Romanticism and the Rule of Law: Coleridge, Blake, and the Autonomous Reader 3030748774, 9783030748777

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Romanticism and the Rule of Law Coleridge, Blake, and the Autonomous Reader Mark L. Barr

Romanticism and the Rule of Law

Mark L. Barr

Romanticism and the Rule of Law Coleridge, Blake, and the Autonomous Reader

Mark L. Barr English Department Saint Mary's University Halifax, NS, Canada

ISBN 978-3-030-74877-7    ISBN 978-3-030-74878-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74878-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image © Historic Images / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book has traveled a long and difficult road. I can only hope that those who helped me shepherd it understand the depth of my appreciation. To my parents, siblings, children, and (above all) Michele: words are (as always) inadequate.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my intellectual mentors: Mark Schoenfield, Jerome Christensen, Deak Nabers, James Epstein, Jon Mee, Fiona Stafford, and Lucy Newlyn. Their influence is everywhere in this book. Elements of Chap. 3 were also made possible thanks to an SSHRC grant from the Government of Canada. Portions of this book appeared previously as: Barr, Mark L. “Prophecy, the Law of Insanity, and The [First] Book of Urizen.” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 46:4 (Autumn 2006) 739–62. Reprinted with permission. Barr, Mark. L. “The Common Law Illusion: Literary Justice in Coleridge’s On the Constitution of the Church and State.” College Literature 35:3 (2008), 120–137. © 2008 Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. Barr, Mark. L. “The Lyric Dispensation: Coleridge, Mosaic Law, and Equivocal Authority in ‘The Eolian Harp’.” Studies in Romanticism 44:3 (2005), 293–315. © 2005 Trustees of Boston University. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. Barr, Mark L. “The Forms of Justice: Precedent and Gloss in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” English Literary History,78:4 (Winter 2011) 863–889. Reprinted with permission.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Legal Reason and the Ordeal of Romantic Reading  1 References  16 2 A Legal Genealogy of the Romantic Imagination 19 Legal Bowers  23 Romantic Reading at the End of History  38 Romantic Justice in “The Solitary Reaper”  50 References  54 3 Coleridge’s Poetic Dispensation 57 Lyric Space and the Prophetic Subject  60 The Fall of Robespierre and the “Cottag’d Vale”  68 “Effusion XXXV” and the Regulation of Autonomy  75 Poetic Transportation and the Lyric Subject  82 The Limitations of Lyric Space  92 (Un)Restrained Liberty 101 References 107 4 Imagination and the Lyric Constitution111 The Ancient Mariner: Regulating Print and Innovation 111 Institutionalizing the Lyric 129 A Moderate Radical 148 References 149 ix

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5 Blake’s Perpetual Revolution153 Toward a New Justice: “The Proverbs of Hell” 154 The Fires of Prophecy 160 Of Law and Forgetting 176 References 181 6 The Gospel of Minute Particulars185 Jury Nullification and Radical Autonomy 188 The Bard’s Song 193 Self-Annihilation as Legal Aesthetic 198 Reading Jerusalem: Revelations Beyond the Rule of Law 203 References 222 7 Epilogue: Law at the Limits of Imagination225 References 234 Index237

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Legal Reason and the Ordeal of Romantic Reading

The rule of law defines the edges of the autonomous legal subject. Theorized in the British tradition as emerging from the interaction of the common law, Magna Carta, the Revolution Settlement, independent courts, the jury, parliamentary tradition and legislation, the law of evidence, judicial procedure, and legal interpretive practice, the rule of law is the bounding line that separates the space in which the individual is free to act from the region in which his or her activity may be curtailed and censured by government force. Although the minute particulars of laws, institutions, and practices may change, flexing that line inward and outward through the centuries and across jurisdictions, the rule of law remains to circumscribe the terrain on which we may live unmolested by the variety of government, corporate, and individual actors who would increasingly curtail our exercise of personal freedom (Santoro 2010, pp.  153–5; Tamanaha 2004, p. 45). However, others see the rule of law as a Victorian fantasy, constructed as a “psychological defence against the horrors of chaotic existence” or even (in more skeptical, Marxist terms) as an ideological prop to the hegemony of those who control the means of production: in a “godless age” rights are the “only values left” (Douzinas and Gearey 2005, pp. 43, 36). For all its supposed lengthy pedigree, it was not until 1885 that Albert Venn Dicey became the first to explore systematically the rule of law in England as a distinct concept and point to it as the fulcrum on which the English Constitution turned (Santoro 2010, p. 161). Standing against the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. L. Barr, Romanticism and the Rule of Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74878-4_1

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burgeoning power of the expanding administrative state, Dicey sought to articulate an origin story that placed the sources of law in a sublime realm beyond the reach of that state, thereby granting greater autonomy to individual interpreters and private citizens protected by the rule of law from the positivist will of their governors (Tamanaha 2004, pp. 57–65). The concept was said to have deep roots in the Whig rhetorical tradition and to arise from something as ancient as the land itself (see also Tamanaha 2004, pp.  10–53). Writing of the English common law in 1753, Sir William Blackstone voiced enthusiastic optimism as to its libertarian effects: [T]o demonstrate the utility of some acquaintance with the laws of the land, let us only reflect a moment on the singular frame and polity of that land, which is governed by this system of laws. A land, perhaps the only one in the universe, in which political or civil liberty is the very end and scope of the constitution. This liberty, rightly understood, consists in the power of doing whatever the laws permit; which is only to be effected by a general conformity of all orders and degrees to those equitable rules of action, by which the meanest individual is protected from the insults and oppression of the greatest. (1765, p. 1:6)

For Blackstone, the law that existed above all was that of God, a “natural law” of universal justice that could be accessed and understood through a process of reasoning over time. This was the practice of the common law that slowly “discovered” the details of divine will, resulting in a space circumscribed by law wherein people could live free. For reasons unexplained, those who were part of England’s “singular frame and polity” had the most direct access to divine justice—the people of this particular land comprehended better than any others what God’s law must be. This was a “law of the land” (a phrase invoked directly from the Magna Carta’s famous “legem terrae”) that both governed the land and arose from some specific connection with place, that could be apprehended (so it seemed) only by people who lived in that place and was then expressed as “political and civil liberty” in the very fabric or “constitution” of the nation, the political and legal analogue of the physical space the people inhabited. The people of Britain were then, in Blackstone’s opinion, prophets of the law who seemingly gained their visionary capacities through association with a special landscape known as England.1

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Sir Edward Coke, writing over a century before Blackstone, had voiced similar sentiments. For him, the common law was the greatest safeguard of freedom against monarchical power: “the law is the surest sanctuary, that a man can take, and the strongest fortress to protect the weakest of all” (Santoro 2010, p. 153; see also Hulsebosch 2003, pp. 439ff.). It was, moreover, a freedom that ran specifically with the land and the mystical sublimity it seemingly contained: the “law remained a mystery” and “knowledge of the law [was] like a deepe well out of which each man draweth according to the strength of his understanding” (cited in Lobban 1991, p. 11). Pronouncing on the applicability of English law to those in British Colonies, Coke made clear in Calvin’s Case that the common law was a law of place, a law of England, and stretched only so far as its physical institutions could reach (Hulsebosch 2003, p. 446; see also Cormack 2007). By the late nineteenth century, legal scholars such as Edward John Phelps (Vermont lawyer, politician, and controller of the US Treasury) would also suggest an intimate connection between the “Liberties of the English” and the soil on which they were born. Speaking in Edinburgh on November 12, 1886, he claimed the “Law of the Land” as “the criterion and bulwark” of liberty, as the essential substratum for legislative authority and court jurisdiction which stood as a guarantee of personal freedom against the potential for government oppression, for the principle “that human rights are the foundation and not the concession of human authority” (Phelps 1886, p. 3). Although Coke’s paean to the liberties protected by the rule of law may seem premature, the ancient causes of action and medieval writs, an independent judiciary, and the jury system were all very much in place by the publication of his Institutes in the early 1620s. Certainly soon after his pronouncement, an even more robust ideal of the rule of law was emerging—throughout the seventeenth century, the common law continued to alter the nature of feudal tenures, muting the discretion previously inherent in the landlord/tenant relationship. The legal and cultural developments of the English Civil War, enshrined to some extent in the Revolution Settlement, placed further restrictions on the discretion of Monarch and Parliament. Developments in the jury system (including restrictions on the extent to which juries could be intimidated by judicial authority), in the capacity of an accused criminal to be represented by legal counsel and (crucially) in the notion of precedent and its interpretation which occurred in the eighteenth century put in place many of the safeguards we recognize today as essential to the rule of law and the freedoms we enjoy. By the

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mid-1800s, European visitors to England showed open admiration for the rights of the accused in English courts and bore astonished witness to “the liberty of the English” (Santoro 2010, p. 158). It is a mistake to suggest the Victorian rule of law is a mere fantasy created from whole cloth—it’s one that had been developing for a long time, finally unified and articulated by Dicey near the end of the nineteenth century at a moment when the rising administrative state seemed eager to embrace the capacity of positive law to project its authority (Tamanaha 2004, pp. 63–4).2 Although the phrase “Law of the Land” at least in part referred to the jurisdictional limitations of the British Courts and also to the central role that the law of property played in the conception of sovereignty both in feudal and post-feudal England (as discussed in Cormack 2007), there was equally an almost mystical sense in which the law of the land and the consequent “liberties of the English” arose from a kind of supernatural connection with the earth and sky of the British Isles—their place (inter alia) allowed these prophets to read the signs of God’s will. James Harrington’s dissemination of the concept of Machiavellian “virtue” as arising from a relationship with the land (and standing in opposition to collective oversight and the corruption inherent in government institutions—Pocock 1975) and Anthony Ashley Cooper’s, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, conception of polite discourse as existing between reasoning equals, surrounded by England’s natural beauty (Klein 1994), these and other theorists who contributed to the Whig tradition of the rule of law all to a greater or lesser extent saw liberty as arising in and from the natural landscape of Britain. In Shakespeare’s “sceptered isle,” his “other Eden, demi-­ paradise” (Richard II 2.1.1–2), legal jurisdiction is equally a metaphor expressing the ideal that the land bears within it the signs of divine justice comprehensible by its people: in a 1712 edition of The Spectator, Joseph Addison could confidently assert “A spacious horizon is an image of liberty” (Waites 2004, p. 84). The rise of the rule of law exhibits intriguing parallels with the Romantic literary movement, especially its British manifestation. Its celebration of the supernatural sublime as manifested through the natural world, its examination of the relationship of the subject to that world, and the broader social and political issues that can be mediated through that relationship, these are well-documented tropes of the form. In his Natural Supernaturalism, M.H. Abrams famously construed British Romanticism as “spilt religion.” Distilling the essence of Wordsworth’s “high argument,” Abrams argued that Romantic poetry becomes a training ground

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for salvation, a demonstration of how the union of mind and nature in the contemplation of common experience can instigate an apocalyptic act of the imagination wherein the world becomes a paradise and the individual apotheosized (Abrams 1973, pp.  11–14). Although the techniques and theoretical underpinnings of other Romantic writers were necessarily different, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Blake ultimately also aimed at this radical alteration of vision. Abrams’ argument frames Romantic expression as a kind of compensation for the fading of religious certainty and sentiment in the era’s cultural consciousness. The trauma of a secular and suddenly-­rootless society is sublimated into Romanticism. Yet, “Romanticism” is equally a Victorian ideological construct, a concept implicated in the canonization process of the later decades of that period. As Terry Eagleton suggests, “English Studies,” insofar as it is the educational institutionalization of that canon, is an attempt to promulgate an ideological prop to failing faith in religion and to cement allegiance to the secular modern state (1994, p.  49). Abrams’ characterization of Romanticism locates the rise of this literary movement in an earlier sublimation of a continuing social trauma. Although he limits his investigation to the ways in which Romanticism supplements a failing spirituality, I would suggest that the literature of that period also seeks to renegotiate the relationship of the individual to the state which that spirituality supports. In his study of the ideological investments underpinning Wordsworth’s poetry, Thomas Pfau suggests that Romantic literature covers the trauma of cultural contingency in a newly emerging capitalist paradigm. Invoking the notion of the Nietzschean aesthetic as “redemption by illusion,” Pfau frames Wordsworth’s poetry as a bandage over the traumatic wound of historical self-consciousness. So long as the middle-class subject can acquire cultural capital through the intense interiority valorized and enacted through Romantic poetry, he or she can deny their existence as purely the product of ephemeral consumer culture and posit a spiritual transcendence beyond the crass materialistic means of their own and their society’s production (Pfau 1997, pp. 1–14). With both Abrams and Pfau, Romanticism arises through a process of sublimation, which entails the elevation of some experience or process (e.g., reading poetry) as a mechanism to enable the denial of some uncomfortable truth. Indeed, this is how Althusser suggests all ideology comes to be. In his “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Althusser posits that, although most feel their belief in “God, or Duty, or Justice” arises from a voluntary choice that then guides their actions, “to participate in certain regular practices …

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sign petitions, take part in demonstrations, etc.,” in fact the inverse is true: the individual subject is confronted by a set of ritualistic practices that are always already in place, and then must supply an ideology to justify their traumatic and irrational capitulation to those rituals and practices. Quoting Pascal, Althusser depicts the process as “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe” (2004, p.  696). Read through Althusser, Abrams, and Pfau describe Romantic poetry as a set of ritualistic practices, phrases, and anticipated responses, all modeled by the author and his poetic focus on his own interiority that creates an apparent spirituality or cultural capital constituting the ideology of Romanticism. Like the rule of law then, Romanticism is an ideological construct that arises in response to trauma. Constantly reminded of our freedom through a variety of cultural rituals (such as the Whig discourse of English Liberty), we must explain why and how we retain that freedom in the face of state power. In referencing the seminal work of Abrams and Pfau, I would add one more source for the Romantic ideology—in not only religious and class trauma, but in legal anxiety. As much as this state power in the Victorian era produced a canon of Romantic authors and works that promulgated a vision of the individual that supported rule of law ideology, the manifestations of that nascent power in the Romantic period (nearer the birth of the modern state) produced a literary reaction that is not merely an illusion of Victorian selectivity. Literary production in the Romantic period itself is equally a sublimation of the 1790s assault on the rule of law, as it was conceived at the time. In these works, we can find both the ideal justice seemingly lost in the 1790s and a template for the kind of subject who can best produce and maintain that lost justice. Extending Pfau’s arguments, I would see the Victorian creation of Romanticism as parallel to its creation of the rule of law: both arise to fulfill a need, to fill in a traumatic gap in the social consciousness, one that compensates not merely for increasing secularism but also for the concomitant potential disintegration of the state and legal subjecthood—a danger existing both in the Victorian period and the Romantic. For many in the decades following the publication of Blackstone’s Commentaries, reason, the common law, and government legislation were not producing a legal system or social order that expressed the universal justice God and the landscape supposedly espoused: the “rule of law” seemingly applied to only a select few, undermining the universality necessary to underpin the concept itself. A corrupt Chancery “equity,” a

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tyrannous Parliament, economic, gender, and racial inequality, and a jury system under siege by forces of bribery and influence all spoke to the failure of conventional legal institutions and processes to house the concepts of “justice,” “liberty,” and “freedom” lying at the heart of Blackstone’s optimistic vision of England. In the 1790s, especially, the rule of law faced one of its greatest crises to date: a government reaction to the threat of rebellion and radical sentiment sparked by the French Revolution of 1789. Since the English Civil War, the rule of law had been seen as protected at its most basic level by the threat of rebellion. In the words of Emilio Santoro: Above all, however, this perception [of the free Englishman] stemmed from the belief that the common people were quite capable of forcefully reminding the magistrates of the rights of “free-born Englishmen” which comprised freedom of association, freedom of the press and, to a lesser extent, religious freedom. (2010, p. 155)

This is the power to which Richard Price alludes in his 1789 “Discourse on the Love of our Country,” when he claims the people may cashier the monarch for misconduct (Price 1789, pp.  23–4 and 34–5). Within the public sphere then was a perception that the government’s patent abuse of power carried with it the risk of a violent public response: the limitation of arbitrary authority that was the (ideal) rule of law persisted only because of the threat that had been demonstrated and realized in the Civil War and (to a lesser extent) the Glorious Revolution, that the people could rise up and “forcefully remind” their rulers (Monarch, Parliament, and their representative, the Magistrate) where the true source of sovereignty should lie, the objections of Edmund Burke notwithstanding. Following the French Revolution, the British Parliament was anxious precisely about this possibility, that chaos, anarchy, and rebellion threatened to break out and violently reestablish the “liberties of the English” in opposition to (perceived or real) government despotism. Alarmed by the radical sentiment contained in the works of Price, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and others, including extremists like Richard “Citizen” Lee, William Cobbett, and Thomas Spence, the government instigated various ploys to limit or eliminate the freedom of expression and assembly that supported the circulation of such ideas and was such an integral part of English liberty. Theorists and populists alike were peering beyond the rhetoric of the rule to call out the injustice and inequality of their times.

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Emilio Santoro reminds us that the threat of rebellion was not the only reason the rule of law persisted through these chaotic times: Faced with the social disorders from 1790 to 1832, the English ruling classes might have chosen to abandon the egalitarian ideology of the rule of law and its universal connotations, to abolish the complex system of legal constrains afforded by the Constitution and to transform their power into a violent machinery of repression. Indeed, they took some steps in this direction, as the campaign against Paine, the Combination Acts (1799–1800), the Peterloo Massacre (1819), and the Six Acts (1820) seem to suggest. In the end, however, the ruling classes preferred to take the path of legality instead of shattering their own image and repudiating one and a half centuries of constitutional legitimacy. In contrast to what happened in other European countries, the government maintained order by applying the law, and did not resort to arbitrary measures. (2010, pp. 159–60)

To this litany of abuses might be added the 1793 Scottish Sedition trials, the 1794 English Treason Trials, and the intermittent suspension of Habeus Corpus in the later 1790s. Through these strategies and more, the British government leaned away from the rule of law and sought to silence radical opposition, to curtail and close down the “free space” in which people existed (or at least felt they existed). Aspects of Santoro’s assessment may be disputed. For example, the application of the law of blasphemous libel in the 1810s (in the trials of William Hone) and the prosecutorial rigging of the jury selection process in the 1790s both suggest a serious attempt to make the application of a seemingly-egalitarian law “arbitrary” in fact. Yet, the Hardy defendants were acquitted and very few actually pursued under any of the Gagging Acts. Adrian Merritt’s objection that E.P.  Thompson fetishizes the rule of law may perhaps equally apply to these “English ruling classes: they had come to believe their own rhetoric and bequeathed on law a supposedly transcendent truth that became ‘the independent source of [their] existence and values’ rather than the other way around” (Balbus 1977, p. 284, cited in Merrit 1980, p. 208). Viewed in this light, the Reform Act of 1832 could be seen as “restor[ing] the credibility of the law as an impartial instrument to limit social and political conflict” (Santoro 2010, p. 160, citing Harvie 1984). This act amounted to the rhetoric of the rule reestablishing itself after a period of turmoil and challenge—the ideological mask had slipped and almost revealed the “reality” behind the fantasy, and had almost caused the feared rebellion and reassertion of “rights.” That this anxiety should register in

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contemporary, Romantic literature makes a certain sense: in reaction to this assault on the rule of law arises a poetry that sublimates the trauma of this activity and attempts to compensate for a variety of law’s shortcomings and injustices, establishing a mode of artistic expression and perhaps even instituting literary expression more broadly as the vehicle to house and promote justice. I would suggest then that Romantic literary production, born in a formative moment for the rule of law, works to uphold that rule or at least attempts to formulate an ideal expression of it by framing its poetic subject in a particular way. Although Dicey may have been the first to explore systematically the theoretical underpinnings of the rule, he was drawing on a long series of historical developments that had been deeply absorbed into legal, historical, and (I would suggest) literary discourse. Produced by those who had emerged victorious from the successive sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conflicts between gentry and monarchy, the Whig rhetorical tradition viewed the law and its various institutional and theoretical safeguards of liberty as the only power that could “protect their property and lives from abuse of monarchical power and aristocratic arrogance” (Santoro 2010, p. 158). In particular, it was through a reliance on reason, the power of the intellect to “discover” the common law, that these safeguards might be maintained. In the face of this erosion of the rule of law and the legal bulwark around individual rights, Romantic literary production sought to create its own haven for individual autonomy through a process not of reason but of emotion and imagination. In the face of traumatic threats to personal liberty and the rule of law, certain writers of the British Romantic period rejected Blackstone’s optimism and expressed in their own poetic meditations on the landscape and nature an alternate forum in which justice and liberty could perhaps be found and even thrive. Writing in reaction to the most serious threat to the rule of law since the Civil War, Romantic writers hoped to reinvigorate a connection with the landscape and nature which would reproduce and maintain the ideals of liberty, freedom, and legal rule supposedly enshrined in the ancient constitution of the land. However, to stop at that conclusion would be uncritically to absorb and reflect the Romantic ideology of literature that is itself the product of an attempt to locate a “poetic justice” in works eager to proclaim their opposition to dominant cultural ideology (which the rule of law so often supports). Unlike the work of Martha Nussbaum and Wai Chi Dimmock, I do not wish to see literature’s effect as purely salutary. As Eagleton has

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suggested, certain authors and particular works are canonized (and taught) because they espouse ideals amenable to political stability. They might reflect a largely a-political substitute or pressure valve in which people may gain cultural capital (and be content with their lack of actual capital), may participate in literary acts of rebellion (and be diverted from violent acts of rebellion), and are constantly assured that their capacity to appreciate literature gentrifies them in a quasi-spiritual sense. If Romantic poetry suggests that justice is attainable in a sphere walled off from the affective political realm, then its acts of justice can never amount to much: rather than promoting rebellion or resistance, such poetry might appear to advocate acquiescence and placidity. As with the skeptical view of the rule of law, Romanticism might be no more than an ideological prison. Yet, to embrace summarily the lure of skepticism would be equally short-sighted. In his work on the origins and application of the Black Act, Thompson concludes that the eighteenth century actually saw the development of a robust rule of law in which there were real constitutional guarantees of a citizen’s rights against the arbitrary and despotic exercise of government force (1993, p. 155). Although the “rule of law” may have been no more than “a mask for the rule of a class” (Thompson 1993, p. 12; see also Merritt 1980, p. 196) and may have excluded certain categories of persons (based on gender, age, or property holdings), it was, at times, “actually … just”: If the law is evidently partial and unjust, then it will mask nothing, legitimize nothing, contribute nothing to any class’s hegemony. The essential precondition for the effectiveness of law, in its function as ideology, is that it shall display an independence from gross manipulation and shall seem to be just. It cannot seem to be so without upholding its own logic and criteria of equity; indeed, on occasion, by actually being just (emphasis in original). (Thompson 1993, p. 35, cited in Merritt 1980, p. 201)

Thompson argues that Whig rhetoric bolstered a stratified class structure—so long as people believed the poor and the wealthy could alike be taken to the Tyburn gallows, it was likely the people would accept their nominal equality and reinforce the class structure through tacit, passive acquiescence. In order to appear equal, the law on occasion (and that is a serious qualification) had actually to act equally. Although Merrit has dismissed this latter claim as “romantic vision” (1980, p. 203), for my purposes it is important only that the “rule of law” worked effectively and

