright, ed. F. D. Cartwright (London: H. Colburn, 1826), 1:248. Cartwright’s protest against the 1795 Gagging Acts was titled A Letter to the High Sheriff of the County of Lincoln, Respecting the Bills of Lord Grenville and Mr. Pitt (London:

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J. Johnson, 1795). A key figure in the radical resurgence of the 1810s, Cartwright was also an active opponent of the Pitt government in the 1790s. In a 21 November 1795 letter to Fox regarding his anti–Gagging Acts petition, Cartwright describes the legislation as “bills intended for riveting our chains, and silencing for ever the voice of complaint” (Life and Correspondence, 231). 51.  “Old Man Travelling,” in Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, eds. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), lines 17 and 20. Subsequent citations from Lyrical Ballads are given parenthetically by line number. 52.  Burney, review of Lyrical Ballads, 209. 53. Glen, Vision and Disenchantment, 229. 54.  For a different account of the political contours of “Old Man Travelling,” see Roe, who argues that Burney mistakes the work for a “poem of protest” (Words­ worth and Coleridge, 140–1). 55.  See Andrew L. Griffin on the “narrator’s surprising abdication of his responsibilities as a storyteller” (“Wordsworth and the Problem of Imaginative Story: The Case of ‘Simon Lee,’” PMLA 92.3 [1977]: 392), and Sarah M. Zimmerman on “the poem’s explicit contrasting of narrative and lyric modes” (Romanticism, Lyricism, and History [Albany: SUNY Press, 1999], 85). 56. Glen, Vision and Disenchantment, 237. 57.  Thomas Spence, The End of Oppression (London: Printed for the Author, 1795), 8. 58. Paine, Rights of Man, 73–4. 59. Ibid., 36. 60.  Wordsworth began “The Discharged Soldier” in late 1797. The poem was completed, in its earliest version, by March 1798. Not included in Lyrical Ballads, it would eventually make up the ending of book 4 of The Prelude (400–504). Beth Darlington has examined Wordsworth’s revisions to “The Discharged Soldier” from 1797 to 1805 (“Two Early Texts: ‘A Night-Piece’ and ‘The Discharged Soldier,’” in Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies, eds. Jonathan Wordsworth and Beth Darlington [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970], 425–48). For its inclusion in The Prelude, Wordsworth situated his encounter with the soldier as an incident from his youth (the original 1797–8 version has no determinate historical markings). 61.  On the 1797 slave rebellions, see Michael Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar, and Seapower: The British Expeditions to the West Indies, and the War against Revolutionary France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 62.  Robin Blackburn, “Haiti, Slavery, and the Age of the Democratic Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 63.4 (2006): 643–74. On contemporary concerns over the losses in the Caribbean, see David Patrick Geggus, “The Cost of Pitt’s Caribbean Campaigns, 1793–1798,” Historical Journal 26.3 (1983): 699–706. 63.  What we do learn about the soldier has been widely interpreted. On his likely experiences with the slave trade, see Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); on his status as a vagrant, see Toby R. Benis, Romanticism on the Road: The Marginal Gains of Words­

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worth’s Homeless (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). Psychoanalytic critics have been particularly drawn to this figure, including Richard J. Onorato, The Character of the Poet: Wordsworth in the Prelude (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971); Matthew C. Brennan, “The ‘Ghastly Figure Moving at My Side’: The Discharged Soldier as Wordsworth’s Shadow,” Wordsworth Circle 18.1 (1987): 19–23; David Collings, Wordsworthian Errancies: The Poetics of Cultural Dismemberment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); and James Holt McGavran, “Defusing the Discharged Soldier: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Homosexual Panic,” Papers on Language and Literature 32.2 (1996): 147–65. 64.  We might recall here Smith’s comment in Marchmont that is it a short trip from “murmurs” to sedition (383). 65.  Darlington, “Two Early Texts,” 442. 66. Beddoes, A Word in Defence of the Bill of Rights, 5. Coleridge’s verdict on Burke (with some help from Shakespeare) comes from his review of Letter to a Noble Lord in the first issue of the Watchman, 38–39. 67. Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease, 119. 68. Barbauld, Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation, 313. 69. Benis, Romanticism on the Road, 198. 70.  McGavran, “Defusing the Discharged Soldier,” 150. 71.  Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 196. 72. Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge, 123. 73.  Wordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads, 740–60. 74.  Lamb’s letter is dated 30 January 1801 (Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb). 75.  The Eleventh and Twelfth Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor (London, 1800). 76.  The Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor (London: Bulmer, 1798), 1:59. See also An Address to the Landed Interest, on the Deficiency of Habitations and Fuel, for the Use of the Poor, by William Morton Pitt, philanthropist and cousin of the prime minister (London: Elmsly and Bremner, 1797). Morton Pitt addresses himself to landowners: “Among the distresses of the poor, there are none more deserving of serious attention, than the difficulties they experience of procuring for themselves habitations and fuel” (1). 77. In 1766 the official punishment for wood gleaning jumped from ten shillings to seven years’ transportation (see James O’Rourke, “‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill,’ ‘The Thorn,’ and the Failure of Philanthropy,” European Romantic Review 9.1 [1998]: 103–23). 78.  Susan J. Wolfson, The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry (New York: Cornell University Press, 1986), 47. 79.  Erasmus Darwin, Zoönomia; or, the Laws of Organic Life (London: Joseph Johnson, 1796), 2:359. 80. Johnston, Hidden Wordsworth, 386. 81.  The poem’s scene of intense questioning has long interested critics. A. C.