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broadly as a legitimizing rhetoric: many in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (perhaps including certain Romantic poets) at least believed the law was or could be “actually … just” and that such justice was worth retaining or regaining. In Althusserian terms, the ritual of Tyburn, one of many conventional practices to support rule of law ideology, caused most to believe in the rhetoric of the rule—the people would then “police themselves” and exist within the fantastic ideology which described an imaginary relationship to their real mode of existence. Belief becomes reality (c.f. Tamanaha 2004, p. 58). That which is imagined becomes true but can equally flicker in and out of existence depending on the extent to which those in power and those governed by them hold to the belief. The rule of law arises from ancient institutions, yes, but more directly from rhetoric and performance associated with those institutions in the present moment. Rich and poor alike could enjoy the protection of their property rights, even though the latter “in reality … [were] oppressed, alienated and dehumanized” by them (Merritt 1980, p. 203). Moments of political and economic stress produce fractures in this illusion. As Pietro Costa suggests, the rule of law as a concept seems often invoked only during such times of stress and fracture, as a way to reassure that it “actually” exists—almost it seems to arise in reaction to a challenge (2010, p. 73). Lacking representation in government and access to legal counsel and the education necessary for a full defence, the poor and women (to name a few of the disenfranchised) could in many ways be decidedly said not to enjoy the rule of law; added to the threat of government oppression, their example and the manifestation of other injustices and abuses of power against a variety of groups had the potential to produce a literary reaction, an attempt to compensate for the trauma of such injustice. Romantic writing inordinately dwells on the lives and experiences of such marginalized groups and tends also to manifest concern about the effects of more specific legal processes such as acts of enclosure and the so-called “Corn Laws” (that came into effect after 1815). The former effectively appropriated for the sole use of large landowners what had previously been commonly held pastureland. The latter raised the price of bread in an effort to support farmers and landowners but with the effect of starving the poor. Here were legal enactments that impinged upon the autonomy of the individual to a great extent and even went so far as to curtail the physical space and landscape through which those people could move. The effects of such laws were dramatized in Romantic

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poetry, especially in that of William Wordsworth, the figure who in many ways set the tenor for the movement. The question of the ways in which “Romantic Literature” colludes with or rebels against the dominant ideologies encoded in the rule of law is highly complex. On the one hand, “Romanticism” and “the rule of law” are anachronisms in the 1790s, developed long after its literary practitioners had ceased writing. Looking through the eyes of the Victorian canon, these “Romantic” writers and works may appear to reflect only the investments and purposes of later nineteenth-century intellectuals who developed their ideas in tandem with the same ideological forces that mandated the “rule of law.” An argument could be made, therefore, that Romanticism and the rule of law are most closely connected at that historical moment, when Dicey and the rise of English Studies both produce literary manifestations of faith in a higher ideal to both support and modify dominant cultural ideology. However, that exploration is only a very small part of this study. Instead, this book takes the coincidental Victorian invention of both concepts as a starting point, as inspiration to commence an examination of the extent to which literary production in the period 1789–1832 (one conventional definition of “The Romantic Period”) self-consciously purported to support the rule of law or rebel against it. Unsurprisingly, something as varied and extensive as “Romantic Literature” could not help but do both. Moreover, although Romantic writers to a greater or lesser extent supported a space for personal autonomy and rule of law ideology in the face of a supposedly collapsing justice, this support cannot be characterized as inherently positive or negative. As much as the rule of law is almost universally lauded in the present day (Tamanaha 2004, pp. 1–2), its ritualistic use in the oppression of minorities and the poor, not to mention its historical utility in justifying colonialism, suggest that Romanticism is implicated in a complex moral legacy.3 Although exploring Victorian thought is not the primary goal of this work, I felt it important to choose one writer squarely within the Victorian Romantic canon, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and one decidedly outside of it, William Blake. This selection was intended not only to expose the conservative ideology at the heart of Victorian canonization, but also to enable reflection on the ways in which conceptions of the literary continue to influence our understanding of the rule of law in the present day. Canonization, I submit, is an important step in distinguishing the literary from the legal sphere and supporting the hegemony of legal utterance in even the most modern jurisprudence. Although Coleridge might be

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unfairly forced into the role of ideological conservative, his work supposedly supporting and promulgating a theory of the subject as a free and autonomous individual caught within the ambit of a justice supported by the rule of law, it will be seen that his work ultimately rebels against any such characterization. Conversely for Blake, as much as his work finally seeks to explode all legal categories and dismantle the rule of law fundamentally, there are times when even he seeks a haven safe and isolated from the danger of legal and political oppression. In short, although Romanticism as a Victorian concept greatly endorses as an unqualified good the subjectivity required by the rule of law, Romantic writers remain suspicious and finally cannot help but rebel against the establishment of supposedly unquestionable universal ideals and categories. Their ultimate questioning of the medium of written expression itself finally undermines the rule of law in their own day, in Dicey’s, and in ours. Chapter 2 traces the development of the rule of law, how it and the threats to it were regarded in the Romantic Period. This chapter details incidents and concepts circulating in the public sphere against which both Coleridge and Blake were reacting. Chapters 3 and 4 explore Coleridge’s work, beginning with his conservative reaction to the radical potential of the political imagination through to his acceptance (or at least acknowledgment) that acts of interpretation cannot ultimately be curtailed—the imagination will have free reign, and no institutionalization of practice or custom can forestall it. I will suggest that the Coleridgean lyric both constructs its audience as an ideal subject within a nation governed by the rule of law and equally functions as a space in which this notion of subjectivity can find expression and lash out against both radical and reactionary forces that sought to undermine it, thereby embodying a vision consonant with the English Constitution of unwritten rights safeguarded by judicial fidelity to an ancient common law tradition. Chapters 5 and 6 launch from Coleridge’s most radical moments into an exploration of Blake who initially engages in the construction of poetry and readerly subjectivity as isolated from the legal sphere. Although this may seem uncharacteristic, Blake soon develops (after his own brush with the law) a conception of poetry and subjectivity that anticipates the radicalism of the Critical Legal Studies Movement of the twentieth century—when literary interpretation fails, legal reading (and a rule of law which depends upon it) can do no better. This countervailing expression and critique of the rule of law was one that gained traction in North America and Continental Europe, finding its ultimate fulfillment in the constitutional democracies of the

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twentieth century. Blake’s poetry (I will suggest) valorizes the imaginative force expressed in the self-creation of the new American and French regimes but warns that any rule of law established through the spontaneous innovation of a written constitution leads to an inevitable cyclic conflict in which subjectivity and the individual’s relation to the state are in a constant process of decay and rebirth. As much as I have attempted to articulate connections between the selected works of these two figures, many gaps remain. The core of this book is comprised of four articles I published previously on various aspects of the relationship between Romantic law and literature. In looking over these prior explorations, I saw in each the image of a “haven” constructed in lyric and prophetic poetry, supposedly inoculating the writer and reader from the exigencies of the legal realm—each described a space in which the imagination could flourish and from which it could spill over into political and legal effect, curtailed to a greater or lesser extent by various intellectual, spiritual, and cultural forces. To me, this space appeared analogous to later conceptions of the rule of law, both describing a place in which the individual could act (and imagine) freely and from which the individual might exert influence on history. The Victorians read and canonized the Romantics. In suggesting that the Victorians forged the immediately preceding generations of writers into a “Romanticism” which supports the needs of the rule of law, I’m attempting to reconfigure the old trope of the Romantic “bower” into an image with legal resonance and to articulate a legal genealogy of the imagination that might flourish in that bower. My hope is that a necessarily limited selection of texts from two prominent (but very distinct) Romantic authors would provide some framework and evidence for a phenomenon that might be seen, more broadly, of a literary period which developed in its own day and was also later fashioned to promulgate a sense of imaginative freedom and autonomy protected and contained by law. My analysis of Wordsworth at the start of Chap. 2 is a brief suggestion that this rubric could be applied to additional authors. That none of these writers can be fully co-opted into Victorian rule of law ideology, since each undermines the stability of linguistic interpretation on which that ideology depends, is perhaps one embodiment of the “rebellion” so often associated with Romantic literature in the 1790s. I would present this study, therefore, not as legal history but as a literary-critical case book articulating my own version of the “spirit of the age” wherein Romantic poetry and a crucial legal and political paradigm (the rule of law) both attempt to express and contain the radical

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potential of the autonomous individual as manifested in acts of imagination, judgment, revolution, and, above all, interpretation. In closing, I would add that in the following pages I pay particular attention to Romantic poetry’s focus on the reading of signs. If, as Dicey suggested, the key to establishing and maintaining the rule of law was the regularization of legal interpretation, the Romantics were also especially interested in the process of how the imagination makes meaning from word and image. Like Blackstone, they felt that being attuned with “God’s eternal language” as expressed in the landscape allowed for insight and personal revelation. In their concern for the process of meaning-making, the Romantics sought to enshrine in their work not merely the image of personal autonomy and freedom that was the product of the rule of law, but also the process whereby it was expressed—in the act of the imagination working on a sign and making a meaning from it. Like the trial by ordeal or the modern jury system, this might provide a means whereby we could know the mind of God and catch a glimpse of His one, true justice, otherwise unseen here on earth. In contrast to the processes of reason promulgated by the Blackstonian common law tradition, Romantic poetry frames itself as a discovery of meaning through imagination and emotion, rising up as a rival incubator of justice, a shrine in which the ideals of the rule of law might flourish safe from assault to burst forth in some future moment to re-seed the political landscape. Romantic literature then tries to frame and produce a radical autonomy of the subject through acts of literary choice, in presenting, examining, and problematizing them: it is in the ordeal of reading that we find ourselves and the rule of law.

Notes 1. See Lobban (1991, pp. 11–14) for a contrasting discussion of the origins of legal rule (popular among legal practitioners), specifically in practice and pleading. My discussion of the Romantics places them more within Blackstone’s theoretical attempt to structure the common law. 2. For a general discussion and examination of these various legal developments, see Baker (1990) and Holdsworth (1956–1982). Although Dicey is a post-Romantic figure, that many elements of the rule of law were in place by 1790 is confirmed in discussions by (e.g.) Tamanaha (2004) and Lobban (2012, pp. 39–41). 3. See Kolsky (2015) and Condos (2016) on the rule of law as legitimizing rhetoric for colonial oppression in British India.

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References Abrams, M.H. 1973. Natural supernaturalism. New York: Norton. Althusser, L. 2004. Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In Literary theory: An anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 2nd ed., 693–702. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Baker, J.H. 1990. An introduction to English legal history. 3rd ed. Boston: Butterworths. Balbus, Isaac D. 1977. Commodity form and legal form: An essay on the ‘Relative Autonomy’ of the law. Law & Society Review 11 (3): 571–588. Blackstone, Sir William. 1765. Commentaries on the laws of England. Oxford: Clarendon. Accessed 29 January 2021. http://www.gutenberg.org/ files/30802/30802-­h/30802-­h.htm. Condos, Mark. 2016. License to kill: The Murderous Outrages Act and the rule of law in colonial India 1867–1925. Modern Asian Studies 50 (2): 479–517. Cormack, Bradin. 2007. A power to do justice: Jurisdiction, English literature, and the rise of common law. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Costa, Pietro. 2010. The rule of law: A historical introduction. In The rule of law, ed. Pietro Costa and Danilo Zolo, 73–149. Dordrecht: Springer. Dimock, Wai Chee. 1996. Residues of justice. Berkeley: University of California Press. Douzinas, Costas, and Adam Gearey. 2005. Critical jurisprudence. Portland: Hart Publishing. Eagleton, Terry. 1994. The rise of English. In Falling into theory, ed. David H. Richter, 49–59. Boston: Bedford. Harvie, C. 1984. Revolutions and the rule of law. In The Oxford illustrated history of Britain, ed. K. Morgan, 421–460. Oxford: OUP. Holdsworth, William. 1956–1982. A history of English law, 17 vols. London: Methuen. Hulsebosch, Daniel J. 2003. The ancient constitution and the expanding empire: Sir Edward Coke’s British jurisprudence. Law and History Review 21 (3): 439–482. Klein, L. 1994. Shaftesbury and the culture of politeness: Moral discourse and cultural politics in early eighteenth-century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Accessed 21 May 2020. https://www.cambridge.org/core/ books/shaftesbur y-­a nd-­t he-­c ulture-­o f-­p oliteness/C236369641C4440 2A4EC3E4950D0A325. Kolsky, Elizabeth. 2015. The colonial rule of exception and the legal regime of exception: Frontier ‘Fanaticism’ and state violence in British India. American Historical Review 120 (4): 1218–1246. Lobban, Michael. 1991. The common law and English jurisprudence. Oxford: Clarendon.

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———. 2012. Hobbes and the common law. In Hobbes and the law, ed. Thomas Poole and David Dyzenhaus, 39–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merritt, Adrian. 1980. The nature and function of law: A criticism of E.P.  Thompson’s ‘Whigs and Hunters’. British Journal of Law and Society 7 (2): 194–214. Nussbaum, Martha. 1997. Poetic justice. Boston: Beacon Press. Pfau, Thomas. 1997. Wordsworth’s profession. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Phelps, Edward John. 1886. The law of the land: Minister Phelps’ address at Edinburgh, November 12, 1886. New  York: H.  Bessey. Accessed 15 May 2020. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100365046. Pocock, J.G.A. 1975. The machiavellian moment. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Price, Richard. 1789. A discourse on the love of our country, delivered on Nov. 4, 1789, at the Meeting-House in the Old Jewry, to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Britain. with an appendix, 2nd ed. London: T.  Cadell. Accessed 15 May 2020. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/368. Santoro, Emilio. 2010. The rule of law and the ‘Liberties of the English’: The interpretation of Albert Venn Dicey. In The Rule of law, ed. Pietro Costa and Danilo Zolo, 153–200. Dordrecht: Springer. Tamanaha, Brian Z. 2004. On the rule of law: History, politics, theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, E.P. 1993. Witness against the beast. New York: The New Press. Waites, Ian. 2004. A spacious horizon is an image of liberty. Capital & Class 28 (3): 83–102.

CHAPTER 2

A Legal Genealogy of the Romantic Imagination

Inspired by the Scottish landscape during an 1803 walking tour, William Wordsworth wrote one of his most celebrated post-Lyrical Ballads effusions, “The Solitary Reaper”: Behold her, single in the field, Yon solitary Highland Lass! Reaping and singing by herself; Stop here, or gently pass! Alone she cuts and binds the grain, And sings a melancholy strain; O listen! for the Vale profound Is overflowing with the sound. No Nightingale did ever chaunt More welcome notes to weary bands Of travellers in some shady haunt, Among Arabian sands: A voice so thrilling ne’er was heard In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird, Breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides. Will no one tell me what she sings?— Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. L. Barr, Romanticism and the Rule of Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74878-4_2

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And battles long ago: Or is it some more humble lay, Familiar matter of to-day? Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, That has been, and may be again? Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sang As if her song could have no ending; I saw her singing at her work, And o’er the sickle bending;— I listened, motionless and still; And, as I mounted up the hill, The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more.

Caught in the act of artistic creation, enclosed in a space of natural seclusion, the poem’s “Highland Lass” invokes the Romantic ideal of the poet, what M.H. Abrams described as an expressive, lamp-like beacon of genius and imagination (1971, pp. 22 ff.) and which Percy Shelley described in his 1821 “A Defence of Poetry” as “a nightingale, who … sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds” (Shelley 2002, p. 486). Perhaps picking up on Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” suggestion that nature motivates our “thoughtless deeds of kindness and of love,” Shelley saw the ideal poet as disseminating an art which enhances morality through the generation of sympathy: The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause … Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. (pp. 487–8)

Although Wordsworth’s speaker cannot understand the content of the Maiden’s song, it nevertheless forges a sympathetic connection one might say is at least analogous to “Love”: the speaker puts himself in the singer’s place, crossing boundaries of language, culture and (presumably) class and gender. He feels what he imagines she feels.

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Sympathetic connection has played a key role in several modern theorizations of the link between law and literature and has even been considered essential in some theories of law and fairness. Love is the first step in what Richard Rorty has more recently termed a “larger loyalty” that has the potential to constitute justice. Stripping away most of the trappings used to theorize and analyze justice as a social and political phenomenon since the eighteenth century, Rorty suggests that justice in its most basic essence is a sense of loyalty to those one identifies with. To the extent we know “detailed and concrete stories” about ourselves as members of a (usually small) group, we are loyal to that group and in a “better position to decide what differences between individuals are morally relevant” (2007, p. 141). In identifying strongly and concretely with this group, in feeling what they feel, we want decisions to go their way and care comparatively less about the absence of that fairness for those with whom we feel a substantial difference and distance. Justice as applied more universally is simply the transposition of this localized identification onto a larger group (i.e., all humanity)—loyalty comes first as a forerunner of the larger concept of justice. Rorty’s ultimate advice for creating a bridge between the ideals of justice held in (e.g.) Western liberal democracies and those of differing cultures is to tell a story, to say: Here is what we in the West look like as a result of ceasing to hold slaves, beginning to educate women, separating church and state, and so on. Here is what happened after we began treating certain distinctions between people as arbitrary rather than fraught with moral significance. If you would try treating them that way, you might like the result. (p. 147)

The move from universal to ethnocentric claims about morality and justice creates the possibility for identification and similarity to spread—perhaps “love” is too extreme a word, but Shelley’s conception of literature’s role in morality at least comes close. Working squarely within this Romantic tradition, Martha Nussbaum has made similar claims about literary influence in her Poetic Justice. Invoking Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (a 1759 text that predates Wordsworth’s “Reaper” by a few decades), she argues that the sympathy generated through the imaginative act of engaging with literature instills an impartial respect for human dignity—it makes people moral. Problems arise, however—Nussbaum seems to suggest that, if literature does not have such an effect on an individual, there is something wrong

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with the individual (1997, p. xviii) and she is also highly selective in the literature she chooses to support her position. Nussbaum chooses “good literature,” novels (in spite of her book title) that, in her opinion, inculcate the effects she desires. So, her theory is not so much of universal application, but rather of how specific works (or perhaps even a category of works left largely undefined) might have the desired effect. In encoding in the works she chooses to include in her study the very conclusion she wishes to reach, she arguably ensnares herself in a Romantic (or at least Shelleyean) ideology of literature, of what literature should be and should achieve. She chooses to examine the kind of literature Shelley would approve of as “moral,” the kind of work Wordsworth sees as enhancing sympathy and interconnectedness, a goal much aspired to by a “man speaking to men” in a plain and simple language directed immediately to the heart and the emotions. As faulty as Nussbaum’s approach may be, I find it significant that her intellectual forebears (Smith, Wordsworth, and others) espoused such an ideology of literature at the precise historical moment the rule of law and the concept of precedent and legal interpretation should coalesce as significant limitations on judicial discretion in the courts of law and equity, at the precise moment that many legal institutions designed to produce a just rule of law and limit arbitrary discretion were under pressure from both inside and outside the legal and political system. What I wish to suggest is that “morality inducing literature,” and Romantic poetry in particular, rises as a concept in tandem with these political and legal mechanisms and the pressure exerted on them to become a repository for liberal justice, an embodiment and safeguard to maintain the rule of law under threat by reactionary forces in 1790s.1 As much as Romantic literature may attempt to create a forum in which the dominant values are love and sympathy, I would emphasize rather that this forum amounts to an extralegal space in which the dominant value is autonomy, freedom to imagine and see the world differently. Like the auditor in Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper,” the Romantic reader becomes one who loves and sympathizes but also (and more significantly) becomes one who has the right to imagine, choose, and interpret without contextual constraint: that reader will decide the meaning of the reaper’s song and will do so in a space unconstrained by law or convention—no one will tell him what she sings (line 17).

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Legal Bowers The desirability of creating spaces sheltered from legal censure, in which the individual could speak without fear and imagine without legal consequence, came to the forefront of public discourse during the oppressive government reaction to radical thought that bloomed in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Although one might point to the Scottish Sedition Trials of 1793 or reactions to the suspensions of Habeus Corpus and the Gagging Acts of the later 1790s, it was the 1794 trial of Thomas Hardy for high treason that truly brought to the fore exactly what was at stake in the act of reading and interpreting signs in both law and literature. As lead defence counsel, Thomas Erskine concluded his jury address thusly: I do not stand here to desire you to commit perjury from compassion;—but at the same time my earnestness may be forgiven, since it proceeds from a weakness common to us all …—it proceeds from a selfish principle inherent in the human heart.—I am Counsel, Gentlemen, for myself. In every word I utter, I feel that I am pleading for the safety of my own life, for the lives of my children after me, for the happiness of my country, and for the universal condition of civil society throughout the world. (Howell 1809–26, p. 24:900)

Erskine saw the courtroom as the front line in a conflict between government force and individual rights, a conflict that would not merely affect the present polity but which could forevermore threaten to collapse the free space circumscribed by the rule of law. Having displayed his physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion throughout the trial, Erskine sought himself to embody the overwhelming effect of government force on the individual caught within the prosecution’s draconian interpretation and application of high treason law. The countering force he hoped to enflame was the jury’s assertion of conscience, an exertion of authority by the people’s courtroom representative. “Inherent in the human heart” (he claimed) is the capacity to defy the strict dictates of law and commit “perjury from compassion” (modern “jury nullification”). In so doing, Erskine hoped to conjure into being an extralegal framework to challenge and supplant the “legitimate” legal regime that had been perverted through government misuse. He sought to put in the jury’s hands the discretion to interpret both fact and law—to support the rule of law by staging a rebellion in the courtroom against those who would undermine it.