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Bradley lamented that “Anecdote for Fathers” suffers from the unintended humor of the adult’s aggressive questioning of “his victim” (Oxford Lectures on Poetry [1909; reprint, London: Macmillan, 1941], 104). Modern critics more often read the disjunctive dialogue as a signal of Wordsworth’s interest in the cognitive distance between adults and children. Mary Jacobus, for instance, understands Wordsworth’s adult-child conversations in terms of the “debate between” the “intuiti[on]” of the child and the adult’s “rational thought” (Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976], 101), while Wolfson argues that Wordsworth shows “the mysteries of a child’s sensibility and its complete insulation from adult intelligence” (Questioning Presence, 46). Extending this attention to the intellectual lives of children, historically tuned readings of “Anecdote for Fathers” by Cynthia Chase and Alan Richardson consider Wordsworth’s engagement with contemporary educational theories (Chase, “‘Anecdote for Fathers’: The Scene of Interpretation in Freud and Wordsworth,” in Textual Analysis: Some Readers Reading, ed. Mary Ann Caws [New York: MLA, 1986], 182–206; and Richardson, “The Politics of Childhood: Wordsworth, Blake, and the Catechistic Method,” English Literary History 56.4 [1989]: 853–68). 82.  Simpson argues that the poem’s specific locations may reflect Wordsworth’s own discomfort at living in the mansion of Alfoxden during the time of the poem’s composition while Thelwall struggled for basic subsistence at his Llyswen farm. The real question, proposes Simpson, is not what the boy prefers, but where Words­worth feels he rightfully should be in 1798, in political exile in Wales or among the gentry in Somerset (“Public Virtues, Private Vices: Reading between the Lines of Words­ worth’s ‘Anecdote for Fathers,’” in Subject to History: Ideology, Class, Gender [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991], 174). For Judith Thompson’s account, see John Thelwall, 128. Damian Walford Davies pays special attention to how Thelwall’s “­Jacobin allegory” from 1793, “King Chaunticlere; or the Fate of Tyranny,” conditions the symbolic language of “Anecdote for Fathers” (“Capital Crimes: John Thelwall, ‘Gallucide’ and Psychobiography,” Romanticism 18.1 [2012]: 55–69). 83.  Qtd. in Lyrical Ballads, 346–7. 84.  A Complete Collection of State Trials, eds. T. B. Howell and Thomas Jones Howell (London: T. C. Hansard, 1818), 24:511, 1008–9. 85. Wolfson, Questioning Presence, 47. 86.  One of Thelwall’s political speeches included a barnyard allegory which features a tyrannical “gamecock” that a farmer beheads. Daniel Isaac Eaton, the printer of Thelwall’s speech, was arrested for the publication, and during the trial, in what Scrivener refers to as “an unintentionally humorous line-by-line interpretation,” the prosecutor paused every time the gamecock was mentioned to interject “meaning our lord the king” (see Michael Scrivener, “John Thelwall and Popular Jacobin ­Allegory, 1793–95,” English Literary History 67.4 [2000]: 956). Eaton was arrested on 7 December 1793 and held in prison until his acquittal on 24 February 1794. On the political significance of Wordsworth’s use of this image, see also Judith Thompson (John Thelwall, 129), Davies (“Capital Crimes,” 64–5), and Scrivener (Seditious ­Allegories, 111–25).

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87.  The Art of Lying and Rebelling (London: J. Morphew, 1713). The phrase was commonly used in eighteenth-century political pamphlets, such as Truth Exploded, or the Art of Lying and Swearing Made Easy, and its Usefulness Explain’d, by A Cobbler of Cripplegate-Ward (Bath, 1782). 88. “Anecdote,” Oxford English Dictionary. 89. McGann, The Romantic Ideology, 85. 90.  James Heffernan, “Wordsworth’s ‘Leveling’ Muse in 1798,” in 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads, ed. Richard Cronin (London: Macmillan, 1998), 231–53. In a similar vein, Sarah Zimmerman has questioned the notion that Wordsworth means to “deny” his earlier self, for the chronology that Wordsworth collates through the title date and opening lines leads precisely to “the evocation of his 1793 self ” (Romanticism, Lyricism, and History, 95). 91.  David Miall, “Locating Wordsworth: ‘Tintern Abbey’ and the Community with Nature,” Romanticism on the Net 20 (November 2000). Drawing on a map from Richard Warner’s A Walk Through Wales, in August 1797 (Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1798), Miall ventures to name the precise location Wordsworth describes in the poem. 92.  Charles Rzepka, “Pictures of the Mind: Iron and Charcoal, ‘Ouzy Tides’ and ‘Vagrant Dwellers’ at Tintern, 1798,” Studies in Romanticism 42.2 (2003): 157. 93. Wolfson, Questioning Presence, 60–1. 94. Ibid., 61. 95. Ibid., 66. 96.  Heffernan, “Wordsworth’s ‘Leveling’ Muse,” 242. 97.  Scrivener has observed that in 1801 “three different Jacobins vindicated themselves in public, defending not so much their political ideas as their moral status,” naming Thelwall’s “Prefatory Memoir,” Godwin’s Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon, and Thomas Spence’s self-defense at his 1801 trial (Seditious Allegories, 258). Similarly, Paul Magnuson has proposed Coleridge’s 1798 volume Fears in Solitude as a “public defense of his caricature drawn in the Tory press” (Reading Public Romanticism, 67). 98.  Above Hardy’s narrative is a note, “Advertised in several newspapers.” The manuscript is dated 5 November 1800 and signed by Hardy at No. 161 Fleet Street (Place Papers, vol. 30, Add. MS 27818, British Library, London). 99. Ibid. 100.  Thelwall to Thomas Hardy, 24 May 1798 (MS 2010.58, Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere). 101.  Losh’s note is dated 31 December 1798 (cited by Roe in Wordsworth and Coleridge, 241). 102.  Thelwall claims to be drawing on the much shorter biography of him published in Public Characters of 1800–1801 (London: Richard Phillips, 1801), 3:177–93, though Scrivener notes that it is “likely that Thelwall himself composed the Public Characters sketch that contains, apparently, not a single error of fact” (Seditious ­Allegories, 266). According to the Monthly Magazine, Thelwall had been working on