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This call for rebellion was an echo of the very process the trial was seeking to forestall. The 1789 revolution in France had produced immediate and far-reaching repercussions in England, one of the greatest of which was a renewed interest in the relationship between people, monarch, and the various institutional and legal manifestations of his power. Although the so-called “constitutional societies” (of which the two most centrally based were the Society for Constitutional Information and the London Corresponding Society) had been formed late in the eighteenth century to maintain polite debate on parliamentary reform, rhetoric sharpened when Richard Price spoke at the Presbyterian Chapel at London’s Old Jewry to mark the centennial of the Glorious Revolution, coincidentally, just months after the fall of the Bastille.2 Ostensibly celebrating the now-­ established rights of the Englishman to “liberty of conscience,” “to resist power when abused,” and “to chuse our own governors; to cashier them for misconduct; and to frame a government for ourselves” (Butler 1984, p. 29), Price implies that such rights exist less in fact than in theory, that the revolutions he had witnessed in America and France had sparked an “ardour for liberty catching and spreading,” so that “the dominion of kings [would be] changed for the dominion of laws” and even nations like England, “panting for liberty, which seemed to have lost the idea of it,” would have restored to them “increasing light and liberality” and the rights of man (Butler 1984, pp. 31–2). Surveying the last hundred years of revolution and reform from monarchic tyranny to a (supposed) nation of liberal rights, Price suggests that the journey is not yet complete: the rule of law promised by the Glorious Revolution has not yet come to pass. Edmund Burke’s emphatic response, The Reflections of the Revolution in France, in turn spawned protracted colloquy in pamphlet form, which gave rise to such landmark treatises as William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, and Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man. This so-called “Revolution Controversy” that spread through the public sphere in much of the (especially early) 1790s, was deeply concerned with the relationship between sovereign and individual, with the rule of law, and with the role interpretation played in defining that law. Anxious that a political and philosophical debate moving toward parliamentary reform was actually a revolutionary, republican conspiracy, the response of the Pitt regime was forceful and included the 1793 Scottish Sedition trials of Joseph Gerrald and Maurice Margarot and the May 1794 arrest and interrogation of

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twelve SCI and LCS leaders, including Thomas Hardy, John Thelwall and John Horne Tooke. The successful prosecution and transportation of radical leaders in 1793 had revealed the Pitt government’s resolve to use show trials both as instruments to silence prominent dissenters and as advertisements of a will to use the law’s most draconian measures to quash radical sentiment. Although many stood in defence of the radical cause, one of the most significant was Erskine, a barrister who had taken on some of the most politically charged and pivotal cases of the previous decade. His defence of Lord George Gordon in the wake of the 1780 anti-Catholic riots had already done much to restrain the use of imaginative legal interpretation in “constructive treason,” while his work in the area of criminal libel had paved the way for the advances of Charles James Fox’s Libel Act of 1792. While Erskine’s defence of Thomas Paine had been unsuccessful and cost Erskine his position as Attorney General to the Prince of Wales, Erskine was at the forefront of the legal fight for what would later become known as “individual rights” and for the rule of law which those rights necessitated (Barrell 2000, pp. 334, 341, 348, 318). The government’s fear, as expressed in the arguments of Chief Prosecutor Sir John Scott, was specifically that large-scale circulation of printed matter and the newly acquired mass ability to read and consume it gave authors an inordinate power to spread radical ideas and disrupt the traditional relationship between government and the governed: Gentlemen … you will find … that publications upon the government of the country were adopted by these societies [such as the London Corresponding Society and Society for Constitutional Information] as their own, and circulated … in a mass round the country, circulated in a manner, that totally destroys the liberty of the press … You will find that these publications are either brought into the world with such a secrecy as baffles all prosecution— published without names of authors or of printers … [or] by contrivance published in the dead of night … and published in quantities, which make the application of the wholesome provisions of the law utterly incompetent to the purpose of allowing the correction of the law to be as frequent as the commission of the offences against it has been. (Howell 1809–26, p. 24:275)

Here, Scott attempts to regulate the Jacobinical potential latent in publication, circulation, and reading, claiming that the ubiquitous exchange of printed matter and the broadening ability to read and discuss it led to

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the intellectual and then physical association of large groups of people inflamed by a coterie of authors: Imported from France in the latter end of the year 1791 or 1792 … the intent [of those on trial and their associates] was to constitute in London … clubs which were to govern this country upon the principles of the French government, the alleged unalienable, imprescribeable rights of man, such, as they are stated to be, inconsistent in the very nature of them with the being of a king … deposing, therefore, the moment they come into execution, in the act of creating a sovereign power, either mediately or immediately, the king, and introducing a republican government with a right of eternal reform, and therefore with a prospect of eternal revolution. (pp. 271–2)

Therefore, Hardy’s treason lay not so much in his own activities as in his association with and deployment of the uncontrollable mass of printing and reading that spread radical concepts to all corners of the nation in efforts to sustain and create societies ultimately bent on rewriting the English constitution. Although Paine’s Common Sense had sold the amazing number of 150,000 copies, this was dwarfed by the popularity of the two parts of The Rights of Man which sold perhaps a quarter of a million copies in two years (Paine 1984, pp. 10, 18). Cheap editions and numerous pirated copies which enormously enhanced circulation may indeed have been printed in the “dead of night” (p. 25).3 What Scott foresees, then, is an apocalypse of “eternal revolution” in which government institution after institution dies and is replaced only to die once again. Unfettered acts of reading and interpretation and the free exercise of imagination in the interpretation of signs have very real consequences. Spread of Painite ideals led to the creation of collectives, “constitutional societies” fashioned in the image of French institutions. Scotts’ position had been adopted from that which Chief Justice Eyre had presented several weeks earlier in addressing the Hardy Grand Jury, that any such organization, left to “their own discretion,” would almost inevitably and spontaneously assemble into a body that legislatively competes with and attempts to overawe the traditional authority of King, Lords, and Commons: The process is very simple: let us imagine to ourselves this case; a few well meaning men conceive that they and their fellow subjects labour under some grievance; they assemble peaceably to deliberate on the means of obtaining redress; the numbers increase; the discussion grows animated,

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eager, and violent; a rash measure is proposed, adopted, and acted upon; who can say where this shall stop, and that these men, who originally assembled peaceably, shall not finally, and suddenly too, involve themselves in the crime of high treason? (Howell 1809–26, p. 24:206)

Thus, for the Hardy prosecution the ultimate source of the accused’s treasonous thinking was Paine’s authorial innovation and, in particular, the massive and condign publication, circulation, and digestion of that innovation in locations law could neither find nor control. Here was rebellion of a new kind that authorities sought to combat through the crime of high treason. Erskine’s appeal, therefore, to the judgment of a jury motivated by an extralegal compassion can be read as a call for the kind of inappropriate, uncontrolled innovation and authority that the treason trials were specifically designed to prevent. Here Erskine asks the people to ignore the dictates of custom and rule, to look into their hearts, consult their own consciences, and make a decision. If left unchecked, who indeed can know where such a practice might lead, even to “jury nullification,” usurpation of authority from the judge, the chief representative of the Crown in the courtroom? However, this plea for rebellion in the courtroom was just the last effort of a lawyer who wished primarily to wage his war for liberty, safety, and happiness on the field of language, to fight within the rules and customs of a system that already had a robust constitutional tradition that supposedly guaranteed the rule of law rather than the rule of men. Extending the implications of Coke’s seventeenth-century claim that liberty resided in the court’s invocation of common law, Erskine saw that English freedom depended on how law was interpreted by judges and juries (Zolo 2010, p. 54 and Santoro 2010, p. 176), and he made interpretive practice the central issue of his defence. The statute of 25 Edward III (the “Statute of Edward”) defined high treason as: to compass or imagine the death of the king, providing such compassing or imagining be manifested by some act or acts [so-called “overt acts”] proved (by two witnesses) to have been done by the party accused in prosecution of that compassing and imagination. (Howell 1809–26, p. 24:202)

As John Barrell has pointed out, the prosecution’s case hinged on convincing the jury that “imagining” meant in its broadest sense to “picture

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in the mind” (pp. 4–20). Consequently, so long as the prosecution could lead the jury, overwhelmed by the mountains of evidence laid before them, through a train of associations from one particular piece to an image of the king’s death, Hardy would be guilty. Hardy had been put on trial because he had stepped over a line. Ignoring the petition process that the radical societies had already abandoned as useless, he had spoken to large groups of people who had paid a mere penny a week for membership in the London Corresponding Society (Goodwin 1979, p.  191). Unlike Godwin and his Political Justice, he had not framed his political speculations in the erudite language of a book too expensive for the working man to purchase but had made his words available to the masses in an open and ill-defined space. Hardy was not on trial so much for what he had said but where (and to whom) he had said it. Proof of this fact lies in the trial itself. It was Scott’s (and Eyre’s) contention that the role of the jury was merely to judge the factual matters of whether or not Hardy was responsible for producing and circulating various letters calling for a national convention, the assembly of a network of associated groups that would claim to represent the will of the people. As a matter of law, according to Scott and Eyre, such a call amounted to high treason. In their estimation, so long as it could be established that Hardy’s activities were part of an attempt to realize even a “remote” but causally connected act of king killing (e.g., the imprisonment of the sovereign or the constitution of a political body to rival or overawe the sovereignty of King, Lords, and Commons), then guilt necessarily followed: if it should appear that it has entered the heart of any man who is a subject of this country, to design, to overthrow the whole government of the country, to pull down and subvert the very foundations of British monarchy … to design such a horrible ruin and devastation, which no king could survive …, need I add, I say, that the complication and enormous extent of such a design will not prevent its being distinctly seen, that the compassing and imagining the death of the king is involved in it, is, in truth, of its very essence. (Howell 1809–26, pp. 24:203–4)

Scott left in reality very little for the jury to decide—once they ascribed certain words to Hardy and agreed with the prosecution’s interpretation of them, guilt attached. Given that the jury represented the polity within the courtroom setting, Scott’s characterization of the law amounted to a constitutional theory. By minimizing the jury’s jurisdiction to interpret

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within the courtroom setting, Scott implied that the power to interpret and apply the law belonged solely to the government, its representatives (such as the attorney general) and its head, the king. The jury and the people had no voice in reading law or challenging authorized applications of it. However, many saw Scott’s and Eyre’s interpretation of the law and the jury’s role as itself manifesting the evil of innovation and unregulated authority it was trying to prevent, as itself an expression of Jacobinism and unfettered imagination. Immediately after Eyre’s address to the grand jury (containing an encapsulated expression of Scott’s theory), Godwin brought a discussion of legal precedent to the public in his pamphlet, “Cursory Strictures On the Charge Delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre” (1794, reprinted in Four early pamphlets, 1966). Here, he complained the government’s legal theory amounted to “constructive treason,” defined by David Hume as: [A] species of proof by which [prosecutors] pretend to fix … guilt upon the prisoner … [by] invent[ing] a kind of accumulative or constructive evidence, by which many actions, either totally innocent in themselves, or criminal in a much inferior degree, shall, when united amount to treason. (Howell 1809–26, p. 24:222)

Constructive treason, in Godwin’s opinion, undermined the provision “most deservedly applauded” among all “the various branches of the English constitution” (Howell 1809–26, p.  24:211). It exposed the nation to “the most flagrant violations of the principles of executive justice” (Howell 1809–26, p. 24:221) and struck a blow to the heart of the rule of law. Godwin argued that Eyre had ignored Blackstone’s and Hume’s admonitions against constructive treason, had ignored the purpose of the Statute of Edward to curtail the invention of treasons, and had disregarded the long history of political conventions as a legitimate and legal form of political gathering and protest: [Eyre] has heaped distinction on distinction. He has promulgated at least five or six different classes of treason, not found in the direct provisions of 25 Edward 3rd, or in the remoter instances of Foster and Hale; not supported, as he explicitly confesses, by any law, precedent, or adjudged case. But all this he does in the mere wantonness of his power. (Howell 1809–26, p. 24:225).

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In short, Godwin claimed that Eyre, by wishing to invent a new form of treason, was breaking with the past and violating both the constitution and the rule of law it supported. He was ignoring precedent and, consequently, his acts of interpretive innovation were no less radical and dangerous than those of Paine, the SCI or LCS. If the latter were supposedly attempting to rewrite the Constitution, the former was in fact doing so by rewriting the law of high treason. This was the approach Erskine adopted in defence, commencing his interpretation of the law with the proposition that the statute of Edward had originally been enacted to create certainty in the law and restrict the power of the monarch to create treasons. Erskine suggested that the statute was declarative of the common law of treason and established a boundary beyond which it could not expand. Thus, in construing the central phrase “compass or imagine the death of the king,” he looked to the common law which existed before the statute and suggests that the past construction of the phrase must govern in the present day. Erskine portrayed statutory law in general as participating in an historical dialogue between enactments and times. He quoted from Hale regarding the subsequently enacted statute of 21 Richard II, which purported to expand the law of treason such that: every man that compasseth or pursueth the death of the King, or to depose him, or to render up his homage liege, or that he raiseth people, and rideth against the King, to make war within his realm … shall be adjudged a traitor of high treason against the crown. (Howell 1809–26, p. 24:887)

Hale had suggested that this expanded law of treason had been pernicious since none knew how to conduct themselves so as to avoid its breach: it put too much discretionary power in the hands of authorities to interpret signs as they desired. The statute of 1 Henry IV ch. 10 had repealed the statute of Richard on these express grounds and had explicitly stated that the law was then returned to that under the statute of Edward. Thus, argued Erskine, since the crown alleged only that Hardy’s acts fell within the ambit of an intent to depose the king, these could not be acts included under the definition of treason in the statute of Edward because they were expressly mentioned in the expanded definition of treason in the (now repealed) statute of Richard. Thus, Erskine read “imagining” and the Statute of Edward more generally within a historical tradition, as having a meaning that arose from a conversation between different enactments and

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decisions through time. Although Dicey would advocate in his 1885 Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution that a judicial interpreter must on no account take the legislator’s intention into consideration when construing a Bill, he or she should and indeed must amalgamate any legislation into the tradition, history, and spirit of the common law (Santoro 2010, p. 176). Erskine, therefore, was arguing squarely within the common law tradition, where context and control in the act of interpretation is the key to maintaining stability and the expectations of the governed in their relationship with government rule and force. Implicit within this battle over hermeneutic strategy was the issue of “authority.” While Scott wished to arrogate to himself the definition of “imagining” on which the trial hinged, Erskine at least purported to fragment the authority for defining the word—its meaning was the emergent property of an historical process. He was not the origin of meaning, but simply a conduit or interpreter of a process that produced meaning. Those (such as Eyre and Scott) who would ignore this historical dialogue are either not presenting the record with accuracy or are going even further, (re)promulgating constructive treason in an act of spontaneous innovation that is itself a rebellion against the institutions of English government and the historically contextualized reading practices enshrined in the common law tradition. Although this was a successful strategy and seemed to paint the prosecution as the radical element rather than the accused, it was a technique Erskine also applied more broadly to the evidence arrayed against his client. By placing Hardy’s supposedly treasonous sentiments within a tradition of tolerated and polite protest against government activity, Erskine sought to provide a space for radical discourse immune from criminal prosecution. The notion that discussion of sensitive and controversial topics could happen within a protected space was not new but had been an important aspect of the common law system from the beginning. Although Erskine in defending Hardy had expressed many sentiments identical to those for which Hardy had been arrested, Erskine was not executed, jailed, or charged with high treason. He was allowed to make his argument, to speak republican sentiment, and invoke radical principles, and he did so effectively. Hardy was acquitted. For modern lawyers in a modern court, this is the unexceptional result of an unexceptional and formal immunity usually conferred explicitly in the rules of court—a lawyer making a statement in the process of bona fide arguing a case at bar is immune from prosecution for any damage or criminal liability that flows from his or her

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words. Yet such an immunity was not always so plainly spelled out or so expressly broad reaching. Blackstone summarizes the status of this privilege as it stood in the late eighteenth century. He notes that among the many “privileges of parliament” exists the privilege of speech, set down in the statute 1 William and Mary st.2 c. 2, “that the freedom of speech, and debates and proceedings in parliament, ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of parliament” (Howell 1809–26, p. 1:167). Speech in parliament is subject only to the law and custom of parliament that is the highest law (as it can make law) and distinct from that of courts or equity (p. 1:166). With specific reference to counsel making argument in the analogous setting of the court, Blackstone says the following: In order to encourage due freedom of speech in the lawful defence of their clients, and at the same time to give a check to the unseemly licentiousness of prostitute and illiberal men …, it hath been holden that a counsel is not answerable for any matter by him spoken, relative to the cause in hand, and suggested in his client’s instructions; although it should reflect upon the reputation of another, and even prove absolutely groundless: but if he mentions an untruth of his own invention, or even upon instructions if it be impertinent to the cause in hand, he is then liable to an action from the party injured. (Emphasis added; p. 3:33)

Due to the barring until 1832 of defence counsel in criminal prosecutions other than high treason, Blackstone naturally phrases this immunity in a civil context (e.g., “liable to an action from the party injured”).4 Thus, there may have been no authority that fixed absolutely the presence of counsel privilege in a criminal trial or specifically in a case of treason (which was often treated as exceptional in many ways). Logically, the kind of privilege that attached to counsel utterances in a civil context should equally attach in a criminal one—clients need to be defended in both places and lawyers need a broad freedom of speech to undertake that defence. In short, the rule of law requires a space in which legal controversy may be played out—there must be locations in which it is safe to say things that might be unsafe. Yet some anxiety about the status of his own speech seemed to enter Erskine’s argument nevertheless. He emphasized near the start of his opening that he “shall not presume to offer … anything of [his] own” on the subject of treason or Constitution and all his characterizations of the

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court and nation as having republican origins he draws expressly from other sources, from Burke, Thomson, and the Duke of Richmond (Howell 1809–26, p. 24:881; see also Barrell 2000, p. 326). Erskine here was concerned with falling formally within the scope of the stated exemption, with invoking the proper conventions to trigger formal protection. To be able to make his argument in defence of Hardy, in order to voice without repercussion the very same ideas for which Hardy was on trial for uttering, Erskine had to deny his own authority and say words that come from elsewhere: he had to quote. He could not imagine or invent but could say only that which must necessarily fall within the limited safe space described by the issues at trial. He had to provide a context for his language that glossed it as nontreasonous. Any quotation is an equivocation of authority—by uttering the words of another, a speaker simultaneously owns and disowns the sentiment expressed. Its ability to destabilize authorial causality is analogous to that of joint authorship, a fact that Erskine played out with his co-counsel Vicary Gibbs near the end of his opening—too weak to project his voice, Erskine was forced to whisper to co-counsel, who then quoted to the jury (Barrell 2000, p. 324). The exemption or dispensation of counsel privilege thus turns the courtroom into a space in which radical sentiments could be expressed without fear of prosecution, but only so long as they are quoted from other sources or drawn from the accused himself. The putative quotation requirement destabilizes the status of the language as an object of censure and places language in a space immune from competing attempts to gloss it as, for example, high treason. Thus, it is not surprising that Erskine tried to extend this formal protection to Hardy’s words. Although all of Erskine’s words are construable as quoted from Hardy, Erskine also shows that Hardy’s words are quotation. By placing them within a tradition of republican dissonance tolerated since the Glorious Revolution, Erskine urged the jury to read Hardy’s words as he himself read the statute of Edward, as the expression of an interplay of voices that is more coauthorship than invention. All Hardy is saying (suggested Erskine) is what Burke, Thomson, and the Duke of Richmond have already said. The words that the prosecution finds offensive cannot be ascribed solely to Hardy—if he is guilty, so are Burke, Thomson, Richmond, and anyone else who ever read and agreed with their sentiments (Howell 1809–26, pp. 24:920–1; 928ff). Staging this model of authority blunts the thrust of government force expressed in the law of treason. In the course of placing Hardy’s words

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within a tradition of republican dissonance, Erskine not only defended his client but also turned the court into a forum of political discontent, a forum in which the prosecution, judge, jury, and gallery members could all hear “sedition” and even engage in the formally treasonous activity of “imagining the death of the King.” Focusing particularly on Burke, Erskine quoted unnecessarily long passages expressing such notions as the temporary nature of the House of Commons, the authority of the citizen being superior to that of the magistrate, and the sympathetic subordination of the House to the feelings of the people (Howell 1809–26, p. 24:918). From direct quotation, Erskine moved seamlessly into paraphrase, not only presenting Burke’s ideas as evidence of the existence and nature of a republican tradition but also evaluating these ideas as “unquestionably correct.” Erskine adopted Burke’s sentiments as his own, as expressing political truth. Strictly speaking, such assertions were irrelevant to the case at hand—they were political commentary rather than legal argument. Shorthand transcription can assist in revealing the transitions between quotation, paraphrase, and argument, but a listener could not know the status of Erskine’s words at any given point—where did the quotation stop and argument begin?5 To what extent were the sources merely factually presented and to what extent were they adopted by the speaker as statements of truth in the present? The dynamics of counsel privilege and Erskine’s exploitation of it in the trial reveal that dual authorship is inherently destabilizing: it provides a shifting, moving target difficult, if not impossible, to prosecute. Through quotation, one can put in play words that describe a treasonous social organization without owning the words and suffering the consequences of them. Erskine’s gloss of quotation, the formal protection of the court, and dissemination in print media allowed these words to be uttered not as a legal exercise but in the course of publicly defining the nature of the English constitution. The bounds of quotation and court were unstable, opening up the possibility of revolutionary utterance in public space, utterance immune from government repression. The courtroom, then, became an important location in both expressing and developing the rule of law. It was a space where the individual could voice dissent, assert rights, and even assert innovation and “imagine,” but do so in a contained and controlled way—either controlled by historical tradition or contained by law itself, interpreted, and applied through historical context and the dialogue of precedent through time.

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Although many of Erskine’s strategies may appear superficially to rely on legal technicality, detailed reports of the trial and its preliminaries entered the public sphere through many avenues, perhaps the most celebrated being Godwin’s “Cursory Strictures.” Arising at a crucial moment in the struggle between radical and reactionary forces, the Hardy trial (I submit) deploys a range of strategies and espouses an ideology of the legal subject that helps shape the poetic expression of radicalism that would follow. In the prosecutorial theory of Scott and Eyre was tangible proof of the government assault on the rule of law. In Erskine’s defence is a recreation of an otherwise-lost safe space for free expression, the quasi-­prophetic quotation of ancestral voices to diffuse authority, and, above all, the placement of power to interpret and judge in the hands of the people, the jury. All of these find analogous housing in Romantic poetic expression. The victories of 1795 were the noontide of 1790s radicalism and the high water mark of the jury’s and people’s influence in defending that radicalism. With the acquittals of the first three defendants, the government dropped its prosecutions of the remaining radical leaders and celebration ensued. At the conclusion of the first trial, and even at stoppages during the trial, Hardy and Erskine were famously drawn home in carriages by enthusiastic supporters (Goodwin 1979, pp. 352–3). Thirteen hundred “respectable citizens” attended a public dinner at the Crown and Anchor on February 4, 1795, while several notable private parties were also held in celebration of the momentous occasion, including one at Earl Stanhope’s country seat at which guests dined beneath letters proclaiming “The Rights of Juries” spelled out in lamplight (pp.  361–2). Commemorative tokens struck soon after the trials’ conclusion proclaimed triumph through “the INTEGRITY of the JURY who are JUDGES of LAW as well as FACT” (Barrell 2000, p. 428). Common law interpretive tradition, a history of radical dissent, and the English jury, the “palladium of the constitution,” had upheld public liberty by resisting government law—or so at least it was characterized in radical circles (pp. 383, 424). If the courtroom was the public arena in which the struggle between government power and popular liberty played out, it was especially the jury and its capacity to invoke its own discretion that was seen to represent the people and their resistance to legal oppression. In 1795, the Hardy courtroom was a protected space expressing the ideal relationship between individual and government in which the power of the latter was curbed by the undefined authority of the former to access a “law above law” through the mechanism of conscience.