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his memoir since 1798, by which point it was “almost ready for the press” (5 [1798 pt. 1], 291; 6 [1798 pt. 2], 53). 103.  Scrivener refers to the “Prefatory Memoir” as a “heavily censored” document, as Thelwall “omits from the narrative many Jacobin details that might have disturbed his readers,” for he wished to show that “a Jacobin could produce valuable writing that was not necessarily ‘Jacobin’” (Seditious Allegories, 275–6). Scrivener smartly describes Thelwall’s approach as “anti-anti-Jacobin”: “Thelwall does not renounce Jacobinism; he declines only to promote it actively” (260). 104.  Thelwall to Hardy, 24 May 1798. Thelwall was not the only one to criticize Tierney (long a thorn in Pitt’s side) after he voted in favor of the suspension of habeas corpus (at the time Thelwall wrote this letter, he could not have known that Tierney was in fact about to face Pitt in a duel, after the prime minister challenged his patriotism in the Commons). On Thelwall’s private assurances of his quietly enduring politics, see also his December 1801 letter to Joseph Strutt, in which he writes of his new public image that “I am really quite transformed. Nothing of the plain out-of-fashioned singularity of the old republican remains, but in my heart— and there it is smothered in silence, except when with a chosen few I can indulge my native energies” (P. J. Corfield and Chris Evans, “John Thelwall in Wales: New Documentary Evidence,” Historical Research 59.140 [1986]: 239). 105.  Judith Thompson reads in “Tintern Abbey” echoes of Thelwall’s “A Patriot’s Feeling” and “On Leaving the Bottoms of Gloucester” (John Thelwall, 144–5). 106. Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge, 127. Civil War hero Fairfax battled Royalists with the New Model Army at the Siege of Colchester in 1648. The sonnet was not published in Milton’s lifetime. 107.  Robert A. Brinkley traces a series of allusions to Milton in “Tintern Abbey” (“Vagrant and Hermit: Milton and the Politics of ‘Tintern Abbey,’” Wordsworth ­Circle 16.3 [1985]: 126–33). In “Censorship and English Literature,” Christopher Hill argues that for those readers who “remembered Milton as spokesman for the republic, defender of regicide and of ‘divorce at pleasure,’ and author of Areopagitica,” these lines in Paradise Lost would have revealed the identity of the author (Paradise Lost was initially published with Milton’s initials only) (The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985], 1:62). Registering the Milton allusion, Johnston has also provocatively wondered if “the sneers of selfish men” might refer to the satirical volleys of the Anti-Jacobin (see Hidden Wordsworth, 434). 108.  James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 9–10.

Afterword 1.  The Treasonable Practices Act was replaced by the Treason Felony Act in 1848. 2.  Benjamin J. Goold, “Public Area Surveillance and Police Work: The Impact of CCTV on Police Behavior and Autonomy,” Surveillance and Society 1.2 (2003): 191. 3. Thompson, The Romantics, 61. The Treaty of Amiens (March 1802) temporarily halted the war between Britain and France. Though celebrated widely, the peace was short-lived, lasting just under fourteen months.

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4. Ibid. 5.  On Pitt’s resignation, see John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt: The Consuming Struggle (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 495–533, and Michael J. Turner, Pitt the Younger: A Life (New York: Hambledon and London, 2003), 205– 73. Although Pitt returned to office in 1804 for nineteen months, this tenure was weakened by a stronger opposition within government, as well as his own faltering health. 6.  John Thelwall, A Letter to Henry Cline, Esq. (London: Richard Taylor, 1810), 15. The occasion of Amiens provided the interbelline “breathing space,” Judith Thompson points out, for Thelwall to “emerg[e] from exile” (Silenced Partner, 60). 7.  For Wordsworth’s letter to Charles James Fox, which famously urged (among much else) that the poem “Michael” shows that “men who do not wear fine cloaths can feel deeply,” see EY, 312. 8.  Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3:226. For more on Wordsworth’s retrospective in The Convention of Cintra, see Richard Cronin, “Wordsworth’s Poems of 1807 and the War against Napoleon,” Review of English Studies 48.189 (1997): 42. 9.  Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3:227. 10.  Letter of 11 February 1806 (MY, 7–8). The funeral for Pitt was held on 22 February 1806. 11.  Jonathan Wordsworth annotates “vermin” as “Home Office agents and informers” (The Prelude, 394n4). 12. Thompson, Making, 807–8.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italic type indicate illustrations. Abrams, M. H., 18, 51, 59–60, 72, 143, 162 Act for the More Effective Suppression of Societies Established for Seditious and Treasonable Purposes. See Corresponding Societies Act (1799) Affecting Case of James MacCurdy, The, 57 Aikin, John, 15 Alderson, (Opie), Amelia, 81, 92 Alfoxden, 71–72, 138, 144, 159, 163 Alien Office, 26, 181n20 Aliens Act (1793), 8, 111 Allen, B. Sprague, 43 Almon, John, 81 Amiens. See Peace of Amiens Anderson, Benedict, 8, 97 Anti-Jacobin novels, 19, 109, 200n2. See also Gagging Acts novels Anti-Jacobin Review, 18, 23, 97–100, 132 Apophasiography, 128 Apophasis, 127, 128 Aposiopesis, 127–28 Aspinall, Arthur, Politics and the Press, c. 1780–1850, 82 Assembly, freedom of, 38 Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, 112, 183n47, 201n10 Bage, Robert, 110 Barbauld, Anna, Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation, 92, 154 Barker, Hannah, 82, 83 Barrell, John, 3–5, 12, 178n1, 179n2, 183n39, 196n18; Imagining the King’s Death, 4–5 Barton, Bernard, 50 Bayley, Thomas, 139