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Although Hardy and Thelwall were acquitted, Pitt’s regime responded by changing the law, closing down historical ambiguity in legal interpretation, and circumscribing the jury’s ability to dismiss charges of treason: by enshrining in the Two Acts of 1795 a broader theory of what high treason might encompass, he made it more difficult for juries to interpret as innocuous various “remoter acts” made in the radical cause. The suspension of habeas corpus from 1798 to 1801 kept leading members of the London Corresponding Society in prison for years without trial or even after acquittal, essentially sidestepping the jury’s institutional power in a direct attack against the rule of law. Further, on the suspicions of a 1799 House of Commons secret committee that sedition remained rampant even after the statutes of 1795, Parliament promulgated the Combination Act which specifically outlawed the LCS and prohibited the existence of any society that kept a secret list of members or secret offices. The act further required the registration of all printing presses and that all places of lecture or debate, even locations used “for the reading of books or newspapers” which charged admission, would be deemed “disorderly” unless licensed (Goodwin 1979, p. 368; Holdsworth 1956–1982, pp. 13:172–3). Once legal argument could no longer offer a safe space in which to speak rebellion, reactionary forces also began to curtail the power of juries to defend an extralegal haven. In the ensuing retreat from radical expression, the jury that had rescued revolutionary sentiment from peril in 1795 fought a rearguard action but could do little to maintain unsullied independence from coercive ideological forces. In his opening address in the 1797 trial of John Binns for seditious words, the Crown’s representative, Spencer Perceval, still showed awareness that cases involving the suppression of radical sentiment made the courtroom a place of struggle between government law and public resistance to that law through jury discretion: Gentlemen [of the Jury], I would not, in the smallest degree exert an undue influence over your judgment: if, after hearing the evidence which I shall adduce, and under all the circumstances of the case, you can believe that the defendant had no other intention than to enlighten the minds of the people, and instruct them in the nature of their just and legal rights; if you can believe, generally speaking, that his views were upright, whatever might be the doctrines that he propagated (for, it is not the nature of the doctrine that you have to consider, as my lord will tell you) not whether a reform in parliament be necessary or desireable or not; this is not the question you are to determine; but whether he be guilty of the seditious intentions stated in the indictment. (Howell 1809–1826, p. 26:601)

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Although it is impossible to know the extent to which the jury did weigh in their verdict the desirability of “reform in parliament,” they did acquit Binns in spite of a suspiciously high concordance in the testimony of the six defence witnesses. However, legal historiographers also note a continued erosion of jury independence in this period. Although a sometimes-­ rigorous screening procedure for jury bias had developed by 1798, jury packing was common, although it still didn’t assure victory. As Joss Marsh notes, the practice of selecting jurors from a list of freeholders and paying them a guinea each to “do their duty” was similar to (in John Horne Tooke’s words), “offering a man a basket of rotten oranges, from which he was at liberty to make his choice” (1998, p.  32 quoting from John Horne Tooke’s Trial by Jury; see also Green 1985, p.  270). With the elimination of the right to assemble and speak freely, the control of the press and circulation of ideas, with the suspension of habeas corpus and undermining of the independence of the jury, very soon the court of law looked like the last place to find succor and haven from government oppression. By rigging the game, the government had indeed subverted the rule of law. Poetry became one of the few remaining places in which it was marginally safe to express revolutionary sentiment. It was in this tumultuous decade that Wordsworth, William Blake, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge entered the politics of poetry. Caught up in the radical optimism of the French Revolution, buoyed by the triumph of the Hardy trial, and horrified at the reassertion of government force in its aftermath, these authors began to see literature as rife with the potential to pick up the liberty and justice that the legal and political spheres had discarded in its march towards absolute government supremacy. They saw in poetry a place to find justice and house an ideal of the rule of law that might issue forth to rejuvenate the public sphere. While the town square or even the courtroom might no longer be a safe location in which to express radical discontent and assert the rights of the individual, poetry might be, especially the kind of poetry that specifically relied on and dramatized the fragmentation of authority that had been so key to Erskine’s arguments to the Hardy jury and was so essential to the specifically English manifestation of the rule of law. For Blake and Coleridge in particular, the poetry of lyric and prophecy becomes not only the idealized expression of a communal conversation and a chain of dialogue through time, but also the perfect space in which to construct and exhibit the individual as sovereign, as subject only to God and His law, and as capable of deciding through his own imagination (contained and contextualized through that

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historical dialogue to various degrees) how to read the signs of this world. Like the jury in the Hardy courtroom and the speaker of Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper,” the Romantic reader becomes an interpreting subject who must struggle to make meaning from inherently ambiguous signs and through that activity perform as an autonomous legal subject capable of existing within, defining, and even challenging the rule of law.

Romantic Reading at the End of History This Romantic demand that the reader interpret and judge arises at the end of a long line of legal institutions that attempted to house and constrain interpretive discretion. In The Law of the Constitution (1867), Dicey defined the crucial role played by restrictive legal interpretive convention in establishing the rule of law: A Bill which has passed into a statute immediately becomes subject to judicial interpretation and the English bench has always refused, in principle at least, to interpret an Act of Parliament otherwise than by reference to the words of the enactment. (Dicey 1982, p. 269 cited in Santoro 2010, p. 175)

Although this maxim implies the subordination of court to parliamentary sovereignty, it equally suggests the “death” of the author/legislator in the interpretive action of the judge. As Emilio Santoro puts it: “Dicey sought to remind … that [judges] must on no account take into consideration the intention of the legislator” (p. 176). Their guide was the “constitutional tradition incorporated into the common law” (p. 176) and nothing else. Judges were to read enactments in a way that made them consonant with the principles derived from earlier texts, with the “norms and spirit of the common law,” a principle that went back at least as far as Sir Edward Coke in the sixteenth century (p. 176). As Dicey saw it, this principle of interpretation was the fundamental basis on which the rule of law could exist, so that those who lived under the current legislative enactments of princes would not be subject to their mere bias and whim. There needed to be a context within which to read signs, interpretive guardrails; the autonomy of the interpreting individual (a judge in most cases Dicey was concerned with) had to be recognized but also restricted so that arbitrary bias would be curtailed, the rule of law supported, and justice done. As much as Dicey believed in the sovereignty of parliament, he worked within the tradition best articulated by Sir Matthew Hale that an act of parliament could only

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be seen as law insofar as it accorded with the spirit of the common law— left to judges alone to interpret the extent to which any such act might cohere. Dicey revived the Whig tradition of the rule of law arising from judicial interpretive practice (see Santoro 2010, pp. 174–9). The concept of the rule of law, countering the threat of arbitrary discretion in political, social, and legal action, simply displaces that discretion to a set of judicial interpreters who will supposedly curtail the ambit of their own imagination through reference to the sublime and mysterious “spirit” of the common law. Viewed through the long lens of history, this focus on interpretation, its location, and its curtailment was merely the latest in a series of attempts in legal discourse to institutionalize “justice” in a manner that limited the autonomy of the individual and the freedom of the imagination to interpret signs. The earliest recorded post-Roman forms of legal decision-making in the British Isles involved a set of varied practices that often culminated in the trial by ordeal. Sparse accounts going back to the 700s suggest the earliest-recorded legal decision-making bodies in Britain were “moots” or folk assemblies of community members that gathered periodically to discuss local events. When disputes were aired at these meetings, the parties were often encouraged to come to some amicable settlement but barring that were put to a more formal process under the auspices of the “doomsman” or “shireman.” If the plaintiff could establish a prima facie case (assisted by a group of supporters who would sometimes be questioned), the defendant would then have the opportunity to swear before God to the truth of his position (at times requiring a group of his own acquaintances or “compurgators” to support his oath). This would often be sufficient to dispose of the matter. However, if the gravity of the offence or the poor reputation of the defendant made these forms of “proof” insufficient, then some sort of physical ordeal was required (Baker 2002, pp. 4–5). By 1166, the ordeals of “cold water” and “hot iron” had become a regular part of a more institutionalized criminal legal process. Once a strong case had been established against the accused, he or she was required to prove innocence by passing the ordeal. “Cold water” required the proband (accused) to strip and be lowered by a rope harness into a pool at least twelve feet deep. If he sank (up to his hairline), then it was judged that the cold water and God had accepted him and he would go free (or suffer some lesser punishment or mandatory exile as of 1194 if of bad character). “Hot iron” required the accused (almost always a woman)

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to hold a pound of iron in hand as she walked nine paces, iron that had been heated in a fire for approximately thirty minutes. If the injury showed no signs of “diseased discharge” after three days, she was said to have passed the ordeal (see Kerr et al. 1992, pp. 582–3, 588–9). Although many justifications for the ordeal have been advanced (e.g., as psychological truth test per Plucknett 1956, p.  114, quoted in Kerr et al. 1992, p. 573, or as a rhetorically powerful ritual to enhance ideological traction: per Hyams 1981, pp. 98, 100, in Kerr et al. 1992, p. 574), most tend to center in some way on the inadequacy of human institutions. For Maitland, the ordeal suggested that “mere human testimony [was] not enough to send a man to the gallows” (Kerr et  al. 1992, p.  573). Morris argued that it proved God’s guidance was necessary for the “normal administration of justice” (Kerr et al. 1992, p. 573). Even Kerr’s revisionist analysis of the ordeal argues that it existed as a way to alleviate the invariably deadly consequences of medieval criminal conviction. Even when juries had a remarkably clear and unified picture of the parties’ actions, the circumstances of the case, and the guilt of the accused, even then would the judge command the convict “purge himself by water” (Kerr et al. 1992, p. 575). This could certainly be seen as an act of (potential) mercy (analogous to the royal pardon in the nineteenth century), but equally as an appeal to God for confirmation of the verdict through clear and (seemingly) unambiguous signs. This was indeed one justification for the abolition of the ordeal in 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council, that it was unseemly and impious to regularly invoke the Almighty in the administration of earthly justice (Baker 2002, p. 5). A more skeptical view might also note that secular political forces had begun to criticize the ordeal process. Some questioned the traditional interpretation of what these signs meant (see Baker 2002, p. 5; see also Kerr et al. 1992, p. 587: in 1231, Frederick II suggested success at cold water had more to do with the amount of air in the lungs than God’s judgment), and others voiced dismay at the high percentage of felons exonerated through this process (including Henry II and William Rufus—Kerr et al. 1992, p. 575). Whatever the justification for the ordeal and its eventual termination, at its center rested an act of public interpretation circumscribed by conventional limitations. This process is in many ways analogous to the role of reason and the common law in Dicey’s iteration of the rule of law and can equally be found in Coke’s characterization of the role of reason and argument in legal practice (in which “Almighty God” can “openeth and inlargeth the understanding” through the course of “solemn Argument”: cited

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in Lobban 2012, p. 144) and even Dodderidge’s notion of reasoning on the case (Lobban 1991, p.  8 but cf. Lobban 2008, p.  545). Both the medieval and modern court must deal with the same fundamental problem: How can flawed human institutions and motivations produce “truth?” Both seek to do so by performing the reading of signs through a procedure that supposedly strips away the possibility of agency and discretion in the reader, turning him into a sybil of some transcendent, sublime, or even divine source of justice.6 Although Enlightenment reason has usurped the role of faith in Dicey’s description, the two remain functionally equivalent (despite the fact that Dicey speaks very much about the interpretation of law and the ordeal about the reading of fact—very distinct issues in modern practice). Rule by law is decidedly not supposed to be rule by people (with all their pettiness, bias, and fallibility). Many and perhaps most of the procedural safeguards now seen as vital to the rule of law were developed in some attempt to limit the possibility of interpretive discretion, an anxiety evident in the ordeal all the way through the nineteenth-century conception of reason’s role in discovering the common law. The authority to make decisions, to interpret signs and determine the fit between fact and legal principle, has been housed in a variety of institutional locations through history. The modern scope of legal interpretation latent in the common law judiciary, courts of equity, Parliament, and jury began as remnants of jurisdiction left over after a series of power struggles between king, and Parliament in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries over a concept of “justice” and a scope of kingly jurisdiction inherited from Anglo-Saxon institutions (Holdsworth 1956–1982, pp.  1:398ff). The community moot and ordeal system was part of a regional and varied network of local court systems, applying a brand of customary law or folk-­ right which varied from place to place in content and administrative practice, and was responsible for interpreting and applying “justice” over much of England (Baker 2002, p. 11). The folk right itself had been in Anglo Saxon days a form of communal authority, vested in the people at large. However, almost as soon as procedures for deciding cases of folk right emerged, jurisdiction and discretion became vested in the individual who presided over the confrontation between suitors. Communal authority transformed into personal authority. At the top of this administration was the king (who, in the tenth century presided over a unified England). Thus, although it was unspoken, even before the Norman Conquest there was the emerging fact (a “constitutional theory” in Baker’s opinion: 1990, p. 11) that justice fell within the purview of the Crown, a justice to which

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suitors disappointed at local tribunals increasingly appealed. The institutional embodiment of justice had detached from the people and vested in the king. The authority to read signs and pass judgment coalesced in one individual, who, as God’s putative representative on earth, was supposedly in a unique position to find divine “truth.” However, the continuing use of the self-informing jury during this time and the increased importance of the jury after the abolition of the ordeal in 1215 provided a decentralized authority for interpreting signs to challenge the monolithic power gathered to the judges in the Royal Courts (Holdsworth 1956–1982, pp. 1:312ff). In the ensuing centuries, a power struggle emerged between monarch (and government) and the jury over who had the ultimate authority to make legal determinations. Although it eventually came to pass that the jury was supposedly confined to determining matters of “fact,” in practice these were (and are) very difficult to distinguish from matters of “law.” This issue surfaced, for example, in the 1791 controversy over the law of seditious libel that resulted in the promulgation of Fox’s Libel Act—no longer would the jury be restricted to the “special verdict” of publication but would also determine the status of the published words as seditious or not. Moreover, by as early as the 1650s, the notion emerged that the jury had, in fact, a powerful role to play in the administration of justice and opposition to government tyranny. In the trial of John Lilburne for breach of a statutorily imposed banishment, the accused argued that it was the jury’s duty to ignore all law “contrary to the standing laws of the nation,” because “the safety and happiness of us all depends on our sticking close to the old and good laws of the land,” and it lay with “the good men of England, the jurymen, especially, … to determine all causes, … to judge, and to distinguish between true and counterfeit laws” (Green 1985, p. 194). Such sentiments were well established by the 1790s, suggesting that the jury, which had evolved initially as a replacement for a defunct evidence-gathering procedure, had by then appropriated a jurisdiction over justice lost in part by the courts and parliament (pp. 349–55). However, in the Romantics’ day even this institution was under assault. During the 1790s, when the conventions of Romantic poetry began to coalesce, the primary assault on the rule of law registered in government attempts to manipulate legal acts of interpretation, to destabilize further various safeguarding institutions. Although the 1794 Hardy trial was perhaps the greatest cause célèbre in this regard, of almost equal interest was the practice of jury packing. The essence of Thomas Green’s argument is

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that, through many permutations and evolutions, by the Interregnum the jury and more specifically its collective conscience had come to be regarded as the mouthpiece of God’s law. As Judge Jermin put it during the Lilburne trial: You must know that the law of England is the law of God …. It is the law that hath been maintained by our ancestors, by the tried rules of reason, and the prime laws of nature; for it does not depend upon statutes, or written and declared words or lines …. Therefore I say again, the law of England is pure primitive reason …. A pure innocent hand does set forth a clear unspotted heart. (Cited in Green 1985, p. 171)

The jury, the deciders of “law as well as fact,” held in their collective discretion or “primitive reason” the cipher for reading the signs right and understanding God’s eternal justice. The words of legal decisions, statutes, and witnesses are important only insofar as they offer fodder for the reason which gives us access to God’s law and the conglomerate conscience of the jury could apprehend the divine mind. This position was essentially unchanged in Blackstone’s time and, for a variety of reasons, would have been highly visible in the Romantic public sphere of the 1790s and beyond (Green 1985, pp. 251, 270). The Norman kings inherited the Anglo-Saxon system of folk-right and soon gave a more administratively complex manifestation to “justice” and the discretion to interpret signs. The uneven custom administered by local tribunals would at times lead disappointed petitioners to seek out the king’s justice.7 As more and more petitioners came to do so, the king delegated a portion of his authority to members of the Curia Regis who became itinerant judges (the king’s “Eyre”) with broad powers to oversee local administration and resolve disputes. Concern about the arbitrary and even despotic exercise of these discretionary powers led to this system being replaced by individuals with more limited discretion curtailed by the writ system and, eventually, under Magna Carta, by a settled system of courts increasingly staffed not by politicians but professional judges: these were significant steps taken to institutionally limit discretion in the legal act of interpreting signs. With their greater administrative and remedial efficiency, the king’s courts began to outcompete those of the manor, borough, shire, and hundred—his judgments were more easily enforceable and not subject to appeal. The local tribunals slowly disappeared and the king’s justice, delegated and channeled by the writ system and

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growing professionalization of the judges, gained jurisdiction over England. “Justice” promulgated through the interpretation of signs had shifted location from local tribunals to the king and his network of national courts. However, the establishment of the writ system led to another problem. If remedy at law could only be sought to the extent that a set of facts could fit comfortably within the already-established elements of the writ (the “causes of action”), novel wrongs and situations would have no remedy. There are many recorded instances of sympathetic courts shoe-horning facts into writs never intended to contain them: interpretive discretion or “imagination,” if you will, still required institutional manifestation. The formal legal remedy to house this necessary interpretive discretion was the creation of the courts of equity. As Holdsworth explains, the office of the chancellor (initially a member of the Curia Regis) first developed from a secretarial function—he held the Great Seal of the king that was necessary to endorse the writs which established the forms of action, the details of the exact circumstances in which the king’s justice could be invoked in the common law courts. Since access to royal justice was first seen as a privilege rather than a right, any petitioner would first need to go to Chancery and request an existing or new writ within which he would frame his complaint. As the keeper of the Great Seal impressed on every such writ, the chancellor not only oversaw the common law courts as its administrative head, but also could endorse new writs or forms of action. He was entrusted to exercise his imagination in the spirit of the common law and could, in effect, create law and define the rights that would be recognized at law. However, this broad prerogative was inevitably eliminated after its abuse in 1244 and returned to the king’s council where it was only rarely used, leaving the chancellor only a narrow range of authority to modify existing writs (see Holdsworth 398 ff). The new institutionalization of discretion had necessarily been curtailed, although that could not obviate the inescapable reality that discretion must accompany the interpretation of legal language in any effort to create “fit” between law and fact. That discretion which remained to the chancellor was to be exercised on the basis of and limited by “conscience” and came to be regarded as the last manifestation of the king’s justice failing a remedy at common law. When a particular case brought to a common law court did not fit exactly within the forms of action (which rapidly were no longer seen as merely administrative authorization for an action but as actually defining common law rights and relief: Baker 2002, p. 66), the chancellor retained the capacity

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to modify the form to create fit and produce “justice.”8 The term “equity” soon supplanted that of “conscience” due to the sense of arbitrariness suggested by the latter term (Baker 2002, p. 123). Thus, the discretion to interpret the signs of particular decisions and of the common law tradition (as demonstrated in a wide variety of documents, legal decisions, statues, and academic pronouncements) found institutional manifestation in the Chancery’s exercise of “equity,” the production of fit between case and rule. Although there is always an exercise of discretion in any act of judgment at law or equity, with the notable exception of the jurisdictional battles (essentially a competition for business) between the Courts of Common Pleas, King’s Bench, and Chancery in the later sixteenth century (culminating in the act of 1641 abolishing Star Chamber and reasserting the primacy of the Common Law Courts), legal flexibility, innovation, and discretion slowly became in fact the purview of the chancellor.9 As Holdsworth claims, by the mid-eighteenth century the courts of law had become extremely technical, rule-bound institutions. Even trivial breaches of procedure were fatal to an action. However, although this led to a greater need for the flexibility of Chancery equity, the concerns which caused the term “equity” to supplant “conscience” led to a parallel (though slower) petrification of equitable principles into hard rules. If equity was too open-ended and rested entirely on the arbitrariness of conscience (under whatever term it was disguised), equity would not produce equality—like cases would not be decided alike—and equity requires equality. Although “rule of law” had not yet entered the legal lexicon, “equity” (and some procedural limitation to the ambit of discretion in the exercise of equity) lies at its heart. Although it was slower to do so than the common law courts, equity itself became increasingly rule bound. Through the eighteenth century, it even began to develop a precedent system, at just the time a system of written precedent was being formalized for the common law courts (although the rhetoric of precedent had been employed by the common law courts for some time: Baker 2002, 196–201). This was particularly the case under Lord Chancellor Eldon, who, in 1818, claimed, “Nothing would inflict on me greater pain in quitting this place than the recollection that I had done anything to justify the reproach that the equity of this court varies like the chancellor’s foot” (Gee v. Prichard (1818) 2 Swan. 402 at 414). Yet, by hardening into rules, the balance inherent in the concept of justice between certainty and flexibility was violated: interpretive discretion had less and less of an institutional

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manifestation. During the petrification of equitable maxims, the notion that the court of Chancery-administered justice came under attack (e.g., see Kohler’s characterization of Shelley’s attack on Eldon at 1998, p. 545). These attacks often materialized as complaints against procedural problems in the court. Hand in hand with Chancery’s monstrous technicality went another emblem of procedural corruption, a fee system that made the court of equity synonymous, not with justice but graft. The conceptual split between the principle of equity and its institutional manifestation in Chancery is best captured in Blackstone’s Commentaries. Blackstone, usually very careful in his use of technical terms, seems to unconsciously slide between two very different uses of “equity.” At one point, he claims that equity by its very nature cannot be laid down in fixed rules. Here, he seems to be using the word in the broad sense as embodying justice. However, he later states that equity is bogged down in established and labyrinthine rules. Here, he seems to be speaking of equity as the brand of law administered by the Chancery court (1765, p. 1:62; see also Holdsworth 1956–1982, pp. 12:589 ff). Thus, although historically Chancery had appropriated justice and transformed it into equity (interpretive discretion under restriction), by the eighteenth century it had, in the opinion of many, become so rule bound and institutionally corrupt that its version of equity no longer matched the principle of equity, allowing other institutions to appropriate the broader concept. The first of these (at a time just before Blackstone wrote) was the common law court of King’s Bench under Chief Justice Mansfield. From his successful Chancery practice, Mansfield imbibed the view that the principles of equity should be applied in courts of law. In a string of decisions, Mansfield recognized and implemented principles of equity at law, transforming the maritime insurance, creating the action of indebitatus assumpsit (in which he stated that a moral claim was sufficient consideration for a contract) and inventing the entire field of commercial law (adopting the equitably based principles of the Law Merchant—see Eaton (1780) 2 Dougl. 455; Atkins (1775) 1 Cowp. 284; Hawkes (1782) 1 Cowp 289; Weakly (1776) 1 Cowp 473 and Corbett (1785) 1  T.R. 5 (overruled), all cited in Leiberman 1989, pp. 99–121). Leiberman points out that Mansfield’s method was similar to that employed by a contemporary, Lord Kames in Scotland—both saw history (and the place of precedent within history) as a programmatic rhetoric to justify the intervention of principle. Where Mansfield would get rid of antiquated rules that no longer fit within present culture, Kames would make the similar (but

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ideologically more complex) move of suggesting that old cases manifested the overarching rule of reason in legal decision-making. If the old decision was a just one, the reason behind it could guide us in the present; if the old decision was unjust or based on the wrong principle, we must reject it (pp. 159–176). However, the innovations that flowed from such a method were seen by many as legislating from the bench, as an exercise of equity without the procedural safeguards which restricted that exercise in Chancery and without the in personam remedies available to Chancery to affect equity’s administration. Historically, Chancery could only “follow the law” (i.e., give relief from the restriction of legal rule, not just blanket relief) and had procedures for (e.g.) gathering evidence and compelling relief which were not available at common law. The supposed uncontested ascendancy of the Mansfield/Kames position is actually misrepresented in Blackstone’s Commentaries. He claims unequivocally that equity was available for administration in both the common law courts and Chancery. This was actually an unusual, minority position. A more accurate picture of the debate is contained in the decision of Burgess v. Wheate (1 Eden 177). Here, Clarke (M.R.) and Henley (L.K.) formed a majority against Mansfield who suggested that trust property without a surviving beneficiary should escheat (because, in principle, trusts were supposed to be regarded as real estates). However, the majority held that the legal rule of escheat only applied when there was no tenant and that, since the trustee was tenant in law, equity must follow the rule of that law and recognize the trustee’s interest so long as there was no one with whom he stood in a fiduciary relationship. Thus, equity and law would remain distinct; legal rule would triumph over principle. Decisions such as Goodtitle, Marshall, and Tucker ((1796), 7 T.R. at 46; (1800) 8 T.R. at 547; (1833) 4 B and Ad. at 748–9), reached subsequent to Mansfield’s tenure, reveal that the majority in Burgess more realistically described the eventual outcome of the eighteenth-century dispute regarding the location of equity. It would remain in Chancery which, via its partnership with the common law courts, would supposedly effectively administer justice for the future. The courts had redefined their jurisdictional boundaries along the lines argued in Fonblanque’s Treatise of Equity (1793–1794). One would administer the letter of the law, the other the spirit. Unfettered exercise of equitable discretion would not lead to justice and Mansfield’s attempt to appropriate equity had failed because of that fact.