Beaumont, George, 68, 169 Beddoes, Thomas, 17, 37, 116, 122, 153, 183n48 Bender, John, 125 Benis, Toby, 154 Berkeley, George, 22 Bersani, Leo, 51 Bewell, Alan, 153 “Billy Pitt’s New Bills; or, Lock Jaws, a Ballad,” 93–94 Binns, John, 48 Birch, William, 85–86 Birmingham Gazette (newspaper), 48 Bishop, Samuel, 50 Bisset, Robert, 109 Blackburn, Robin, 151 Boaden, James, The Secret Tribunal, 23–24 Bonney, John Augustus, 9, 50; imprisonment of, 190n26; “Ode to Liberty,” 3–4, 61–62; prison verse of, 3–4, 18, 60–63; “Suspension,” 10, 62, 129; “To the Author’s Wife,” 63 Booksellers, imprisonment of, 7, 12, 15, 67, 98, 189n22, 199n58 Bourdieu, Pierre, 13 Bowles, Walter Lisle, 50, 60 Bradley, A. C., 210n81 Breach of privilege, 100–102, 199n60 Breadalbane, Lord, 141 Brinkley, Robert, 213n107 Brombert, Victor, The Romantic Prison, 51–52 Brothers, Richard, 189n22 Brown, Charles Brockden, 110 Burgh, James, Political Disquisitions, 184n53 Burke, Edmund, 42, 94, 126, 129, 132, 135, 153; Letters on a Regicide Peace, 126, 131;

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Reflections on the Revolution in France, 22, 35, 116 Burney, Charles, 52–53, 142–43, 148, 155 Burns, Robert, 92 Butler, Marilyn, 113 Cabinet, The (journal), 10 Cambridge Chronicle (newspaper), 88 Cambridge Intelligencer (newspaper), 18, 80, 87–89, 90, 91–108, 117 Cartwright, John, 148, 208n50 Case of William Hodgson, The, Now Confined in Newgate, 49 Censorship, scholarship on, 12–14 Certain Mutinous Crews Act (1797), 176n36 Chandler, James, 166 Chase, Cynthia, 211n81 Clemit, Pamela, 110, 202n21 Cole, Steven E., 40 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 21, 50, 92, 153, 184n54; Biographia Literaria, 138; on Bowles, 60; Conciones ad Populum, 24, 38, 143; departure for Germany, 11; “The Destruction of the Bastille,” 74; “The Devil’s Thoughts,” 74; “The Dungeon,” 74– 75; “Fears in Solitude,” 96; Flower and, 80; “Frost at Midnight,” 74, 75; imprisonment as theme for, 52–53, 74–78; journalistic endeavors of, 80, 81, 104, 191n41; Lectures on Revealed Religion, 40; Montgomery and, 63; “On the Liberty of the Press,” 38–39; “On the Present War,” 38; “On the Two Bills,” 146; Osorio, 74; on Pitt, 29, 39, 41; The Plot Discovered, 22, 38–41, 77–78, 143, 144, 184n53; prison as metaphor for, 18; pseudonym of, 194n87; “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement,” 78; response of, to political repression, 6, 17, 22–24, 29, 38–41, 49; sociolinguistic theory of, 22, 38–41; Thelwall and, 2–3, 50, 71–72, 74–78, 186n80, 193n77; “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” 51, 75–78; Wordsworth and, 138–39 Coleridge, Sara, 71 Colley, Linda, 133; Britons, 8 Combination Acts (1799, 1800), 12 Confinement. See Imprisonment; Psychiatric confinement Consensus, 8 Cooper, Thomas, 84–85 Corbet, John, Self-Employment, in Secret, 23 Corfield, P. J., 193n68, 213n104

Corresponding Societies Act (1799), 11–12 Cowper, William, 14–15; “A Sonnet Addressed to Mr. Phillips now in confienment at Leicester,” 16–17 Crichton, Daniel, 19, 112 Cross reading, 94–96, 104 “Cross Reading of a Newspaper,” 94 Cruikshankk, Isaac: The Royal Extinguisher, 29, 29; Talk of an Ostrich!, 32, 32–33 Cumberland, George, 118; The Captive of the Castle of Sennaar, 110 Curtis, Jared, 145 Cuthell, John, 15 Darwin, Erasmus, 156 Davies, Damian Walford, 157, 194n77, 211n82 Davies, Kate, 116–17 Defence of the Realm Act (1798), 11 De Man, Paul, 5, 144 Democracy: Coleridge on, 39; opposition to, 7; the press and, 84–86 De Quincey, Thomas, 79 Dermody, Thomas, 50 Dialogue upon the Two Bills Now Depending in Parliament, A (pamphlet), 30 Dickinson, H. T., 176n37 D’Israeli, Isaac, 109; Vaurien, 111 Eaton, Daniel Isaac, 67, 189n22, 211n86 Edwards, Edward, 70 Edwards, Pamela, 184n53 Egerton, Thomas, 110 Elliott, Marianne, 142 Emsley, Clive, 176n39 English Revolution, 67 Epstein, James, 189n22 Equiano, Olaudah, 197n35 Erskine, Thomas, 4, 110 Espionage. See Spies and spying Esterhammer, Angela, 40 Eyre, Sir James, 159 Falkner, Matthew, 85–86 Favret, Mary, 8 Feather, John, 84 Felix carcer (“happy prison” tradition), 51–53, 56, 58–59, 67, 77, 134 Fenwick, Eliza, 43; Secresy, 23 Ferguson, Frances, 5, 144 Ferraby, J., 23 Ferry, David, 5, 144 Fletcher, John, 68