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The concerns of the Burgess court were also echoed outside the legal establishment. Junius attacked Mansfield for turning certain law into uncertain equity and even Bentham (an enormous admirer of Mansfield’s dedication to principle), condemned his “genius” as only partial amendment leading to evil (Holdsworth 1956–1982, pp. 12:558, n.6 and 558). However, Bentham was equally concerned with the exercise of this discretion in Chancery. In his lampooning description of the office of Chancellor, Bentham emphasizes the arbitrary discretion he holds, not the overly rule bound nature of his work. Indeed, Bentham saw discretion and invention (operating in historical moments and then solidified into precedent) as the basis of all law, leading to his pronouncement that the common law (besides being a “sham” and analogous to religious dogma) was a “thing merely imaginary” (Bentham 1928, p.  125; see also Simpson 1994, p. 129, and Lobban 1991, p. 151). Eldon’s modifications of equity into an increasingly rule-bound form over the same period reflects a similar anxiety regarding Chancery discretion—that its arbitrariness, even with procedural and remedial safeguards, cannot produce the equality necessary for equity and the rule of law. Thus, Mansfield, Bentham, and Eldon can all be seen as Romantic-era manifestations of a centuries-old institutional conflict over the location and manifestation of “justice” and the power of interpretive discretion in the realm. Some, like Bentham, saw the best successor to currently defunct forums to be a Pannomion that set out legal rules applicable to the whole range of human activity (see Lobban 1991, pp. 116–184). Others, like Mansfield, saw it in a judiciary reeducated in the old pioneering spirit of equity, unbound by Chancery precedent or notions that the writ system barred the application of equity in King’s Bench courts. When Wordsworth began developing his “new” style of poetry in reaction to the Enlightenment French School, all these many legal anxieties about discretion and legal interpretation were simmering in the public sphere. “Genius” shone through the poetry Burns or Chatterton but was equally the hallmark of the autonomous imagination shaping the political and legal world in ways both free from and limited by the strictures of convention and precedent. The crisis which English law quickly approached, brought on by the French Revolution and its aftermath in a reactionary 1790s government response, brought directly into public consciousness exactly how much was at stake in the seemingly simple act of reading. Legal institutions had been wrestling with this issue for 1000 years, establishing a series of licenses and limitations on this activity. Ordeal,

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wager of battle, jury, royal court, medieval writ, equity—all were designed to both enable and contain the discretion of individuals who were constantly asked (ideally) to ascertain a truth and administer a justice that was not merely of earthly origin but connected with something inhuman and otherworldly. Whether the ultimate source of “justice” was called God, reason, equity or the common law, it was (and is) the abstraction which supposedly controls the decision, not the people channeling that decision into reality (however, c.f. Lobban 1991, pp. 8, 12, 47, 257). The literary cognate to these legal mechanisms is “imagination.” As Forrest Pyle argues in The Ideology of the Imagination, this pervasive and varied Romantic trope cannot fit comfortably within any category or definition. It can and has been regarded in so many different ways that, like the term “Romanticism” itself, it has almost lost is capacity to signify anything. Pyle claims, therefore, that it is important instead to examine how imagination functions, how it is consistently “assigned the responsibility of making a linkage, an articulation” (1995, p. 2). Under this perspective, “imagination” becomes a conduit, a sign with little specific content but which represents a bridge between “subject and society” and also “spirit and matter” (p. 1). In acting as a kind of bridge between this world and the next, imagination begins to look at least a little like equity, the ordeal, the writ, and the jury: all of these are mechanisms and conventions that both enshrine the capacity of the autonomous subject to choose (and interpret) while also channeling that choice in conventional ways to articulate a connection with something beyond the material. If the common law is a thing “purely imaginary,” then the poetic imagination just might enact the common law and fulfill Shelley’s promise that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” What I hope to suggest through this history of legal discretion and interpretive imagination is that, by the beginning of the Romantic period in 1790s, poetry might begin to look like a viable institutional manifestation for a sense of “justice” and an emerging rule of law by framing its poetic subject as an individual capable of exercising imagination and interpretive discretion: Romantic poetry and its persistent invocation of the imagination creates a new legal institution out of the autonomous reading subject. That Romantic poetry would substitute “imagination” for “reason” (particularly “primitive reason”) as the bridge to legal truth seems consonant with the Romantic struggle against enlightenment values as described in (e.g.) Abrams’ The Mirror and the Lamp.

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Romantic Justice in “The Solitary Reaper” Insofar as she is a liminal figure balancing on the border between this world and the next, Wordsworth’s Reaper participates in this literary and legal discourse about imagination and the political consequences of interpretive freedom. In his discussion of the poem, Peter Manning has noted the potentially damaging occlusion of the political in its tone and process. What the ideal creative moment enshrined in the poem ignores and covers over are the poverty, “English reprisals for the Jacobite uprisings,” factories, absentee landlords, and “murmurs of radical discontent” (1990, p. 268 cited in Shields 2012, p. 778). However, as Julie Shields also suggests, while Wordsworth’s literary nostalgia acts to mask the trauma of the past, it also serves as a trace of that trauma. That the Maiden sings of “battles long ago” recalls the horrors of the ‘15 and the ‘45, the Highland clearances, and the consequent political oppression visited on the Scottish. That she might equally sing of “some natural sorrow, loss, or pain” could in turn gesture to the very real poverty that was a common part of Scottish life in Wordsworth’s day. Although the Reaper is temporally associated with Wordsworth’s 1803 Scottish tour, it was a more direct response to Thomas Wilkinson’s manuscript account of his own walking tour of 1787. As Wordsworth himself later admitted, the last line of the poem is an almost-verbatim copy of a description from Wilkinson. His published 1824 version reads as follows: Passed a female who was reaping alone: she sung in Erse as she bended over her sickle; the sweetest human voice I ever heard: her strains were tenderly melancholy, and felt delicious, long after they were heard no more”. (1824, p. 12)

Although this description augments the sense of Scotland and its nostalgia as consumable Romantic product (“delicious”), the context of the figure in Wilkinson potentially adds to the political and historical resonances of Wordsworth’s poem. Wilkinson’s reaper lives in a world peppered with political and social observations. Although his design is always to move from the factual and historical to an ethereal sublime (as suggested in his preface, he seeks the sublimity of mountains throughout the British Isles), he nevertheless grounds his reader in the poverty of the Scottish situation. On the page following his description of the reaper, Wilkinson recalls seeing blood on the roadway in winter, left behind by the feet of common

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laborers who lacked proper footwear (p. 7). Although in seemingly every instance, Wilkinson quickly idealizes this poverty (e.g., “their chaste and modest countenances gave an innocence to their appearance that would hardly have been known in the southern parts of the island” (p. 14)), he maintains a steady undercurrent of commentary on scarcity in the lowlands and highlands. Moreover, the poverty and simplicity of the poor is implicitly contrasted with the estates of the English and Scottish nobility, as Wilkinson constantly notes the boundaries and conditions of various clan seats and noble lands. A scant two pages before Wilkinson introduces his reaper, he gives us the image of William Wallace’s sword (p.  10), a symbol of rebellion against English oppression, hanging impotently on a wall. The context from which Wordsworth lifted his reaper is, arguably, substantially political; one might go so far as to suggest its “precedent” not only concerns itself with issues of justice and fairness, but also theorizes the relationship between nature and morality. Wilkinson’s reaper appears at a transitional moment, as he travels from the southern, lowland regions of Scotland, those most familiar to and under the most direct influence of England, to the highland regions, more “remote” (p.  11), that contain the mountainous sublime for which he searches in order that they might fundamentally “change his life and expectations” (p. 11). So situated, the reaper becomes a border figure, standing not merely at a geographic and sociopolitical boundary but between the mundane physical world and the supernatural. It comes as no surprise that Wordsworth would, therefore, employ her in similar fashion, as introduction to a mystical, imaginative realm bodied forth in song. However, poised at this political and spiritual boundary, the figure also invokes the legal. As Wilkinson observes five pages earlier: The females in this part of Scotland dress very lightly …. Perhaps their appearance brought the Indians to the recollection of John Pemberton [Wilkinson’s traveling companion from the United States], who now entertained me with many interesting anecdotes of that people, whom he ­represented as a sincere and noble-minded race of men, excelling in their sense of justice, courage, generosity, and eloquence. (p. 5)

This penchant to associate the Scottish with Rousseau’s noble savage and their uncorrupted sense of morality is one noted by Fiona Stafford, who argues that Wordsworth may have seen in that northern region an escape

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from and alternative to the “drabness, commercialism, and general moral decrepitude” of English society (Stafford 2007, p.  99; cited in Shields 2012, p. 778). Intentionally and directly invoking the context Wilkinson provides, Wordsworth’s “Reaper” perhaps becomes not only a description of the sublime inspiration and transition that poetry can catalyze between the natural and supernatural realms, but also the poetic symbol of a shift between a place of moral decrepitude, oppression, and poverty (England and the Scottish Borders under English influence) to the sublime and barely glimpsed possibility of an ancient “sense of justice,” undefiled by modern institutions and self-interest. In her song, the reaper bears a traumatic past into the present; the poem’s speaker and reader both bear her song into a future that has at least the possibility of reenacting the aboriginal justice which resonates in the reaper’s song. She becomes, potentially, a new image of lady justice—bearing a scythe rather than a sword, looking open-eyed at the world around her and channeling to all her auditors the authority to interpret the mysterious signs in her music. As a Pythian oracle, she provides the overdetermined potential of a meaning that always has the capacity to overflow any boundary set before it (such as the vale itself which the reaper occupies) but which is nevertheless subject to interpretive fiat and convention (the boundary of the vale itself). What remains to be discovered is the nature of the priest or judge who will come forth to interpret her song. Like the officiator at an ordeal examining the traces of hot iron, the Hardy jury, or the high justice in the House of Lords sifting through centuries of written precedent, the reader of poetry must judge—and Romantic poetry asks that the reader be put in the position to judge. In short, “The Solitary Reaper” is fundamentally concerned with acts of interpretation and judgment and how those acts as imaginative processes might fall inside or outside a circumscribing form to bear moral consequences into an uncertain future. The Maiden’s song becomes a textual gateway of ancestral voices with which the auditor must engage, a conduit to a realm as pure and primitive as the singer herself which provides through its connection at least a glimpse of the ancient constitution that many 1790s radical figures felt was the true embodiment of the rule of law. What Romantic poetry seeks to remind its readers is that they too sit at the border of this world and the next; like Ronald Dworkin’s Hercules (half god, half human), in his Law’s Empire (1986), they must read the signs before them and decide what meaning to make. The poem’s overburdened speaker yearns for guidance and context (“Will no one tell me what she sings?”); the extent to which Coleridge and Blake felt such

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limitations were appropriate is largely the subject of this book. Written in the immediate aftermath of the Thomas Hardy trial for high treason, “The Solitary Reaper” embodies political and legal theoretical dynamics resonating in the public sphere of 1794–1795 and running through the entire English history of legal decision-­making and exuberantly asserts the radical autonomy of the individual to be a member of his own self informing jury to judge both law and fact in an effort to reinstitutionalize a justice seemingly lost to reactionary forces in the 1790s. Although “Reaper” is just one poem and cannot possibly represent an entire literary movement (even assuming such a movement as “Romanticism” can be said to exist), I ultimately discuss it here in the hope it might embody a position common to much of the poetry written under the shadow of government oppression: it provides a model reader and a model space in which something like the rule of law might continue to flourish.

Notes 1. For an extended discussion on the perceived social utility of literary expression in the 1790s, see Hudson 2020. 2. See Goodwin 1979 for an invaluable discussion of these constitutional societies and their historical development. 3. The 1790s abound with government attempts to use the courtroom as an instrument to regulate public and private speech. Trials for seditious words, seditious libel, and various treasons were conducted in England and Scotland, particularly in 1793 and 1794, in an effort to silence revolutionary sentiment. See Morris 1998, p. 105. 4. See generally Langbein’s (1999) account of the gradual introduction of defence counsel in instances of lesser offences starting as early as the 1730s. 5. The shorthand transcriber who supplied the text for State Trials, Joseph Gurney, wrote a handbook on shorthand techniques. The 1813 American edition states “When a Council quotes an Author, or Statute; or a Divine, a passage of scripture, &c., the writer needs only to take down the folio, chapter, verse &c., leave a space, and supply the quotation at his leisure” (1813, p. 39). Thus, the trial transcription, compiled with a later reference to the works cited, gives an artificial precision to the commencement, conclusion, and accuracy of the quotations made. 6. One might add to this a discussion of the trial by battle or “wager of battle” introduced into England after the Norman invasion. It is in essence a version of the ordeal, seeking for unambiguous signs of God’s verdict (see Baker 2002, pp. 72–4).

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7. For example, although it was customary in the feudal tenure system that the son of a deceased tenant would then be allowed to succeed his father in seisin, the lord was not bound to enter the feudal contract with the son. The common law courts eventually stepped in to recognize and enforce the son’s interest as a “right” to the contract and the property. See Baker 2002, pp. 296ff. 8. During these battles, the common law courts (especially that of King’s Bench) would resort to legal fiction to modify the forms of action they were allowed to decide; for example, they were able to adopt a streamlined “Bill” system like that used in chancery for debt (by Magna Carta under the jurisdiction of Chancery) by piggybacking a claim in debt on a writ for (fictitious) trespass. Once the defendant was within the custody of the King’s Bench court for the trespass, they had jurisdiction over him regarding the debt action as well. This technique brought in a great many claims to the King’s Bench, where it was cheaper to proceed than in Chancery. Baker (2002, pp. 79ff) notes how trespass and case (legal fiction) became the main way the common law escaped the forms and led to development of most law through the eighteenth century.

References Abrams, M.H. 1971. The mirror and the lamp: Romantic theory and the critical tradition. London: Oxford University Press. Baker, J.H. 2002. An introduction to English legal history. 4th ed. Boston: Butterworths. Barrell, John. 2000. Imagining the king’s death. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bentham, Jeremy. 1928. A comment on the commentaries. Ed. C.W.  Everett. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Blackstone, Sir. William. 1765. Commentaries on the laws of England. Oxford: Clarendon. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30802/30802-­h/30802-­h.htm. Accessed 29 Jan 2021. Butler, Marilyn. 1984. Burke, Paine, Godwin and the revolution controversy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dicey, A.V. 1982. Introduction to the study of the law of the constitution. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Dworkin, Ronald. 1986. Law’s empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goodwin, Albert. 1979. The friends of liberty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Green, Thomas Andrew. 1985. Verdict according to conscience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Gurney, Joseph. 1813. Gurney’s easy and compendious system of shorthand adapted to the arts and sciences and to the learned professions. Ed. Thomas Sergeant. Philadelphia: Mathew Carey. Holdsworth, William. 1956–1982. A history of English law. Vol. 17. London: Methuen. Howell, Thomas Bayle. Ed. 1809–1826. State trials. Vol. 33. London: R. Bagshot. Hudson, Nicholas. 2020. The social utility of “literature:” the genesis of a modern idea, 1780–1800. Eighteenth-Century studies 53 (2): 191–209. Hyams, Paul R. 1981. Trial by ordeal: The key to proof in the early common law. In On the laws and customs of England, ed. Morris S. Arnold et al. Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina P. Kerr, Margaret H., Richard D. Forsyth, and Michael J. Plyley. 1992. Cold water and hot iron: Trial by ordeal in England. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22 (4): 573–595. Kohler, Michael. 1998. Shelley in chancery: The reimagination of the paternalist state in The Cenci. Studies in Romanticism 37: 545–589. Langbein, John H. 1999. The prosecutorial origins of defence counsel in the eighteenth century: The appearance of solicitors. Cambridge Law Journal 58: 314–365. Leiberman, D. 1989. The province of legislation determined: Legal theory in eighteenth-­century Britain. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lobban, Michael. 1991. The common law and English jurisprudence. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 2008. Common law and common sense. Ratio juris 21 (4): 541–546. ———. 2012. History, law and language; or, what can foxes teach hedgehogs? Transnational Legal Theory 3 (2): 140–145. Manning, Peter J. 1990. Reading romantics: Texts and contexts. New  York: Oxford UP. Marsh, Joss. 1998. Word crimes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morris, Marilyn. 1998. The British monarchy and the French revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 1997. Poetic justice. Boston: Beacon Press. Paine, Thomas. 1984. The age of reason. New York: Pantheon. Plucknett, Theodore F.T. 1956. A concise history of the common law. 5th ed. London: Liberty Fund. Pyle, Forest. 1995. The ideology of the imagination. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rorty, R. 2007. Justice as a larger loyalty. In Philosophy as cultural politics: Philosophical papers, ed. Richard Rorty, 42–55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Santoro, Emilio. 2010. The rule of law and the ‘liberties of the English’: The interpretation of Albert Venn Dicey. In The rule of law, ed. Pietro Costa and Danilo Zolo, 153–200. Dordrecht: Springer. Shelley, Percy. 2002. A defence of poetry. In Shelley’s poetry and prose, ed. Neil Fraistat and Donald H. Reiman, 486–488. New York: Norton. Shields, Juliet. 2012. Highland emigration and the transformation of nostalgia in romantic poetry. European Romantic Review 23 (6): 765–784. Simpson, A.W.B. 1994. The common law and legal theory. In Folk law: Essays in the theory and practice of Lex non Scripta, ed. A.D. Renteln and A. Dundes, vol. 1, 199–240. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Stafford, Fiona. 2007. Inhabited solitudes: Wordsworth in Scotland, 1803. In Scotland, Ireland, and the romantic aesthetic, ed. David Duff and Catherine Jones, 93–113. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell. Wilkinson, Thomas. 1824. Tours to the British mountains. London: Taylor and Hessey. Zolo, D. 2010. The rule of law: A critical reappraisal. In The rule of law, ed. Pietro Costa and Danilo Zolo, 3–72. Dordrecht: Springer.

CHAPTER 3

Coleridge’s Poetic Dispensation

Samuel Taylor Coleridge reacted to the Pitt regime’s assault on the rule of law within a month of Hardy’s acquittal on November 5, publishing the sonnet “To the Honourable Mr Erskine” in the Morning Chronicle: When British Freedom for a happier land Spread her broad wings, that flutter’d with affright, ERSKINE! thy voice she heard, and paus’d her flight Sublime of hope! For dreadless thou didst stand (Thy censer glowing with the hallow’d flame) An hireless Priest before th’ insulted shrine, And at her altar pourd’st the stream divine Of unmatch’d eloquence. There thy name Her sons shall venerate, and cheer thy breast With blessings heaven-ward breath’d. And when the doom Of Nature bids thee die, beyond the tomb Thy light shall shine: as sunk beneath the West Tho’ the great Summer Sun eludes our gaze, Still burns wide Heaven with his distended blaze.1

Here, Coleridge turns lawyer into priest and prophet, resanctifying the shrine of liberty through “unmatched eloquence” (8), protecting a holy space of inestimable value to future generations. Transformed in death, Erskine will be naturalized, shedding a light that will, like the sun already set, glow above the horizon for those who remain behind. Described here © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. L. Barr, Romanticism and the Rule of Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74878-4_3

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as “British Freedom,” the sacrosanct rights of the Englishman under the rule of law are seen as defended through language, a sacrifice of waters poured on a sacred altar which serves to protect it from the insulting attack of government force displayed in the Hardy trial. Even here, so soon after the trial’s conclusion (and before the final acquittal of the remaining defendants), we see a conglomeration of images and ideas that prefigure Coleridge’s ultimate construction of a lyric sanctuary for both the rule of law and those who would remain free under it. Mentioned intermittently in his lectures of the following year, Coleridge’s primary characterization of the trial and its aftermath in the Two Acts of 1795 was that they embodied government action designed to infiltrate and close down liberty and language in even the most private of spaces, comprising, therefore, a direct assault against the rule of law. In an allusion to the arrest and pretrial incarceration of Thomas Hardy in the Fall of 1794, Coleridge asserts: 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, heart broken by our Imprisonment—til overpowered by disease and wounded sensibilities we sink into the Grave. (Works p. 1:62)

Here Hardy’s fate epitomizes for Coleridge the invasion of domestic space by arbitrary government authority. As Victoria Myers suggests in her reading of Coleridge’s essays on the Two Acts, The Plot Discovered, through the Fall and Winter of 1794/1795 Coleridge increasingly saw government as attempting to curtail room for political commentary, ultimately closing down speech even in the most personal of forums (p. 73; see also Roe 1988, p. 149). The acts arose as both an “edition of Scotch laws with large editions” (an allusion to the Scottish sedition trials of 1793 which resulted in sentences against all the accused) and a codification of the prosecution’s arguments in the English Treason Trials of 1794, arrogating to government lackeys the authority to construe virtually any activity as treasonous (Works pp. 1:291 and 292). Here is a rule of men rather than law in which the accusation of treason is sufficient to prove it: Whenever it shall suit the purposes of a corrupt and abandoned ministry, these Acts will be administered to the utmost stretch of possible implication.

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Read the trial of Gerrald, and then ask your own hearts, on what evidence a man may not be condemned? (Works p. 1:291)

As a consequence, Coleridge fears there will no longer be a place in which to reimagine the political landscape. In combination, says Coleridge, the two bills “assassinate the Liberty of the Press … [and] smother the Liberty of Speech” (Works p. 1:291). The acts’ promulgation entails “All political controversy is at an end” so that even “the exertions of living genius [will be] smothered” (Works p. 1:286). Coleridge’s immediate response to the threat against liberty embodied in the Hardy trial is a turn to nature. Erskine’s apotheosis at the end of Coleridge’s sonnet may be stylistic device or rhetorical flourish but also points to the dominant legal theory of the day which Coleridge develops further in much of his work throughout the 1790s. In the early portions of Blackstone’s Commentaries, he sets out a legal cosmogony in which God promulgates a series of laws that rules all aspects of existence, from physics to morality to the laws of humanity and nations. Since “man is an entirely dependent being,” he is subject to: This will of his maker … called the law of nature. For as God, when he created matter, and endued it with a principle of mobility, established certain rules of the perpetual direction of that motion; so, when he created man and endued him with freewill to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that freewill is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the purport of those laws. (1902, pp. 1:39–40)

These include the “eternal immutable laws of good and evil, to which the creator himself in all his dispensations conforms; and which he has enabled human reason to discover, so far as they are necessary for the conduct of human actions” (1902, p. 1:40). This discovery comprises the “Common Law” itself, famously not invented so much as revealed through the exercise of “right reason” (1902, p. 1:40). However, modern life has in Blackstone’s opinion clouded human capacity to discover and understand this law: In order to apply [God’s law] to the particular exigencies of each individual, it is still necessary to have recourse to reason; whose office it is to discover … what the law of nature directs in every circumstance of life … and if our reason were always, as in our first ancestor before his transgression, clear and perfect; we should need no further guide but this. But every man now finds

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the contrary in his own experience; that his reason is corrupt, and his understanding full of ignorance and error. (1902, p. 1:41)

Therefore, this ultimate source of law, which “no human laws should be suffered to contradict” (1902, p. 1:41), is often hidden from the modern mind and, by extension, can only be recovered by a return to a simple way of life, to “a state of nature, … [in which] there would be no occasion for any other laws, than the law of nature and the law of God. Neither could any other law possibly exist” (1902, p. 1:43). Coleridge’s reaction to the Hardy trial and the various other assaults on the rule of law launched through (inter alia) government place men, rotten boroughs, and jury tampering was to write a poetry of nature that would reacclimatize his readership to the aboriginal, Edenic state in which they could directly apprehend the law of God through nature, “God’s eternal language” as it’s framed in “Frost at Midnight.” From the early framework expressed in “Effusion XXXV,” through the more detailed explorations of The Lyrical Ballads, into the doubts of the later 1790s, Coleridge develops a theory about the power of poetry to reform the romantic subject into one capable of living under and expressing the rule of law, to construct an individual with a radical autonomy of the imagination that is nevertheless restrained by tradition and convention. At this crucial moment in the development of the rule of law and the liberal subject, Coleridge participates in and helps fashion a mode of artistic expression to encourage the political imagination while escaping the violence of legal prosecution. He creates a space in which one might even imagine the death of kings.