index Flower, Benjamin, 18, 79–108; career of, 81; Coleridge and, 80; editorials by, 89, 91–92; example of, 79–80; The French Constitution, 88; imprisonment of, 80–81, 99–103, 107, 189n22, 199n67; journalistic and editorial practices of, 87–108; and politics, 91–92, 97, 99–104, 117; Reflections on the Preliminaries of Peace, Between Great Britain and the French Republic, 104–5 Flower, Richard, 88 Flower’s Political Review and Monthly Register (newspaper), 106 Fludernik, Monika, 113 Foucault, Michel, 13, 51; Discipline and Punish, 114, 202n21 Fox, Charles James, 15, 29–30, 34–35, 48, 83, 148 France, British wars with, 25, 30, 38, 92–94, 105–6, 126, 133, 137–38, 148, 154–55, 169 Franchise, extension of. See Voting rights Freedom of assembly, 38 Freedom of the press, 38–41, 89, 91–92, 185n68 French Revolution, 1, 15, 88, 116, 126, 130 French Terror, 34, 68, 81, 126 Frend, William, 88; Peace and Union, 92 Frost, John, 189n22 Furniss, Tom, 126 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 13–14 Gagging Acts (1795), 5; debates over, 29–30, 92–94; effects of, 17–48, 97, 110–36, 139, 146, 148; introduction of, 10–11, 21–22, 26–37; lifespans of, 167; passage of, 48; petitions on, 33; promoted as patriotic, 26–27; provisions of, 28; responses to, 16, 17, 21–48; scope of, 22–23 Gales, Joseph, 63, 81, 86–87, 107, 159, 191n42, 197n35 Gardner, David, 141 Garlies, John Stewart, Lord, 26 Garnai, Amy, 111 Genet, Jean, 77 George III, attack on, 21, 27, 30 Gerrald, Joseph, 42, 58, 185n71 Gill, Stephen, 146 Gillray, James, 17, 22; London Corresponding Society alarm’d—Vide, Guilty Consciences, 139, 140; Retribution, 34, 34–35 Gilmartin, Kevin, 111, 195n10, 196n18, 199n53 Glen, Heather, 143, 148–50 Godwin, William, 21, 50, 81, 86, 110, 116, 194n84; Caleb Williams, 3–4, 19, 23,

241

45–46, 58–59, 110–11, 112–16, 130, 202n21; Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills, 22–23, 41–47, 114, 146, 186n77; Cursory Strictures, 22, 58; on imprisonment, 53, 58–59; Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” 132; More’s satire on, 54–56; on the novel, 112; “Of History and Romance,” 112; on Pitt, 44–45; Political Justice, 22, 42–43, 45, 58, 92; and politics, 42–47, 112; prison as metaphor for, 18; response of, to political repression, 6, 17, 22–23, 41–47; Thelwall and, 42–45, 114; and Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman, 126–27 Goodwin, Albert, 86 Gould, Benjamin J., 168 Gould, Eliza, 94, 104, 198n51 Gray, Thomas, 71 Grenville, George, 26, 46, 100, 102–4, 147 Grossman, Jonathan H., 113 Guest, Harriet, 116–17, 203n25 Gurney, John, 179n2 Habeas corpus: restoration of, 168; suspension of, 8–10, 24, 62, 95–96, 142, 145, 175n30 Habeas Corpus Act (1679), 8 Habermas, Jürgen, 7, 83 Hall, Robert, An Apology for the Freedom of the Press, 92, 185n68 Hamilton, Elizabeth, 109 Hampden, John, 68, 120, 145, 192n52 “Happy prison” tradition. See Felix carcer Hardt, Michael, 58, 122 Hardy, Lydia, 180n12 Hardy, Thomas, 9, 57, 70, 87, 163–64, 180n12 Harrop, Joseph, 84–85 Hartman, Geoffrey, 5, 144 Havel, Václav, 13 Hayley, William, 15 Hays, Mary, 18, 50; The Victim of Prejudice, 61 Hazlitt, William, 45–46, 69 Heffernan, James, 161, 162 Hill, Christopher, 177n46, 213n107 Hodgson, William, 49, 189n21 Holcroft, Thomas, 110, 180n13, 189n22, 190n26 Holland, Lord, 102 Holland, William, 189n22 Holmes, Richard, 74 Holquist, Michael, 13 Holt, Daniel, 81, 189n22

242

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Home Office, 25, 63, 70, 72, 87, 138–39, 143 Horner, Francis, 46 Howard, John, 18, 49–50, 53, 56–57, 78, 129, 187n1 Hugo, Victor, 52 Hulme,T. E., 5 Hume, David, 85, 148 Hunt, John, 167 Hunt, Leigh, 167 Hutchinson, Sara, 79, 106 Ignatieff, Michael, 177n52 Imlay, Gilbert, 126 Imprisonment, 49–78; of Bonney, 3–4, 60–63, 190n26; of booksellers, 7, 12, 15, 67, 98, 189n22; of Flower, 80–81, 99–103, 107, 199n67; of Hardy, 57; of Holcroft, 180n13; imaginative escapes from, 58, 60, 63–65; as literary theme/metaphor, 18, 50; of Pigott, 25; of publishers, 189n22; Romantic-era writing on, 51–59; in Smith’s Marchmont, 121–22; of Thelwall, 50, 57, 65; threat of, 9, 12, 25, 57, 70, 79, 113; of Wakefield, 14–15, 177n52; in Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman, 129. See also Habeas corpus, suspension of; Prison conditions and reforms; Prison verse Inchbald, Elizabeth, 110 Incitement to Mutiny Act (1797), 11, 135 Informers, 9, 25, 30, 112. See also Spies and spying Jacobus, Mary, 211n81 Jameson, Fredric, 20 Johnson, Claudia, 129–30 Johnson, Joseph, 15, 139, 143, 148, 159, 189n22, 194n84 Johnston, Kenneth R., 2, 3, 82, 147, 177n53 Jones, John Gale, 48 Jordan, Jeremiah, 15 Journalism and the press, 18; attacks on, 27– 28; editors, 84; Flower and, 87–108; freedom of, 38–41, 89, 91–92, 185n68; government action against, 86–87; loyalist, 8, 21, 28, 99, 179n2, 196n21; oppositional/resistant, 80, 87–108, 196n21; provincial, 84–87; romantic-era, 82–84; scholarship on, 81; significance of, 81–84. See also Loyalist press Joyce, Jeremiah, 189n22 Juvenal, 145–46 Keats, John, 65

Kelly, Gary, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780– 1805, 109–10 King, John, 139 Klancher, Jon, 195n10 Lamb, Charles, 49, 75–77, 81, 155 Lamb, Mary, 76 Landon, Carol, 145 Langan, Celeste, 154 LCS. See London Corresponding Society Lee, Richard “Citizen,” 28, 173n3, 181n25 Legislation: justifications of, 21, 27–28; military as subject of, 11; politically repressive, 7, 10–12 Leicester Herald (newspaper), 16, 17, 107, 196n21 Levinson, Marjorie, 6, 143, 161, 162 Libel, 16, 60, 64, 79, 101–2, 104 Licensing Order (1643), 14, 41 Literacy, 83 Liu, Alan, 6 Llandaff, Richard Watson, Bishop of, 14, 101, 103, 144–45 Lloyd, Charles, 76, 77 Locke, John, 22, 85 London Corresponding Society (LCS), 11, 12, 27, 29, 44–45, 139–40, 142, 159, 168 London Reforming Society, 27 Losh, James, 142, 143, 164 Louis XVI, 1, 81, 105, 144 Loyalist press, 8, 21, 28, 99, 179n2, 196n21 MacCurdy, James, 57 Magnuson, Paul, 74, 75, 78, 212n97 Malmesbury, Lord, 46–47 Manchester Chronicle (newspaper), 84 Manchester Constitutional Society, 84 Manchester Herald (newspaper), 83, 85–86, 107–8 Manchester Mercury (newspaper), 84 Mann, Peter, 42 Markley, A. A., 113 Marriage, 131 Marshall, Peter, 113 Marsom, John, 199n58 Martin, David, 159 Martin, John, 199n58 Matthews, William, 9, 81–82 McCalman, Iain, 57, 173n3, 189n22 McCann, Andrew, 70 McGann, Jerome, 6, 143, 161 McGavran, James, 154

index Mee, Jon, 174n3, 181n16, 194n77 Mellor, Anne, 76, 203n25, 205n59 Mezentius, 146 Miall, David, 161 Miller, D. A., 115 Miller, Judith Davis, 201n7, 203n25 Milton, John, 3–67, 165, 213n107; Areopagitica, 41, 185n68; “On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament,” 67 Monboddo, Lord, 22 Montgomery, James, 18, 50, 63–65, 107, 108; “Captive Nightingale,” 64; “Moonlight,” 64–65; Prison Amusements, 64, 191n44 Monthly Magazine, 142 Monthly Review (newspaper), 44, 88, 142 Moore, John, 88 Moorman, Mary, 106 More, Hannah, 18, 50, 131–32; Cheap Repository Tracts, 53–56, 134; “The GinShop,” 53–54; The History of Mr. Fantom, 54–56, 133; on imprisonment, 53–56; Jack Brown in Prison, 56; Village Politics, 7, 53 Morganwg, Iolo (Edward Williams), 70 Morning Chronicle (newspaper), 112 Morning Post (newspaper), 33, 104 Mornington, Lord, 27, 28 Morton, Thomas, Secrets Worth Knowing, 23 Muir, Thomas, 67, 78, 177n53, 189n22, 192n55 Mulrooney, Jonathan, 82 “Mum!!!,” 94 Mutinies, 11, 99–100 Myers, Victoria, 184n53 Napoleon Bonaparte, 104, 169 Nerval, Gérard de, 52 Newgate prison, 49, 50, 58, 79, 80–81, 99, 103 New historicism, 2, 143 Newspaper Act (1798), 104 Newspapers. See Journalism and the press Newton, Richard, 189n22 Norris, Cara, 175n30 Occupatio, 20, 103, 104, 161, 166 O’Gorman, Frank, 7 O’Keefe, William, MUM!, 94, 95 Ousby, Ian, 113 Paine, Thomas, 16, 85, 86, 139, 150–51, 199n58; The Rights of Man, 7, 15–16, 145, 159, 178n58, 178n59 Paine effigies, 7, 88, 132 Palmer, Thomas, 189n22