Lyric Space and the Prophetic Subject Lyric, and its association with a prophetic fragmentation of authority, was one location in which even a radical political imagination might hide from government censure. In the course of developing a literary haven for liberty, Coleridge (very much like Blackstone) turns first to the Bible. As Elinore Shaffer has argued in Kubla Khan and The Fall of Jerusalem, aware of the German Higher Criticism as filtered through the work of Alexander Geddes, by the mid-1790s Coleridge began to conceive of modern poetics as an expression of prophecy: assuming a program of mythic writing and reading, Coleridge sought to reproduce the moment of inspiration in lyric

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form, a revelation that not only proclaimed the Divine cause of its poetic effect but also attempted to recreate the inspired moment in readers as they experienced the text. Insofar as the reader perceived through the syncretic overdetermination of symbol a pan-cultural spirituality that registered on some deep psychological level, he became a witness of deity, an experience that overcame the textual disjunction Paine posited in the Age of Reason as inevitably nullifying any conveyance of inspiration from prophet to reader (1984, p. 9). In Shaffer’s view, Coleridgean lyric undertakes biblical work. Poetry becomes a mechanism for revealed religion stripped of the false ornamentation of translational mistake, historical mischance, and cultural or systematic prejudice. However, as I will suggest, Coleridge’s exploration of the Mosaic Dispensation in the second of his Lectures on Revealed Religion implies that revelation has a political dimension that also requires regulation. Witnessing a higher power does not occur in a vacuum but within the legally controlled context of a political system; prophecy needs a “safe receptacle” in which to grow, a constitutional haven affective in the legal realm that can stave off the forces of tyranny and idolatry that will interfere with the perception of deity both by those who create prophecy and those who recreate it through interpretive action. The political resonances and potentialities of the prophetic mode can be seen through the example of Richard Brothers. On March 4, 1795, Brothers was arrested for violating an Elizabethan statute forbidding the publication of “various fantastical prophecies, with the intent to cause dissensions and other disturbances within [the] realm” (Matthews 1971, p. 110). The king’s messengers led him quietly past a throng of followers, many of the “very respectable” sort, that habitually camped itself outside his doors. Brothers offered no resistance, although some sources report that the “fury of the multitude” was threatening to those who had dared lay hands on “God’s Nephew” (Garrett 1975, pp. 197–8). Born in Newfoundland, Brothers had been a Navy lieutenant, retired on half pay, and “called” to write a series of highly specific prophecies regarding the coming end times in which he, as a new Moses, would lead the chosen people of England to the promised land. Through 1794, he had become well known in both London and international millenarian circles (his A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times alone had four separate editions in England, one in Ireland, 18 in the United States, and was also translated into German and French), a touchstone for political debate (Gilray sketched a cartoon of a slack-jawed Brothers carrying Charles James Fox, Richard Sheridan and Charles Stanhope in his rucksack

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toward the New Jerusalem) and even a fashionable figure for a time (his portrait appeared in Harrison’s Lady’s Pocket Magazine) (Garrett 1975, pp. 188 and 199). However, government authorities showed little express interest in his activities until the simultaneous publication of a Times article warning of the political ramifications of his popularity (perhaps placed by the government) and his arrest. The article on “The Great Prophet of Paddington Street” marked the rise of subversive occult and millenarian forces in France just prior to its Revolution, and associated Brothers with such a trend in England. When brought before the Privy Council for examination, the prophecy to which the prosecution officially objected was a brief excerpt from Revealed Knowledge in which Brothers addressed the King: “The Lord God commands me to say to you, George the Third, King of England, that immediately on my being revealed in London to the Hebrews as their Prince, and to all nations as their Governor, your Crown must be delivered up to me, that all your power and authority may instantly cease” (cited at Matthews 1971, p. 109). Although accounts differ (mainly because no official report of his examination or its aftermath was ever produced), it appears that Brothers was both found guilty of violating the Elizabethan statute and pronounced insane—a legal impossibility (see also Barrell 2000, pp. 534–42). Although Lord Chancellor Loughbourough, as the guardian of lunatics, found Brothers quite reasonable in his comportment during an initial interview, protracted incarceration and examination by government physicians eventually led to evidence put before a hastily convened lunacy commission (for which Brothers was allowed no preparation or aid in his defense) that did result in his committal to the private asylum of Dr. Samuel Foart Simmons, the same physician who had examined and testified against him at the commission (see also Barrell 2000, pp. 530–40). Spared from the penal consequences of a guilty verdict for high treason and removed from the venue of judgment that was the courtroom, Brothers was nevertheless locked away to languish until his prophetic and political vision was no longer relevant. Although Coleridge seems to laugh off the political and personal implications of these events, writing a March 10, 1795, letter to George Dyer with the aside, “Poor Brothers! They’ll make him know the Law as well as the Prophets,” (1956, p. 1:156, quoted in Works p. 1:178n) at the time of Brothers’ rise to popular fame and arrest Coleridge was writing his own very serious-minded prophetic work. Of the several poems that might be included under this rubric, the “Eolian Harp” (then known as “Effusion XXXV”) perhaps best embodies Coleridge’s efforts in the context of the

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Hardy trial and the politically charged nature of prophecy to circumscribe a lyrical haven safe from the encroachments of law. Brothers had been taken and hidden away because of the powerful political influence prophecy could wield at the time. In particular, as shown by the nature of the passage selected by the prosecution as especially aggravating, prophecy had the potential to disrupt the established lines of legal and religious authority on which the English social system depended. As J.C.D. Clark (1985) and Marilyn Morris (1998) have argued, the justification of monarchical authority, although in transition to a secular ideal, still clung to the remnants of the notion of divine right; moreover, the general population often perceived the secular authority of the monarch to be embodied in Church of England officials and their local representatives. Therefore, the prophet, by inserting himself in the line of authority between God and Monarch, came to assert his place as supreme fount of all earthly justice, authority, and law in the nation. Prophet treasonously supplanted king and arrogated to himself all legal and political authority as God’s representative. To become a prophet was to return to the Edenic state in which God’s law arose not through courts, judges, and government or religious officials, but through direct revelation. Inheriting the mantle of George Gordon after 1793, Brothers threatened to extend Gordon’s brand of popular radicalism (McCalman 1996, pp. 343–67, 356 and 367). William Pitt’s scandalous abridgment of legal procedure in the Brothers case reveals the government’s desperation to nullify this prophetic potential— allowed to spread unchecked, the prophet’s words could rise up and displace established authority arrangements for a new fiat dictated by God through the prophet. As Morris suggests, the courtroom, especially trials for sedition and treason, became the secular mechanism of choice to confirm this expedient Right of Kings in 1790s England. What Coleridge found in lyric then was a location for the prophetic inversion of authority that both performed its liberal message and also obscured it from government censure. However, what Coleridge would have observed in the Hardy trial and the discourse of legal interpretation that surrounded it was the danger of innovation and imagination employed in the act of prophecy, the interpretation and translation of divine signs into the world. His quip about Brothers may have been intended as an offhand, amusing comment, but it also expressed some anxiety about the need to regulate prophecy through law—unchecked, the power of the individual to innovate and move beyond the signs granted by deity was all too real. Blackstone himself was emphatic on this point: liberal autonomy

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might find its most fertile ground in a new world of rights, but God’s natural law exists so that free will “is in some degree regulated and restrained” (1902, p.1:40). Coleridge’s “Effusion XXXV” thematizes just this balancing act between the radical autonomy of the free will (as expressed through the imagination) and the need to both protect and contain that expression lest it spill over in unchecked revolution. Writing in the second of his Lectures on Revealed Religion, Coleridge posits the “principle design” of the old Mosaic law as “to Preserve one nation free from Idolatry in order that it might be a safe receptacle for the precursive Evidences of Christianity” (Works p. 1:137). The infiltration from which the potential for prophecy and the revelation of God’s law must be isolated were forces Coleridge tended to associate with idolatry in contemporary political life: the instrumentality of terror and influence exerted as mechanisms of control and authority by the British government. Positing in his revisionist historical account of the “republican” Mosaic constitution that a suspension or denial of temporal authority in the Mosaic Dispensation provided some isolation from the forces of idolatry extant in biblical times, Coleridge begins to envision lyric as a similarly isolated realm in which prophetic and radical content could find an avenue back into the public sphere. Working from a position first voiced in The Fall of Robespierre in which he associates lyric with an apolitical realm defended against the terror and greed that control modern politics, Coleridge’s poem of August 1795 settles on a constitutional organization for lyrical space that emulates that of the Mosaic Dispensation—it is a place isolated from government forces through the same suspension of earthly authority as immunized the ancient Hebraic community from the idolatrous practices of the nations that historically surrounded it. It is a space in which the romantic subject might assert a radical autonomy of the imagination and yet still remain safe and contained. For Coleridge, the Mosaic Dispensation was that which ensured the Jewish nation would perform its role as the historical antecedent to Christianity. Laws against idolatry provided an insulated space for the prophecy by which later generations of Christians could become witnesses of Christ: The circumstance of the Mosaic Dispensation were these—To shew the great power of God and by the immediate consequences [of] their frequent apostacy from him to shew the hateful Effects of Idolatry the Jews were

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chosen above all others—a people of a stupid and earthly imagination and blindly addicted to idolatrous Rites from the splendid Ceremonies and sensual Pleasures which attended them. Such were the circumstances—to preserve this nation free from Idolatry, that there might be publickly acknowledged such a series of Prophecies as to us of later ages is a necessary part of the proof of Christianity. (Works p. 1:139; c.f. James Harrington’s similar but more moderate critique of the Israelite Commonwealth noted in Remer 2008, pp. 207–9)

The act of witnessing Christ was something Coleridge had associated with liberalism and republicanism as early as Consciones ad Populum: That same busy spirit which inclines men to be Unitarians in Religion, drives them to be Republicans in Politics … Alas! what room would there be for Bishops or for Priests in a Religion where Deity is the only object of Reverence, and our Immortality the only article of Faith … [Christ] has left us a religion that shall prove fatal to every High Priest—a Religion of which every true Christian is the Priest, his own Heart the Altar, the Universe its Temple, and errors and Vices its only sacrifices … Never, never more shall we behold that generous Loyalty to rank, which is prodigal of its own virtue and its own happiness to invest a few with unholy Splendors;—that subordination of the Heart, which keeps alive the spirit of Servitude amid the empty forms of boasted Liberty! (Works p. 1:67/8n.)

Progress into “true Christian[ity]” entails rebellion against “rank” and the “unholy Splendors” of lords and kings. If there was to be a space for prophecy and liberty in social discourse after the treason trials and in the shadow of the Two Acts, that space must be proof against government infiltration. Therefore, the Mosaic Dispensation preserved a state free of idolatry so that both evidence of the divine origins of Christianity might flourish; in order to provide the textual basis for such revelation, prophecy must occur in a state circumscribed and idol free. The particular mechanism through which the dispensation accomplished this effect was to treat the Jewish people as children and arrogate to God the preponderance of authority in political decision-making: There were no proper legislative powers lodged anywhere in the Constitution—for even the whole Nation had no authority vested in them either to repeal laws in being, or to make new Laws. The Laws of the Nation

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had proceeded miraculously from God—none might add to or diminish aught from them. The Laws of Moses were fully adequate for the regulation of a People among whom Land had been equalized, and each one of whom was to be an agriculturalist—and Commerce and Manufactures were either expressly forbidden by the Law, or at least clearly contradictory to the Spirit of it, as tending to introduce the accumulative system. (Works p. 1:130)

The Hebraic Constitution was a network of laws maintaining a society in which equalization of property and limitation of profession negated the need for virtually all political activity—the people did not need authority to make decisions or legislate alterations. In those rare cases in which they were granted such authority, it was fragmented and split so that no one individual could rise up and dominate an otherwise-corporate expression of public will. Although there was a “Congress of the Hebrew Nation” in the time of David that “possessed all the legislative Powers which existed in the Jewish Constitution,” this Congress would act to create or apply law only in those uncommon instances not contemplated by the Mosaic Dispensation (Works p.  1:129). Even this small authority was circumscribed by the fact that the congress was filled by rotation and “when any point of more than common importance was proposed” all twelve tribes met en masse and “enacted it personally” (Works p.  1:130). This entire structure was expressly directed toward making “every Hebrew … the subject of God alone;” it was “unlawful to acknowledge any human superior” because such acknowledgment amounted to idolatry, to a mediation between the subject and God (Works pp. 1:126, 134). Here was an ancient model of republicanism that both enabled and contained the expression of individual liberty. By keeping most authority from temporal hands and ensuring the little that remained would be unlikely to be concentrated in one individual, Coleridge saw the Hebraic system as discouraging the kind of idolatry of greed, graft, and hierarchy that ultimately seduced the Jews and also characterizes the current behavior of his fellow citizens in the public sphere. By his allusion to Samuel in the midst of the lecture, Coleridge inserts his interpretation of the Hebraic Constitution into a radical republican tradition expressed in such contemporary authors as Warburton, Priestly, and Paine, a tradition that saw the establishment of any political hierarchy as interfering with the divine constitution in which each individual was solely and directly responsible to God for all actions and decisions made in the public sphere. This tradition saw the Jewish adoption of monarchy as a sin,

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as an act of idolatry instigated by the seductive power of splendor and greed.2 Coleridge depicts it in a similar light: Their crime was the foulest of which human nature is capable—they were weary of independence, and their punishment was the heaviest. They had their Request granted. (Works p. 1:133)

Placing any individual above others in the chain of political decision-­ making is an act of idolatry, a “prostitution of the Almighty’s titles” that began when the people of Israel were “seduced by the splendor of monarchical Courts around them” (Works pp.  1:134, 132). Read next to Warburton, Priestly, and Paine, these sentiments become equally a criticism of the self-subjection of England to the Georges in the seventeenth century, a comparison Coleridge seeks to evoke through a brief, ironic contrast between ancient Jewish and modern British government: Moses, it should seem had received no divine Revelation of that great Mystery recently delivered by an English Statesman that Power was for the People not from the People, and that whether Murders and Famine are to be hazarded by a national War is a point more advantageously discussed by a few Place-men than by the unbribed many, unbribed, yet deeply interested. (Works p. 1:131)

Just as the Jews were tempted into monarchy by its promises of temporal gain, so the current English government gained and maintains its authority through the material lures of influence. Coleridge seems to be hinting here at some equivalence between “idolatry” and other forces of compliance exercised in the modern political realm, like bribery. However, the only express comparison Coleridge draws between the Mosaic Dispensation and modern legal systems is in his allusion to French politics at the start and conclusion of the lecture. Coleridge’s supposed catalyst for defending the Mosaic Dispensation was an argument with a “Professing Patriot,” likely Thomas Holcroft, regarding the proper way to interpret the legislative intent behind both current and biblical law. After lauding Holcroft’s claim that the sometimes-quizzical regulations of the French Constitution must be interpreted in the historical context in which they appear, Coleridge necessarily condemns his acquaintance for failing to extend the same historically grounded hermeneutic to the past legislation of the Mosaic Dispensation. Just as the supposed “Frivolity of the

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Revolutionary Regulations” is actually directed to “the subversion of Prejudice” and to “push the Idol Superstition from off its base,” so the “principle design” of the Mosaic Dispensation was to make one nation an idol-free and safe receptacle for prophecy and revelation (Works p. 1:137). Although his ironic reference to English politics in the middle of the lecture suggests that it guards against idolatry by immunizing the individual from the stratifying force of influence, Coleridge’s reinvocation of French republican politics at the end of the lecture also associates idolatry with “Terrors,” “Tyrants,” and “political Slavery”: The Belief of one God and his Perfections were necessary to preserve [the Jews] a Free State since the Superstitions that surrounded [them] disposed the mind to imbecility and unmanly Terrors—which would soon bring in political Slavery, whereas they who accustomed themselves to contemplate the infinite Love of the true Deity, that by the comparison they do so dwarf the giant sons of Earth as to become incapable of not yielding Obedience to God by Rebellion to Tyrants. (Works p. 1:145)

Coming at the end of the lecture to mirror his sentiments at the lecture’s start, this allusion to one of Joseph Gerrald’s radical pamphlets (in which he stated “REBELLION TO TYRANTS IS OBEDIENCE TO GOD”) and the concluding phrase’s association with French revolutionists cannot but help bring Coleridge’s assertions regarding the structure of the Hebraic constitution into a contemporary radical context.3 Coleridge here seems to be developing a link between idolatry (or “superstition”), “terror,” “greed,” and political slavery, all of which are expressions of tyranny that the Mosaic Dispensation and the laws of modern France are designed to guard against. Thus, although the Mosaic Dispensation was designed to fend off the forces of idolatry in biblical times, these forces were still operating in the present day and needed to be repelled. An early recognition of this fact Coleridge had already voiced to some extent a few months prior in The Fall of Robespierre.

The Fall of Robespierre and the “Cottag’d Vale” That a space of equivocal or even suspended authority might provide some immunity from the forces of greed and terror prevalent in the political sphere was a notion Coleridge had first begun to develop in the 1794 play he jointly authored with Robert Southey. In her treatment of the play,

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Alison Hickey stresses the ambivalent nature of authority in any collaborative effort. Although the joint production of texts implies a joint authority, whose authority is it? Is it fragmented, collective, or something of both? Hickey explores the Coleridge/Southey interaction in the revision and publication process of Robespierre and finds it part of a larger social dynamic Coleridge attempts to establish between himself and any collaborator (literary or conversational), a dynamic in which agency and responsibility are suspended. Typical of such relationships, she suggests, is Coleridge’s interaction with another acquaintance of the time, John Thelwall: [Coleridge] imagines Thelwall’s mind as a surface on which his ideas may be directly “imaged,” virtually bypassing the difficult incarnation into language that communication with another ordinarily entails …. The virtue of such a silent collaborator is that he stimulates imagination without committing the thinker irrevocably to authorship of a permanent, externalized text. (1998, p. 321)

Without a physical existence in the public sphere, Coleridge’s name (Hickey argues) will not have attach to it “accidental conjunctures of social forces” (often perceived as “great bad acts”) beyond Coleridge’s control (p. 315). By refusing the role of author, Coleridge maintains the propriety and property of his own identity, isolated from social forces that seek to misappropriate it. Although biographical information surrounding the genesis of the text creates a mosaic of Coleridge’s anxiety regarding misappropriation of personal identity, the dynamics of authorship thematized within The Fall of Robespierre also suggest the political implications of suspended authority. In the play, Coleridge posits for the first time that certain types of relationships can exist in an apolitical space, in a space severed and immune from the influence of terror and greed that are so often the instruments of coercion in the political realm. Associating this isolated, personal space with the sacred and juxtaposing it to the idolatry of the public sphere, Coleridge seems to lay the groundwork for the dichotomy he would later exploit in his analysis of the Hebraic Constitution, positing in the suspension of earthly authority a dispensation from political influence. This space he calls in The Fall of Robespierre “domestic peace,” but it may just as appositely be called “lyric.” Central to The Fall of Robespierre is the contrast between two social circles with diametrically opposed notions of the sources of authority. In

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Robespierre’s circle, all authority arises from the terror he wields over those around him. As he states in the middle of the act: Say, what shall counteract the selfish plottings Of wretches, cold of heart, nor awed by fears Of him, whose power directs the eternal justice? Terror? or secret sapping gold? The first Heavy, but transient as the ills that cause it; And to the virtuous patriot rendered light By the necessities that gave it birth: The other fouls the font of the Republic, Making it flow polluted to all ages; Innoculates the state with a slow venom, That once imbibed, must continue ever. Myself incorruptible, I ne’er could bribe them … (I.151–62)

Although “Terror” is in Robespierre’s opinion by far the more effective force to control those who fail to see God as the ultimate source of authority (the “wretches … nor awed by fears/ Of him whose power directs eternal justice”), it is logically analogous to bribery and influence, which he associates with the control mechanisms used by the contemptuously named “English patriots” (I.147). Through his “prodigality of eloquent anger” (I.182), his instrumentality of terror, Robespierre is able to dictate political reality; his skill at creating or authoring a denunciation places him as the sole source of political power and authority in the state (e.g., I.56–62). This ability is figured as the power of a keen eye that “flashes mighty meanings” (I.50) and which becomes the “inmate of [the] bosom” (I.10). Recalling the “frenzy” of Theseus’ poetic eye in a Midsummer Night’s Dream and a precursor to that of the ancient mariner and poet of “Kubla Khan,” Robespierre’s terror may literally make him an author writing the political present, an author moreover who even at times seems to take on aspects of a pagan deity or idol. Although Barrere’s description of Robespierre at the play’s opening perhaps only faintly evokes the splendor of the ancient deities as preserved in such places as Shakespeare’s comparison of Hotspur to Mars in the second part of Henry IV, Robespierre portrays himself in terms reminiscent of a pagan god later in the act. In response to his brother’s question as to what will remain if all his associates desert him, Robespierre replies:

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Myself! the steel-strong Rectitude of soul And Poverty sublime ‘mid circling virtues. The giant Victories, my counsels formed, Shall stalk around me with sun-glittering plumes, Bidding the darts of calumny fall pointless. (I.117–21)

His activities and those of his circle are even framed in quasi-religious terms—they will “purif[y]” (I.71) the state of faction and use “wholesome massacre” to cleanse the nation (I.109). The resonances are faint, but Coleridge already seems to be associating the political forces of terror and influence with a kind of idolatry in which the earthly individual replaces God as ultimate authority. As Couthon observes, Robespierre’s attitude of complete self-reliance and self-determination regarding the course of political action cuts him off from all other sources of authority, even “Conscience” (I.126–7). Like the Hebraic Constitution that flowed directly from God, Robespierre and his crew “justify” (II.53) the laws they promulgate without reference to any other source—as the unchallenged commander of his coterie, he is an idol interposing his authority between the subject and God. In a thematic move parallel to the role he often adopts in personal interaction, Coleridge attempts to create within the political maelstrom of his drama on French politics a safe haven isolated from the forces of idolatry and terror exercised in the public sphere. In the second of his Lectures on Revealed Religion, he would suggest that the Mosaic Dispensation created a constitutional space, mandating suspended authority or (in rare cases) equivocal and fragmented authority that was a supposed defense against such enticements as terror, influence and authoritarianism. In Robespierre, this space begins as the sympathetic intercommunication of a “cottaged vale” in which a similar law of suspended authority reigns supreme. Eschewing the ethic of terror, there are those at the edges and outside Robespierre’s coterie who embody a very different attitude regarding the sources of authority. Robespierre chastises his brother for feeling sympathy for those in other factions: in thine heart the woman form of pity Asserts too large a share, an ill-timed guest! (I.106–7)

Sympathy, itself suggestive of a connection that resonates between people rather than a hierarchical relationship, is something the tyrant Robespierre wishes to banish. Just as he frames the equality of debate as a

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meaningless political ploy (I.144–5), he sees sympathy not only as a flaw within his brother but as endemic of an “unsoundness in the state” (I.108). Sympathy and those who associate in coequal feeling are political subversives who embody a mode of social organization at odds with the idolatry of terror. Sympathy is also associated with characters in the Girondists faction opposed to Robespierre’s, where it is presented as a basis of social organization in opposition to terror. As Tallien asks Adelaide to voice her troubles, she responds that they are merely the reflection of his own. Without express communication, the pair is able to share sentiments and feelings: after all, the scene itself begins with Tallien returning home in accordance with Adelaide’s written wish that was never actually delivered. Here sympathy and an almost-wordless communication is seen to arise in a private, domestic space. In this location, no one mind dominates—contrasting thoughts are not cut off but balanced. As Adelaide raises objections to Tallien’s plan, he completes her ideas in a sympathetic round, harmonizing his thought and hers:     Adelaide. Yet—yet—be cautious! Much I fear the Commune— The tyrant’s creatures, and their fate with his Fast link’d in indissoluble union. The pale Convention—     Tallien.      Hate him as they fear him. Impatient of the chain, resolv’d and ready.     Adelaide. The enthusiast’s mob, confusion’s lawless sons—     Tallien. They are weary of his stern morality, The fair-masked offspring of ferocious pride. (I.243–50)

This mode of thought completion is a kind of joint authorship in which authority for any particular utterance submerges into an indeterminate source. What emerges is a co-created plan for political action that unfolds in the remaining two acts. Each asserts autonomy, but each also joins a collective that regulates the potential extremity of that autonomy. The generic form Coleridge chooses to embody this social dynamic is not a statute or textual form ever previously employed to do constitutional work: it is lyric. The “song” into which Adelaide breaks as Tallien enters

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their scene describes a place far removed from the internecine plottings of the French Convention, the place of “sceptered state” and “noisy hate” (I.218, 219). Adelaide’s world is a “cottag’d vale” (I.220) in which the dominant values are not influence and terror but love, sadness, memory, and joy. Like the space it describes, the song was regarded as severable from the dramatic and political context of its initial location; excerpted and published as “Effusion XXV” in the 1796 Poems on Various Subjects, Coleridge conceived of this lyric as a self-contained artifact that could both exist alone and interact with the public space of the drama. Here lyric becomes a metaphor for the relationship between the individual and the state and between the suspension of authority and the political forces it kept at bay. Robespierre’s idolatry of terror exists on the outside of this space, while the joint authority that describes the nature of decision-­ making inside this sphere ensures that idolatry will not rise up and invade the safe receptacle. Insofar as it is a place of “holy ground” (I.214) wherein one may hear “the Sabbath bells” (I.221), Coleridge even seems to anticipate the notion in his second lecture that a region of suspended earthly authority brings its inhabitants that much closer to an immediate relationship with the Divine, safeguarding the potential for prophetic expression in such a polity. Although Coleridge has little room to develop a contrast between this domestic space and the political realm, the suspension of temporal authority in domestic space is immediately and diametrically opposed to the violent action often undertaken in the political arena. As soon as Adelaide retires from the scene, Tallien sloughs off the ethic of joint authorship to demand that political action, responsibility and authority be asserted in the public sphere:     If the trembling members Even for a moment hold his [Robespierre’s] fate suspended, I swear by the holy poniard, that stabbed Caesar, This dagger probes his heart! (I.272–5)

As soon as Tallien leaves the isolated space of the “cottag’d vale,” he changes dramatically into an individual who will take the law into his own hands if the conglomerate judgment of the Convention does not produce the desired result. Back in the political sphere of terror and influence, Tallien becomes a Robespierre, seeing himself as the sole source of judgment and authority. Tallien’s transformation at Adelaide’s departure

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emphasizes the enormous political potential of “domestic peace”: if the nation can be brought within its ambit, idolatrous values will no longer rule uncontested and the potentially horrific consequences of completely unbridled autonomy may be muted. So it is that Adelaide, embodying the isolation of domestic peace in her lyric, becomes “the woman form of pity” that Robespierre fears—the ethic of sympathetic joint authorship describes a location that is indeed apolitical, but the very existence of which registers politically insofar as it contests the hegemony of terror, greed, and idolatry in public space. Here is Coleridge’s first model, therefore, of a rule of law supported by sympathy and joint authority that has the capacity to both express and contain imaginative autonomy. Reading the suspension of authority in Robespierre’s “domestic peace” as an early manifestation of the spirit of the Hebraic Constitution, a manifestation embodied in lyrical form, helps create a bridge between the Mosaic law and “Effusion XXXV.” “Terror” was Robespierre’s instrument of idolatry which he used to disrupt the immediate connection between the subject and God and institute his own chain of authority—one in which Robespierre was the sole source of power, political reality, and “mighty meanings.” A place of suspended authority, a place embodied in and by lyric, becomes in Robespierre an isolation mechanism performing a function similar to that of the Mosaic Dispensation: both circumscribe a space with private and public aspects against a surrounding environment of idolatrous political practice. Whether the forces against which these dispensations defend be named “idolatry,” “terror,” or “influence” makes little difference—all three Coleridge associates with a system of political coercion that existed in Biblical times, in modern French politics, and in contemporary England which led to injustice. Already associating the lyric with the apolitical, with a mode of interaction and authority at odds with that in the political sphere, seeing in it the potential to maintain a space isolated and protected from despotism and biased adjudication, Coleridge explores the dynamics of how this might work in the meta-lyrical “Effusion XXXV.” In both exhibiting and thematizing the creation and containment of lyric sentiment in the poem, Coleridge again displays authority in the prophetic lyric as equivocal and suspended, a suspension he accomplishes by borrowing techniques that he had observed in the Hardy trial that worked to disguise and submerge authority in order to avoid government interdiction. Although 1795 revealed continued attacks on the liberty Erskine had defended, “Effusion XXXV” contains both Coleridge’s hope

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and fear that justice, liberty, and the rule of law might find expression in poetic form.

“Effusion XXXV” and the Regulation of Autonomy Developed from a seventeen-line manuscript version describing the pastoral setting Coleridge and his fiancé encountered in Clevedon in August of 1795, the first published version of the poem (Poems on Various Subjects, 1796) is a fifty-six-line meditation on the nature of creativity in such a setting: My pensive Sara! thy soft cheek reclin’d Thus on mine arm, most soothing sweet it is To sit beside our cot, our cot o’er grown With white-flowered Jasmin, and the broad-leav’d Myrtle, (Meet emblems they of Innocence and Love!) And watch the clouds, that late were rich with light, Slow-sadd’ning round, and mark the star of eve Serenely brilliant (such should Wisdom be) Shine opposite! How exquisite the scents Snatch’d from yon bean-field! and the world so hush’d! The stilly murmur of the distant Sea Tells us of silence. And that simplest Lute, Plac’d length-ways in the clasping casement, hark! How by the desultory breeze caress’d, Like some coy Maid half yielding to her Lover, It pours such sweet upbraidings, as must needs Tempt to repeat the wrong! And now, its strings Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes Over delicious surges sink and rise, Such a soft floating witchery of sound As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy Land, Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers, Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise, Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untamed wing!

And thus, my Love! as on the midway slope Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon, Whilst thro’ my half-clos’d eyelids I behold

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The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main, And tranquil muse upon tranquility: Full many a thought uncall’d and undetain’d, And many idle flitting phantasies, Traverse my indolent and passive brain As wild and various as the random gales That swell and flutter on this subject Lute! And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely fram’d, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual Breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? But thy more serious eye a mild reproof Darts, O beloved Woman! nor such thoughts Dim and unhallowed dost thou not reject, And biddest me walk humbly with my God.

Meek Daughter in the family of Christ, Well hast thou said and holily disprais’d These shapings of the unregenerate mind, Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break On vain Philosophy’s aye-babbling spring. For never guiltless may I speak of him, Th’ INCOMPREHENSIBLE! save when with awe I praise him, and with Faith that inly feels; Who with his saving mercies healed me, A sinful and most miserable man Wilder’d and dark, and gave me to possess PEACE, and this COT, and THEE, heart-honor’d Maid!4

Except perhaps for a noted reference to celebrated Girondist supporter Madame Roland, there is little political about the poem. On its surface, it is a love poem developed into a meditation on the nature of poetic creativity. Yet publication of any kind in the 1790s had political potential. Decades after first conceiving “Effusion XXXV,” Coleridge reinvoked its central harp image in discussing the nature of poetic inspiration as typified in the bard, David: But let me once be persuaded that all these heart-awakening utterances of human hearts—of men of like faculties and passions with myself, mourning,

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rejoicing, suffering, triumphing—are but as a Divina Commedia of a super-­ human heart—Oh bear with me, if I say—Ventriloquist;—that the royal Harper, to whom I have so often submitted myself as a many-stringed instrument for his fire-tipt fingers to traverse, while every several nerve of emotion, passion, thought that thrids the flesh-and-blood of our common humanity, responded to the touch,—that this sweet Psalmist of Israel was himself as mere an instrument as his harp, an automaton poet, mourner, and supplicant;—all is gone,—all sympathy, at least, and all example. (Works p. 11: 1136, quoted in Shaffer 1975, pp. 77–8)

Through the assistance of the more mature reflections of the poet himself, “Effusion XXXV’s” depiction of submission to a many-stringed instrument, of poetry as prophetic ventriloquism, becomes an allusion to David, “the royal Harper.” In 1795, David was for Coleridge not merely the embodiment of the process of poetry itself, but also the judge and ruler of the Hebrew nation, the individual who, in the sources Coleridge used in writing his second lecture on Revealed Religion, called together the assembly of the people to exercise jointly the earthly discretion they maintained under the Hebraic Constitution (Works p. 1:129). As a Davidian figure within the poem, the speaker enacts the dynamic of seduction and legal reproof at the core of Coleridge’s characterization of Mosaic law. Lying alone and listless, open to “idle flitting phantasies” (40), the speaker is in a state of mind similar to that of the Jews in Coleridge’s characterization: “They were fond of novelty—and would therefore have applied their idleness to the pursuit of the alluring Ceremonies of Idle Worship” (p. 1:140). Idleness and the lure of sensual pleasures leads inevitably to idolatry: [they were a people of] earthy imagination and blindly addicted to idolatrous Rites from the splendid Ceremonies and sensual Pleasures which attended them” (Works p.  1:139). Seduced by the sensuality and idleness characteristic of the opening scene, the speaker launches into speculation at the center of the poem: And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps, Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of All? (44–8)

Whatever the content of this speculation, it is almost immediately cut off by the “mild reproof” (49) of conventional religious dogma. Sara’s “more

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serious” (49) eye indicates the “unhallowed” (51) nature of such ideas. Here is the assertion of monotheism at the core of the Mosaic Dispensation, reigning in what might have become an extended idolatrous transgression and reframing it as merely a metaphoric exploration of conventional sentiment. There is a point at which individual autonomy can go too far, into idolatry (and the surrender of autonomy) or into the innovation of the new French Republic and the terror that followed. Much like the vale that surrounds Wordsworth’s reaper, Coleridge posits a dogmatic limitation on natural inspiration, so that it might find a fitting and moderate expression as prophecy rather than idolatry or personal imagination bodied into revolution. Just as the Mosaic law existed to enable the “public … Acknowledg[ment]” of prophecy in Old Testament days, so the speaker’s religious expression in the central stanza becomes retrospectively characterized as prophecy by legal assertion (Works p. 1:139). Poetic publication becomes an expression and a reigning in of religious inspiration. Within any David lies the potential to extend inspiration into innovation, rebellion and despotism. The unquestioned rule of the law of God and nature, however, acts to contain such potential and frame sentiment within conventional terms. Potentially a Richard Brothers, the speaker is rehabilitated through Mosaic law into a true Davidian who resists the lure of sensuality, idleness, and personal inclination to utter a religious rather than an idolatrous expression. Thus, “Effusion XXXV” characterizes poetic creation as an act of inspiration that religious law contains and frames as ventriloquism. Silencing speculation and imagination before it gets out of hand and interpreting it within a history of religious convention makes prophecy a jointly authored product, the ultimate source of which cannot be located with certainty. This makes the poetic utterance both a safe haven from legal prosecution and a space in which to contain the possibility of individual autonomy, innovation, and revolution inherent in that haven. Coleridge himself emphasizes the equivocal genesis of this act of poetic creation even before the creation itself occurs. The speaker’s thoughts are “uncall’d” and uncontrolled (39). His brain is as passive and acted upon as the “subject Lute” itself. The speaker’s lack of authority and mastery over these sentiments is further emphasized by Sara’s appropriation of them in the remainder of the poem. Although as modern criticism has suggested, there is a virtually endless variety of interpretations of the speaker’s central speculation, Sara settles on one that makes it into an idolatrous utterance, an interpretation the speaker and nominal “author” of the speculation

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himself adopts in the final lines. On one level, this condemnation of the speaker’s idolatry is an allusion to the function of the Mosaic Dispensation, contemporaneously explored in the Lectures on Revealed Religion, to repel idolatry and superstition. However, on another level it is an invocation of the putative “quotation defense” to insulate the inherently radical content of prophetic expression. Prophecy that reveals the immediate relationship between subject and God effectively deposes the tyrant or king as intermediary in that relationship. As the trials of 1794 had proven, an attempt to depose a king was treason. Thus, to be utterable in the 1790s, prophecy had to be presented as ventriloquism, quotation, and joint authorship; this destabilization of authorial status Coleridge encodes within the poem itself. Here, authority, insofar as it creates a meaning that may be subject to interpretation and censure, whether the “mild reproof” of a beloved auditor or the stern condemnation of a verdict in court, is shattered to fragments. The self-construction of the speaker at the conclusion of the poem as the now-healed version of a previously “sinful and most miserable man” seems as much the creation of Sara as of the speaker himself; the poem enlists its reader as an accomplice in the undoing of its own conclusion and authority. How can the speaker be sinful when all he is guilty only of being acted on, first by the “uncalled” promptings of some unseen source and then by the interpretive force of his auditor? Where is the speaker’s responsibility in the process of poetic creation at issue in “Effusion XXXV”? Immunized within the “cottag’d vale” of Adelaide’s apolitical space, authority is bifurcated and the speaker of “Effusion XXXV” cannot be held responsible for anything. His work expresses an inspiration from elsewhere in words that only mean within the rubric of a reader’s interpretation. The autonomy of the individual to judge, read, and imagine is both displayed and limited. The speaker’s imaginings are tamed by a context that limits their radicalism and forestalls the revolution of sinful ideas. This containment of authorial autonomy is equally reflected by the poetic history into which the poem places itself. Often overlooked in the criticism of “Effusion XXXV” is that poem presents itself as a quotation, in this case of Thomson’s “An Ode on Aeolus’ Harp.”5 Like Thomson’s “Harp,” Coleridge’s “upbraid [ing]” (5) instrument produces notes that “thrill the lover’s heart” (6) and plays two distinct tones: those of a lighter “faerie” strain and those of a more politically oriented “graver tone” of the “sacred bard who sat alone/ In the drear waste, and wept his people’s woes” (9–12). This express allusion to Psalm 137, a lament by a Hebraic exile over the lost Jerusalem, places

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Thomson’s work, just as Coleridge’s allusion to Thomson places him, within a tradition of lyric poetry stretching back to the Bible.6 Just as the harp in Coleridge’s poem serves as an intellectual catalyst to the lyric-­ making of the speaker in the central stanza, so the poem, “Effusion XXXV,” arises as part of a tradition—Coleridge from Thomson, from the unnamed poet of the Psalms, and, ultimately, from God. There is no single poet who can be named “author” of the work and brought to trial. Moreover, as John Barrell and Harriet Guest point out in “Thomson in the 1790s,” borrowing from Thomson tended to have charged political implications until late in the decade (2000, p. 217). Not only was Thomson widely known as a republican poet, but the citation of Thomson himself echoed a much more specific and recent political controversy, the Thomas Hardy trial. Although sections from Thomson’s Liberty found their way into many radical publications in the 1790s, it was a specific passage from “The Prospect” portion of the poem that sparked a minor controversy between Scott and Erskine. In the course of reviewing the evidence against the accused, Scott read through many London Corresponding Society publications, including “An Address from the London Corresponding Society to the Inhabitants of Great Britain on the Subject of Parliamentary Reform.” In this reading, he excluded the epigram it borrowed from Thomson: Unblest by VIRTUE, Government a League Becomes, a circling Junto of the Great, To rob by Law: Religion mild, a Yoke To tame the stooping Soul, a Trick of State To mask their Rapine, and to share the Prey. What are without it Senates, save a Face Of Consultation deep and Reason free, While the determin’d Voice and Heart are sold? What boasted Freedom save a sounding Name? And what Election but a Market vile, Of Slaves self-barter’d?

However, Erskine demanded that the epigram be read to the jury and used it as an opportunity to extend his quotation defense. Thomson had written Liberty (Erskine argued) under the roof of a Prince of Wales. How could it be high treason merely to invoke and interpret the sentiments of the “Bard of Liberty” as Hardy had done (Barrell and Guest 2000,

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pp.  228–9)? Although Hardy was no poet, his political sentiments fell within a respected poetic tradition, within a “space” that should be immune from criminal prosecution. Thus, Coleridge’s quotation of Thomson not only undermines his own status as author of “Effusion XXXV,” placing him in the same role vis-à-vis this poetic creation as the speaker stands to the central “what if” of the poem, but specifically places Coleridge’s utilization of the quotation defense within contemporary radical discourse. By writing and echoing a lyrical expression, Coleridge eschews the more obvious colloquy of the political narrative, but nevertheless recalls it with the allusion to Thomson and the Greek liberty for which he stood—the Greek Harp central to both Coleridge’s “Effusion XXXV” and Thomson’s “Harp” recall Thomson’s paean to the Greek origins of English freedom in Liberty (2000, p. 221: Barrell notes that Thomson’s poetry was also seen as an antidote to “raging Burke”). Thus, the modern prophet may equally “we[ep] his people’s woes” in a lyric form immunized from government interdiction through the same destabilization of authority as found in the Hebraic Constitution, the Girondins “cottag’d vale,” or the trial of Thomas Hardy. Lyric then becomes a space in which to assert a political imagination that derives authority from a source beyond the earthly realm and beyond the reach of law, a source that the poet (and by extension the reader) gains immediate access to by becoming a prophet. The poet has the power to receive and disseminate signs to a wider population who, in their capacity to read and judge, also gain authority for further interpretation uninterrupted by temporal authorities. This is what Eyre and Scott feared: this is how national conventions rise and constitutions fall. To some extent, it was a fear shared by Blackstone and Coleridge, who both portrays and curtails such innovation in “Effusion XXXV.” As the French Terror and the rise of Napoleon would show, unchecked imagination can lead to perpetual revolution and tyranny, a tyranny Coleridge had foreseen in his Fall of Robespierre. The image he creates then to embody a space in which to both assert and contain the consequences of individual autonomy is the “cottag’d vale,” bounded by hill, steeple, and sea: the physical embodiment of Sara’s conventional admonition to contain the “idle flitting phantasies” of poet and reader alike. Here is the artistic analogue to the notion of precedent that Erskine invokes in the Hardy trial to curtail prosecutorial innovation: the response to power in the religious, legal, and poetic context is to create boundaries to reading manifested here in the land of England itself. While the wind may convey the spirit of nature or God to

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the individual, vesting him with an authority to imagine and express an autonomy of the will, that land will equally protect and constrain such imaginative expression. Like the rule of law itself, however, Coleridge’s free space is one of both protection and imprisonment—the imagination can only be allowed to go so far.

Poetic Transportation and the Lyric Subject That Coleridge utilizes landscape as metaphor for a new dispensation, a space isolated from the modern corruption of political and legal forces but which also constrains the revolutionary potential inherent in such a space, is perhaps unsurprising given the historical association of law and land traced in Blackstone all the way back to Magna Carta (Baker 2002, pp. 472–5; see also Zolo 2010, p. 17). Erskine’s poetic naturalization in Coleridge’s 1795 sonnet (e.g.) suggests that it is not merely the prophetic, authorial fragmentation of lyric that produces autonomy of the imagination but also the natural forms contained in that poetry which might encourage the sympathy and imagination necessary to intuit the law of God and nature. In the years following the Hardy trial, the French Terror and the Two Acts, Coleridge developed his various contributions to the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 (jointly authored with his close friend, William Wordsworth). Through these seemingly unrelated poems, we can trace an overarching concern with authoritarian power and, more especially, with punishment through imprisonment and transportation. Pretrial imprisonment had been inflicted on Hardy, after all, and was widely seen as contributing to the poverty, anxiety, and death of his wife (as Coleridge himself expressed in Works, p. 1:62). Of the four poems Coleridge contributed to the 1798 edition, two deal directly with the issue of legal force in a contemporary or historical context, while the most widely known, “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” is also deeply concerned with the possibilities of punishment and rehabilitation. In situating his poetry within the context of a contemporary debate on penal reform, Coleridge (I argue) not only attacks the moral destitution of the current English punishment regime but also offers a poetic alternative that reflected current legal practices: transportation. As the “merciful” alternative to the extremities of the “Bloody Code,” transportation offered a practical solution to criminality flowing from overpopulation and poverty but also a theoretical opportunity for rehabilitation through return to a rural, aboriginal and even primordial existence in a space far removed from corrupted English society

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and law. In playing with and examining such dynamics in his Lyrical Ballad’s poetry, Coleridge suggests how an enforcement of his Pantisocratic ideal through the act of reading might amount to a parallel “poetic transportation” which allows a reconstruction and rehabilitation of the self in a space isolated from legal prosecution. Of Coleridge’s nonfantastical Lyrical Ballads pieces, both “The Foster Mother’s Tale” and “The Dungeon” were originally conceived as part of his politically charged play, Osorio, completed in 1797 and excerpted in the Ballads. It is in the latter poem that Coleridge makes clear his position about the current nature of punishment in England in lamenting the fate of any imprisoned criminal: And this place our forefathers made for man! This is the process of our love and wisdom, To each poor brother who offends against us— Most innocent, perhaps—and what if guilty? Is this the only cure? Merciful God! Each pore and natural outlet shrivell’d up By ignorance and parching poverty, His energies rolled back upon his heart, And stagnate and corrupt; til changed to poison, They break out on him, like a loathsome plague-spot; …         So he lies Circled with evil, till his very soul Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deformed By sights of ever more deformity! (1–19)

Writing in such plain language about the corrupting influence of incarceration put Coleridge in the middle of a debate about penal reform that had been simmering since at least the 1750s. Although the many capital offences of the “Bloody Code” required that some alternative be found to execution, there was a gathering consensus at the time that transportation was a punishment too easily circumvented.7 With the loss of the American Colonies in 1776, the tide was very much against transportation, and so in 1779 Parliament promulgated an act to establish two national penitentiaries. Imprisonment was lauded not merely as a mechanism to protect the public but as a place for contemplation and reform: in the 1770s Jonas Hanway and John Howard evangelized on the benefits of solitary imprisonment on the soul (Alber 2007, p. 17). The approval of Jeremy Bentham’s

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panoptic prison system by Parliamentary decree in 1794 seemed to confirm that incarceration rather than transportation would be the government’s punishment of choice. Coleridge’s attack on imprisonment in “The Dungeon,” however, put him at the forefront of a countermovement against this supposedly salutary solution, a position that had certain radical resonances. As James Willis notes in “Punishment and the Cultural Limits to State Power in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain,” there was something about the visibility of imprisonment, its association with the Bastille and Newgate, and the practice of hard labor that disturbed many in the ideological climate of the 1790s. Many complained that imprisonment (especially when accompanied by hard labor) was a “violation of the natural rights of man” (in the words of Jeremy Bentham; Willis 2008, p.  417). Members of Parliament objected to prison labor because “slavery in any shape, or upon any pretense, was no less abhorrent to the spirit of the constitution than to the feelings of an Englishman (Willis 2008, p. 416).” As one writer for the London Magazine complained: What end can be attained, in the least degree, contributive to the welfare of the nation [by the Convict Act]? The sight of an Englishman, transformed into a galley slave, is humiliating. Without arrogating to myself the spirit of prophecy, I will venture to foretell, that such a sight will not be long endured. Englishmen, in their most degenerate condition, are designed for a better fate. (# 45 (July 1776): 369; cited at Willis 2008, p. 416)

After the 1794 suspension of Habeus Corpus and the arrest and trial for high treason of twelve leading members of London corresponding societies, penitentiaries became associated with political tyranny, the cruelties of solitary confinement coming under particular attack (Willis 2008, p. 417; see also Barrell 2000, pp.  182–251). The construction of the infamous Coldbath Fields prison was also completed in 1794, which housed sixteen members of the London Corresponding Society in 1798, who quickly complained to the home secretary and eventually the Foxite Whigs of cruel treatment. Infamous for its brutal discipline, prisoner treadmills, and “silent system,” Coldbath specifically and the penitentiary movement more generally came to embody for Sir Francis Burdett (Member for Boroughbridge) the attack of government tyranny on the “good old constitution of England” (Ignatieff 1978, p. 135; cited at Willis 2008, p. 418).