243

Pantisocracy, 184n54 Patterson, Annabel, Censorship and Interpretation, 13–14, 177n46 Patton, Lewis, 42 Peace of Amiens, 11, 104, 155, 168, 171, 176n34, 213n3 Performance, imprisonment as, 62, 67–68 Peritz, Janice H., 126, 131, 133 Perry, Sampson, 81, 107, 189n22 Petitions, 33 Philanthropist (newspaper), 81, 82 Phillips, Richard, 15–17, 81, 107–8, 178n54 Philp, Mark, 133, 186n77, 201­n10 Pigott, Charles, 25, 50, 118, 181n16, 189n22 Pindar, Peter (pseudonym of John Wolcot), 17, 21, 22, 35–37, 94, 189n22 Pinney, Azariah, 146 Pitt, William (the Younger): assassination fears of, 30; Bonney on, 61; Coleridge on, 29, 39, 41; death of, 169–70; Godwin on, 44–45; gothic rhetoric of, 23; opposition to, 29–37, 46–47, 93–94, 100, 103–4; promotion of Gagging Acts by, 26–33; resignation of, 11, 168; return to office of, 214n5; and San Domingue, 151; surveillance by, 26; on suspension of habeas corpus, 95–96; “terror” of, 2, 12, 106–8; Wordsworth on, 169–70. See also Repressive government Place, Francis, 141–42 Polwhele, Richard, 132 Poole, Steve, 176n39 Poole, Thomas, 71–72, 75, 168 Poovey, Mary, 204n40 Portland, Duke of, 138, 139 Praeteritio, 20, 144, 151, 161 Praz, Mario, 5 Press, the. See Journalism and the press Price, Richard, 128 Priestley, Joseph, 85, 87, 139, 206n6 Prison. See Imprisonment Prison conditions and reforms, 18, 49–50, 53–60, 78, 177n52, 187n1, 199n67, 199n68 Prison verse, 18, 59–74; Bonney, 3–4, 60–63; characteristics of, 60; Cowper, 16–17; Montgomery, 63–65; Romantic lyrics as reflecting, 18, 50–51, 60, 63, 72, 74–78; Thelwall, 18, 50–51, 51, 65–69 Privacy, 23–26 Provincial press, 84–87 Prynne, William, 13 Public Advertiser (newspaper), 8

244

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Public sphere, 7, 83 Publishers, imprisonment of, 189n22 Pye, Henry James, The Democrat, 111 Pym, John, 145 Raids, on reform leaders, 25 Rajan, Tilottama, 113, 204n40 Raleigh, Walter, 61, 191n38 Rathbone, William, 148 Reeves, John, 35–37, 112 Reform Act (1832), 83 Reform movement: Flower and, 81–82, 88–108; government repression of, 14–16, 24–30, 65; the press and, 83–86; proponents of, 1–2 Reid, Thomas, 22 Repressive government: alarmist responses of, 135, 139–42; chilling effect of, 2–3, 106–8, 139, 148, 170–71; habeas corpus suspended by, 8–10, 142, 145; legislation of, 7, 10–12, 135, 142; models of engagement with, 14–17; moderation of, 168–69; novelists’ responses to, 110–36; overview of, 1–20, 176n34; Smith’s Marchmont and, 116–25; surveillance by, 22–30, 138–39, 143, 163; Wordsworth’s poetry in context of, 142–66 Revolution controversy, 81, 83, 85 Richardson, Alan, 211n81 Rickman, Thomas Clio, 15–16, 178n58 Ridgeway, James, 67, 189n22 Robespierre, Maximilien, 81, 102, 170 Robinson, Mary, 81, 92 Robinson, Robert, 106 Roe, Nicholas, 3, 82, 138, 142, 147–48, 155 Rose, Samuel, 16–17 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 85 Royal Proclamation Against Seditious Writings (1792), 6–7 Rushdie, Salman, 13 Russell, William, 61, 191n38 Rzepka, Charles, 161 San Domingue (Haiti), 151 Scaffold speeches, 68 Scott, Sir John, 159 Scrivener, Michael, 3, 160, 212n97, 212n102, 213n103 Secrecy, 23–30, 113–15 Secret Service, 25 Sedition, arrests for, 19, 63, 142 Seditious Meetings Act (1795), 167. See also Gagging Acts (1795)

Shakespeare, William, 23 Sheffield Iris (newspaper), 63–64, 108 Sheffield Register (newspaper), 63, 86–87, 108 Shelley, Mary, 110 Shelley, Percy Bysshe: The Mask of Anarchy, 11, 135 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 9, 30, 34 Sidney, Algernon, 61, 191n38 Siebert, F. S., Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776, 13 Silence: expressive, 3–4; figurations of, 6; politically influenced, 5–6, 22–23, 36–37, 46–48, 94, 144–51; in Romantic-era writing, 2–6; in Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman, 127–28; in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, 19–20, 144–51 Simmel, Georg, 116 Simpson, David, 6, 157, 211n82 Six Acts (1819), 167 Smith, Charlotte: Desmond, 19, 116, 117; Letters of a Solitary Wanderer, 111; Marchmont, 19, 110–11, 116–25, 148 Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor, 155 Society for Constitutional Information (SCI), 27, 60, 97 Society of the Friends of Liberty, 27 Solitary confinement, 3, 50, 57, 58–59 Southey, Robert, 75, 81, 92, 103, 184n54; “The Devil’s Thoughts,” 74 Speech. See Discursive constraint Spence, Thomas, 150, 173n3, 189n22 Spencer, Jane, 122, 123 Spies and spying, 25–26, 30, 112, 138. See also Informers; Surveillance Spinoza, Baruch, 138 Spy Nozy affair, 138 Stanley, Edward, 30 Star (newspaper), 38 Star Chamber, 13 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 52 Storch, Rudolf, 113 Suffrage. See Voting rights Sullivan, Garrett A., Jr., 113 Surveillance: Godwin’s Caleb Williams and, 112–16; persistence of, 167–68; by Pitt government, 22–30, 143, 163; Smith’s Marchmont and, 122–24; of Thelwall, 69–70; of Wordsworth, 138–39, 163; in Wordsworth’s poetry, 156–57. See also Spies and spying Symonds, Henry, 67, 189n22

index Tarling, Barbara, 125 Telegraph (newspaper), 82 Terror: French, 34, 68, 81, 126; Pitt’s, 2, 12, 106–8 Theater. See Performance, imprisonment as Thelwall, John, 50, 54, 81, 97, 163, 173n5; “The Cell,” 66, 68–69; Close Confinement, 66–69; Coleridge and, 2–3, 50, 71–72, 74–78, 186n80, 193n77; “The Crises,” 68; destruction of manuscripts of, 25, 50; “The Feelings of a Parent,” 67; Godwin and, 42– 45, 114; harassment of, 25; imprisonment of, 50, 57, 65; on informers, 9; “Lines, written at Bridgewater,” 70–71; Llyswen lyrics of, 69–74, 192n61; mental state of, 69–70; “On the Report of the Death of Thomas Muir,” 67, 78; Peripatetic, 66; Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, 50, 65, 69, 164, 192n61; Poems on Various Subjects, 66; Poems Written in Close Confinement in the Tower and Newgate, 50; and politics, 65–66, 68, 69–70, 164, 211n86, 213n104; “Prefatory Memoir” for Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, 164, 212n102, 213n103; prison verse of, 18, 50–51, 51, 65–69; response of, to political repression, 17, 22, 25, 33, 116, 168; “To the Infant Hampden,” 74; Welsh sojourn of, 69–74; “The Woodbine,” 66, 72–73; Wordsworth and, 71, 143, 158 Thelwall, Susan, 71 Thompson, E. P., 2–3, 11, 22, 43, 48, 65, 68, 73–74, 80, 84, 113, 143, 168, 173n4, 176n39; The Making of the English Working Class, 2, 108, 171, 173n3 Thompson, James, 113 Thompson, Judith, 3, 66, 74, 157, 174n5, 192n54, 193n71, 203n105 Thomson, James, “Hymn,” 3 Tierney, George, 141, 164 Tooke, John Horne, 22, 61, 86, 139, 189n22 Tower of London, 3, 49, 50, 60–62, 190n26 Traitorous Correspondence Act (1793), 8 Treasonable Practices Act (1795), 167. See also Gagging Acts (1795) Treason statute (1351), 4–5, 21 Treason trials (1794), 10, 24, 92 Treaty of Amiens. See Peace of Amiens United Britons, 142 United Englishmen, 11, 139, 141, 142 United Irishmen, 139, 142

245

United Scotsmen, 142 Unlawful Oaths Act (1797), 176n36 Unlawful Societies Act (1799), 142. See Corresponding Societies Act (1799) Virgil, 146 Voltaire, 85 Volunteers, 11, 176n36 Wakefield, Gilbert, 103, 104, 148; imprisonment of, 14–15, 177n52, 189n22; response of, to political repression, 14–15 Walker, George, 109 Walker, Thomas, 81, 84–86, 87, 103 Wallace, Miriam L., 110 Walpole, Horace, 131–32 Walsh, James, 138–39 Warning Voice to the People of England, A (pamphlet), 21 War Office, 25 Wars, between Britain and France, 25, 30, 38, 92–94, 105–6, 126, 133, 137–38, 148, 154–55, 169 Watchman (newspaper), 48, 63, 80, 153, 191n41, 195n4 Watson, Nicola, 204n40 Watson, Richard. See Llandaff, Richard Watson, Bishop of Werkmeister, Lucyle, 18, 174n14, 175n20 West (cartoonist): A Lock’d Jaw for John Bull, 35, 36; The Modern Hercules, 31, 31 West, Jane, 109 Wheeler, Charles, 84–85 Whelan, Timothy, 80 Wickham, William, 25–26 Williams, Edward. See Morganwg, Iolo Williams, Helen Maria, 88 Williams, Raymond, 8 Williams, Thomas, 98, 199n58 Windham, William, 10 Winterbotham, William, 189n22 Wolcot, John. See Pindar, Peter Wolfson, Susan, 20, 156, 162, 211n81 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 50, 194n84; Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, 205n52; Mary, a Fiction, 127–28; misogynist criticisms of, 131–32; prison as metaphor for, 18; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 125–26, 128; The Wrongs of Woman; or Maria, 19, 61, 110–11, 125–36 Wood, Lisa, 131

246

index

Woodcock, George, 186n77 Wood gleaning, 142–43, 156, 210n77 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 79–80, 106, 145, 163, 164 Wordsworth, Jonathan, 52, 170 Wordsworth, Richard, 9, 145 Wordsworth, William, 50, 88; “Anecdote for Fathers,” 6, 144, 157–60, 210n81, 211n82; The Borderers, 175n30; “The Boy of Winander,” 5; brother of, 9; Coleridge and, 138–39; The Convention of Cintra, 79, 169; “The Convict,” 52–53, 143, 152–53; criticisms of, 142–43, 148–49, 154; departure for Germany, 11; “The Discharged Soldier,” 144, 151–55, 209n60, 209n63; and discursive constraint, 143–44; fear of prosecution, 79–80, 106–7; “The Female Vagrant,” 143; “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” 142, 144, 155–57; Imitation, 145–48, 208n47; journalistic endeavors of, 81–82; “The Last of the Flock,” 143, 151; Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, 14, 144–46;

Lyrical Ballads, 19–20, 139, 142–51, 155–61; “Old Man Travelling,” 143, 148–49, 151; on Pitt, 169–70; and politics, 137–38, 142–51, 163–66, 168–71; Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 155; The Prelude, 137, 151–52, 169–70; prison as metaphor for, 18; Racedown poems, 155; repressive context for poetry of, 142–66; response of, to political repression, 6; “The Ruined Cottage,” 155; “Salisbury Plain,” 155; silence in work of, 19–20, 144–51, 155–61; “Simon Lee,” 143, 144, 149–50; and sonnet form, 67; speech in work of, 151–61; surveillance of, 138–39, 143; Thelwall and, 71, 143, 158; “Tintern Abbey,” 4, 143, 144, 161–66, 213n107; war criticized by, 137–38, 148, 154–55; on war with France, 137–38 Wrangham, Francis, 145–46, 208n35, 208n47 Yearsley, Ann, The Royal Captives, 23 Young, Arthur, 88 Zimmerman, Sarah, 209n55, 212n90