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Coleridge himself would mention Coldbath in his 1799 “The Devil’s Thoughts”: As he went through Coldbath Fields he saw A Solitary cell; And the Devil was pleased, for it gave him a hint For improving his prisons in Hell. (34–7)7

As Willis suggests, this ideological climate about the acceptable uses of state power pushed opinion back in favor of penal transportation over incarceration since the former “allowed the State to remain largely absent from the administration of punishment” (p. 412). Coleridge’s sentiments in “The Dungeon” participate in this larger debate: although the penitentiary was designed to reform through “penance,” contemplation, surveillance, and control, Coleridge saw prison advocates (such as Bentham) as “pamper’d mountebanks” (11) who placed individuals in a “friendless solitude” (13) that led more to corruption than cure. Coleridge concludes “The Dungeon” by contrasting this man-made “solution” to criminality with nature’s far more efficacious influence: With other ministrations thou, O nature! Healest thy wandering and distempered child: Thou pourest on him thy soft influences, Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets, Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters, Till he relent, and can no more endure To be a jarring and a dissonant thing, Amid this general dance and minstrelsy; But, bursting into tears, wins back his way; His angry spirit healed and harmonized By the benignant touch of love and beauty. (20–30)

That exposure to nature might cause an emotional response (“bursting into tears”) that implicates Coleridge in the discourse of sensibility that had been developing since at least the mid-eighteenth century, a discourse Coleridge had already associated with lyric expression in The Fall of Robespierre. Rising from John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Thomas Willis’ The Anatomy of the Brain and Nerves (1664) but most recently manifested in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), David Hartley’s Observations on Man (1749)

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and the aesthetic theories of Alexander Gerrard (An Essay on Taste, 1759), sensibility involved the performance of extreme emotion (usually weeping, but sometimes blushing and fainting or other manifestations of high emotional sensitivity) on observing the suffering of others, supposedly evidence of a “fine responsiveness that guaranteed rare emotional capacity” (Spacks 2001, p. 249). Exposing outwardly the signs of a sensitive and emotional interiority was thought to indicate an individual’s potential for moral contemplation and activity. Spread through the telling of stories in an almost inevitable and unavoidable infection of influence, depictions of sensibility supposedly led to “sympathy” in which (potentially very large) groups moved toward a harmonious emotional community supposedly more bent on moral action (Brewer 2009, pp.  21 and 29). Coleridge, however, modifies the usual sequence of events by having his convict brought into sensibility not by experiencing a story of suffering, but by experiencing nature, causing him (it seems) to both reflect on and be released from his own suffering. Probably at work here were conversations with Wordsworth, who, in his later “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (appended to the 1800 and 1802 editions of the poetic collection), justifies the rustic peasant as his choice of poetic subject because he felt that in country living and close contact with nature “the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity” (Wordsworth 2008, p. 1:144). Since, as he theorized, emotions and language are more simple in a natural state, “less under restraint,” and “incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature,” depictions of the rural poor in his poetry would counteract the corruption inherent in city life and put his readership back in touch with the “great and permanent objects” of their essential being (Wordsworth 2008, pp. 1:144 and 1:150). Nature cures not merely the cruelty of solitary confinement but the generalized corrupting influence of society itself. In awakening a sympathy that would excite a sense of natural morality, the poetic forms of nature just might undo the corruptions of modern society that Blackstone saw as barring us from Edenic law. Although later in his career Coleridge voiced some skepticism at the connection of sensitivity and philosophical erudition with the English peasant, his 1798 sentiments about prison reform fit well with such assertions, suggesting that exposure to nature not merely frees the prisoner from penitentiary horrors but also reconnects him with buried emotions, sensibility, and sympathy.8 The transported prisoner (or the reader under poetic transport) moves to a more perfect understanding of divine law, the rule of law, and his role within it.

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Indeed, Coleridge had just recently contemplated reforming himself through exposure to nature. In the summer of 1794, Coleridge hatched a plan with Robert Southey to travel to North America and establish a colony on the banks of the Susquehanna River, organized on communitarian principles (Eugenia 1930, p. 1072). “Pantisocracy,” as they proposed to call it, would ostensibly encourage the associated individuals into a life of virtue and productivity by recreating the original republic he describes in his 1795 lectures on Mosaic law, a system of communistic life which would constitute a “just” social order and a viable republican alternative to the degenerate, corrupt social organization found in contemporary Britain.9 Although they had abandoned the scheme by October of 1795, Coleridge’s scathing postmortem letter to Southey enacts the sensibility and sympathy both had hoped to find in the wilds of the new world (Myers 1997, pp.  75–9). Coleridge suggests here that the relationship that existed between the two former friends was at one point so instinctive that Southey’s mere presence would cause a mechanical action to vibrate along Coleridge’s nerves—on seeing Southey he would raise his arm (presumably to shake hands or wave) without conscious volition. Invoking a Hartleian associationist vocabulary, Coleridge presents the lost friendship and, by extension, the Pantisocratic community as the epitome of sentiment and sympathy, both of which Coleridge figuratively abandons as the letter goes on. This discourse of sensibility likely penetrated Coleridge through Jeans-Jacques Rousseau, Richard Steele, Adam Smith and the sentimental novel of the 1770s and ‘80s (Lloyd 2013, pp. 5–10; see also Orr 2013, pp. 25–42, and Fairchild 1928, p. 218). In combination with Wordsworth’s theories of nature and the natural man, Coleridge sees in nature an ethical influence that manifests itself through the markers of sensibility. In his emotional response to nature, the convict in “The Dungeon” signals he is capable of participating in an ethical, sympathetic community ruled by God’s natural law. If nature could exert such an influence on the individual and substitute as a remedy for moral change more potent than the prison system, what might a poetry of nature accomplish in reforming English society more broadly and returning the individual to a state of nature more readily capable of apprehending the divine law? If the literature of sensibility, even in an era when it was seen as somewhat passé, could still be regarded as possessing the potential to instigate a wide-ranging sympathetic reaction, and if natural forms and locations made the individual even more open to emotion and stripped away the distractions and negative influences of

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society, then a poetry of natural sensibility should have an enormous rhetorical capacity to change and reform public opinion: through the potentiality of mass print circulation, a revolution in taste and belief could begin (Brewer 2009, p. 43). This had already been seen in the case of Thomas Paine, whose enormous publication reach spawned a discourse of individual rights which pervaded discussions about the French Revolution and its implications for British political change. It is in another of his Lyrical Ballads poems, “The Foster Mother’s Tale,” that Coleridge explores the political possibilities for a poetry of natural sensibility, suggesting not merely that sensibility leads to some generalized sympathetic morality, but that it leads specifically to a state of aboriginal “liberty” associated with Britain’s “ancient constitution.” “The Foster Mother’s Tale” thematizes the action of poetic influence. Extracted from Osorio, a play depicting the persecution of Spanish Moors under Philip II, the fragment amounts to a story, a “perilous tale,” told by the eponymous character to her friend, Maria, about a child found years ago in the wilderness by her husband’s father, a servant of Lord Velez. This foundling first appears “wrapt in mosses, lined/With thistle-beards” (24–5), at the foot of a great tree that has since been cut down and incorporated as a “huge round beam” into the structure of the local chapel (21–2). Raised in the Lord’s household, the child is “pretty” but unteachable, ignoring orthodox church dogma but well capable of imitating birds, whistling “as he were a bird himself” (32) and planting wild flowers on tree stumps. Under the tutelage of the local friar, he eventually becomes very learned (presumably in unorthodox subjects) but he “read, and read, and read,/ ‘Till his brain turned” (42–3), a reference to the popular, anti-­ radical paranoia about education and philosophy that can be found in such widespread locations as Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray and the arguments of the Hardy Trial prosecutor. The consequence of such reading is that the boy begins to have “unlawful thoughts of many things” (44); yet nevertheless, his speech, “so soft and sweet” (47), keeps him in the good graces of Lord Velez, who joins him in radical talk. However, an earthquake convinces the superstitious noble that God is angry at their “deep discourse” (50), causing the lord to pass judgment on the boy and imprison him. It is not an imprisonment that lasts long. The same woodsman who originally found him is brought to tears on hearing the boy sing:      a doleful song about green fields, How sweet it were on lake or wild savannah,

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To hunt for food, and be a naked man, And wander up and down at liberty. (61–4)

Deeply moved, the Woodsman breaks open the prison by digging a secret exit, enabling the boy to escape and make his way to the new world where he:         seized a boat, And all alone, set sail by silent moonlight Up a great river, great as any sea, And ne’er was heard of more: but ‘tis supposed, He lived and died among the savage men. (77–81)

“The Foster Mother’s Tale” extends the implications of “The Dungeon” into a broader social context, depicting the naturalized individual as inherently radical and capable of exerting a revolutionary influence on both the social elite (almost) and the common folk through song and poetry that opens up the individual to an emotional state (he “Sobbed like a child—it almost broke his heart,” 58) in which he becomes the ally of freedom. The liberated child immediately participates in a physical and intellectual movement, a transportation to a world of “savage men,” who, stripped of both clothing and societal influence, live at “liberty.” Here can be found the ancient constitution Burdett felt the penitentiary system so gravely threatened, an inheritance perhaps lost in England but nevertheless recoverable on foreign shores, on which the aboriginal person supposedly lived closer to the primitive political condition Rousseau describes in his Social Contract and Blackstone (not to mention Wordsworth’s “Reaper”) seems to echo. Although the figure of the “noble savage” can be traced back at least to the Germania of Tacitus, Rousseau’s resurrection of him in the 1700s lent credence to claims late in that century that “the woodland Indians such as the Iroquois [were] contemporary equivalents of ancient Britons, Gauls, and Scots,” those who had lived according to the ancient constitution before its corruption (Bickham 2006, pp.  92–8). In 1780, Horace Walpole had remarked of the Gordon Riots: When prisons are levelled to the ground, when the bank is aimed at, and reformation is attempted by conflagrations, the savages of Canada are the only fit allies of Lord George Gordon and his crew.10

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Although Walpole hardly intended to be complimentary, he nevertheless associated new world people with a radicalism Coleridge would invoke in the Lyrical Ballads (see also Hussein 2011 and Wind 1998, pp. 39–55). The foundling boy seemingly flees to South (rather than North) America (the “great river” likely being the Amazon), but the association of the wild lands beyond the Atlantic with revolution and ancient liberty was there for Coleridge to employ. What emerges in Lyrical Ballads is a complex conflation of sentiment, sympathy, and radicalism rising through the influence of nature. The “new world” was a place of primitive purity, equality, and liberty, a place Coleridge could no longer reach physically, but which perhaps he could attain (and spread) through acts of poetry (see also Sheats 2002, pp. 14–31). Just as a woodsman is moved to reform and revolution through art, so might be Coleridge’s readership. One might conclude then that Coleridge, in his Lyrical Ballads meditations on punishment, portrays poetry as a forum for justice and reform that is superior to law, that seeks to break from the strictures of legal convention and legislated condemnation into the realm of mercy, a gospel to accompany the law of the “Bloody Code” triggering a penal or literary “transport” into a new, natural realm. To invoke Jon Klancher’s (1987) vocabulary, Coleridge is attempting to construct his reader through acts of poetry into an autonomous liberal figure who, nevertheless, regulates his actions through principles of sympathy and community. At least initially, penal transportation was also associated with reform. An examination of the rhetoric surrounding this practice and the pardon process that triggered it speaks to a similar belief in the power of an aboriginal existence to lead to enhanced sensibility and personal growth. Although authorities in no way expected transportation to encourage radicalism (as Willis implies, they hoped it would reduce radicalism at home by making government force less visible), the new world was seen as a place to strip away societal corruption and reestablish a primitive purity of the self that would redeem the convict.11 Available since the time of James II with some periodic interruption, transportation depended on a pardon process in which any individual convicted of a capital offence might seek mercy from the monarch based on a judicial assessment and recommendation and the commutation of the death sentence into mere exile or transportation for a certain designated period (Baker 2002, pp. 515–17). With the founding of New South Wales in 1788 and the increasing association of the penitentiary system with government tyranny, transportation became not only once again possible, but even attractive in the 1790s. Not

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only would the invisibility of this punishment help maintain at least the illusion of “liberty” on British soil, but also, as with the movement of Coleridge’s poetry, transportation became associated with a freedom and possibility for reform that prison seemingly lacked. Such possibilities were symbolized in the First Great Seal of New South Wales, described in a Royal Warrant as: Convicts landed at Botany Bay; their fetters taken off and received by Industry, sitting on a bale of goods with her attributes, the distaff, bee-hive, pick axe, and spade, pointing to an oxen ploughing, the rising habitations, and a church on a hill at a distance, with a fort for their defence. Motto: Sic fortis etruria crevit [So, I think, this is how brave Etruria grew]; with this inscription round the circumference, Sigillum Nov. Camb. Aust. (Quoted at Devereaux 1996, p. 60)

Although this scene should not be confused with the kind of republican radicalism and religious unorthodoxy Coleridge’s foundling boy seems to embody, it does suggest that a king’s mercy could displace the harsh reality of English life and English law by commanding a physical and spiritual movement to a location where meaningful reform could occur: it was in a new land that life could begin anew. This scene of perfectibility was echoed in the sentiments of the home secretary Lord Liverpool when he suggested that transportation to the new world offered “the only chance … of [convicts] becoming good Settlers or good men.” In contrast, the soil of England remained barren—Liverpool was equally certain that, on their return home, many would quickly lapse into old bad habits (Devereaux 1996, p.  61). Simon Devereaux argues that “the appearance of some reformative influence in transportation was crucial to its perceived legitimacy” (p. 61). However, James Mackintosh voiced the common suspicion that, while “the experiment of a reforming penal colony [was] perhaps the grandest ever tried in morals, it was also one that was ‘perfectly safe’ from critical scrutiny given its distance” (Devereaux 1996, p. 61). Invoking the rhetoric of this practice in his poetry, Coleridge again sought to reconnect the individual with a mental state of nature. Perhaps poetry could revive justice and defend the rule of law against the attacks levied throughout the 1790s. A rule of law that flowed from such connected, contextualized, and restrained imagination and rebellion would both preserve the “true justice” contemporary legal institutions had forgotten and also restrain

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through the influence of nature and sympathy the Jacobinical radicalism inherent in revolutionary sentiment and action.

The Limitations of Lyric Space Although Coleridge may have displayed optimism in Lyrical Ballads about the reformative potential of poetry, it was not unalloyed with doubt. Bracketing his Lyrical Ballads efforts were two poems that reveal uncertainty even at this early stage in his career, “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement” and “Fears in Solitude.” In these, Coleridge holds out the optimistic hope that the influence of the “cottag’d vale” and the sovereignty he personally feels so keenly expressed in that locale can extend into the public sphere through the publication of a new genre of verse. However, although this new poetry contains the possibility to rebuild the social structure into one that recognizes the individual’s immediate connection with God as sole sovereign, the instability encoded within the new genre itself as well as subsequent factual events prove Coleridge’s hope for a return to justice and the rule of law may be a forlorn one. Although the exact time of its composition is disputed, “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement” has been long known as a “companion piece” to “Effusion XXXV,” picking up much of the imagery of that former work, being published after it in all editions of Coleridge’s poems after 1797 and set in the same specific location of the Clevedon cottage the Coleridges left in the Spring of 1796 (Everest 1979, pp.  222–31). Having just discussed the effects of isolation and regulation on the lyric activity of prophecy in the former work, Coleridge moves on in “Reflections” to explore the extent to which the private activity of revelation may cross into the public realm of politics and motivate social reform. The speaker’s stated occasion for writing “Reflections” is a need to explore the conflict between the impulse within himself to remain isolated from the realm of political action and the sense of duty he feels to be involved in the “bloodless fight” for social change. Standing in the present position of already having made the choice to leave the place of retirement, he looks back on his idyllic past in the process of answering a self-posed question:         Was it right While my unnumber’d brethren toil’d and bled That I should dream away the entrusted hours

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On rose-leaf beds, pampering the coward heart With feelings all too delicate for use? (45–8)

Of course, the very manner in which the speaker slants the question suggests he seeks self-justification for an action already taken—he has, after all, left the place of retirement. However, the incident he recalls experiencing while in retirement itself undermines the assertion that his former feelings were “all too delicate for use.” The change that overcomes the “wealthy son of commerce” when he enters the speaker’s secluded vale suggests that the feelings invoked by retirement are in fact quite useful. They quench the thirst for “idle gold”; they completely alter the man’s system of values. Although a later addition, the pun on “idle” may contain the intentional suggestion that people outside the speaker’s world worship wealth over God.12 From an ethic of worshipping the golden calf, even a brief trip to the speaker’s retreat encourages the visitor to worship God again as his sovereign: through a reconnection with a natural landscape he again asserts an immediate relationship with the giver of all law and then blesses the vale. In short, retirement to the cottag’d vale that lyric embodies has the potential to instigate a sea change in the individual back into the position of prophet and visionary, with no law to obey but that of God as interpreted through the otherwise autonomous imagination. Far from being an ineffectual gesture, the blessing itself has an illocutionary effect— “And we were blessed” (18). It bridges the gap between personal revelation and effect in the social sphere. The speaker quickly relates this experience to his analogous reaction to the scene years before, further suggesting the potential of seclusion (physical or poetical) to influence all who contact it and to reorganize the social fabric more broadly. The visitor’s blessing leads the speaker into the earlier memory of the “Blest hour” when he first overlooked the vale and saw there an image of the whole world as a temple of God:         when first From that low Dell, steep up the stony Mount I climb’d with perilous toil and reach’d the top, Oh! What a goodly scene! Here the bleak mount … The Channel there, the Islands and white sails, Dim coasts, and cloud-like hills, and shoreless Ocean— It seem’d like Omnipresence! God methought, Had built him there a Temple …. (26–39)

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The speaker has now returned to a time when he, like the “son of commerce” first experienced the feelings inspired by the secluded place. Like the other visitor, he blesses the valley and this action is seen as instigating the apocalypse prayed for at the poem’s conclusion. Although Coleridge used “temple,” a structure that can be read as the public manifestation of a private sentiment, in many senses, in 1795, the use of it here in the context of an apocalypse may refer to the temple of Jerusalem, reconstructed in the second coming. The speaker’s first encounter with the broad prospect of the vale inspires in him a reconnection with God that amounts to a personal apocalypse, a revelation as to the essential nature of the world, the landscape and the society in which he lives, which, by implication, has the potential to become a universal apocalypse and a complete alteration of the political and social landscape if only more people might encounter the salutary effects of natural seclusion in poetry and in fact. Thus, in spite of the speaker’s suggestion that the feelings inspired by retirement have no use, the poem itself dramatizes the use to which these feelings and memories may be put. The speaker acts out the recollection of retirement, evidences its effects on himself in the concluding prayer for an apocalypse to rebuild the temple of Jerusalem, and packages it in published poetry intended to convey a similar effect on its readership, many of whom may be “wealthy sons of commerce” ripe for conversion back into individuals who bless the landscape and collectively rebuild English society into one existing immediately under God’s law of nature. Thus, “Reflections” suggests that the divide between private revelation and the instigation of broader social change is seamless, if sometimes fraught with anxiety. The speaker’s own suspicion that mere lyrical feelings inspired by natural seclusion are useless is belied by the public effort he makes to use those feelings to exhort social change. Although he nods to the general perception that lyricism is ineffectual, he nevertheless uses it in the process of publication. Just as the speaker, Tallien-like, must leave the secluded vale of “Domestic Peace” to pursue activities and ends in the political realm, but keeps the memory of the valley in him as a place of refuge and an ethical guide, so the poetic text itself is an entity that can circulate through the political and social sphere bringing its radical alteration in social perspective to all who might read it. Writing within a prophetic tradition, Coleridge invokes a religious apocalypse in the hope of instigating one that would also register in the political and legal realm. He will do so by influencing one individual at a time. Focusing not on speeches to large crowds in open fields, he will

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write poetry, speaking to individuals in polite conversation that will mirror the enclosed space of his lectures and the salutary, calming and containing effect of the cottag’d vale. It is as though he expresses in both the content and forum of his work a naturalized liberty that many saw as absorbed by the Englishman through the very air and landscape of his nation, the “Law of the Land” that was the common law itself (Zolo 2010, pp. 9 and 60 n.29). Coleridge’s depiction of the radicalizing effects of the landscape, how it strips away the chains of tyranny, dominant ideology, and the occluding effects of civilization, is a metaphorical embodiment of this belief. Yet, in the late 1790s, lyrical poetry was not changing the world. Soon after publication of The Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge returns in “Fears in Solitude” to a contemplation of the physical location in which he produced poetry, now Nether Stowey, to extend and undermine his metaphorical discussion of the potential of lyric space and subjectivity to infiltrate back into the public realm. In this poem, Coleridge invokes a similar dynamic, theme, and imagery to explore the dichotomy between private expression and public action; however, unlike his previous work, this poem takes on an almost hysterical edge as its speaker rails against corrupt social institutions in the starkest of terms and more sternly calls for an apocalypse: The poor wretch, who has learnt his only prayers From curses, who knows scarcely words enough To ask a blessing from his Heavenly Father, Becomes a fluent phraseman, absolute And technical in victories and defeats, And all our dainty terms for fratricide; Terms which we trundle smoothy o’er our tongues Like mere abstractions, empty sounds to which We join no feeling and attach no form! As if the soldier died without a wound; As if the fibres of this godlike frame Were gored without a pang; as if the wretch, Who fell in battle, doing bloody deeds, Passed off to Heaven, translated and not killed; As though he had no wife to pine for him, No God to judge him! Therefore, evil days Are coming on us, O my countrymen! And what if all-avenging Providence,

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Strong and retributive, should make us know The meaning of our words, force us to feel The desolation and the agony Of our fierce doings? (108–28)

Specifically, he calls for an apocalypse in which the gap between signifier and signified is collapsed so that all language, whether that of a newspaper article or poem, may become actualized, providing the ultimate bridge between the textual depiction of a place of retirement and the public space in which the speaker wills its lyrical ethic be manifested. In this case, echoing Blackstone’s sentiments that the very air and land of England enables the reason of its people to apprehend divine law, all citizens become prophets, in a position to know directly God’s will, but with little or no capacity to innovate and imagine something other than that described by “God’s eternal language” manifested in the lineaments of nature. Poised for a third time overlooking the prospect of a secluded natural scene, a home from which the speaker produces his public works, the speaker of “Fears” again performs the feelings and thoughts that such a scene incites. Like the “humble man” whose love of God was rekindled by “sweet influences [that] trembled o’er his frame” (21), the poet expresses his lyric song as would an Aeolian harp, channeling divine impulses from his surroundings that ultimately find expression as political commentary. Society in its current state, he argues, is ungodly, tyrannous (43), and greedy (54ff). In particular, it is full of individuals who swear oaths to temporal authorities, not God (72). It is a world of superstition (71) and idolatry (172). In short, it is a world that echoes the corrupt Jewish state, enslaved by the Egyptians. Coleridge’s specific reference to “Cairo’s swamps of pestilence” (48) frames the British commonwealth as a nation of slaves promulgating vice and corruption in an expansionist and aggressive conflict. This corruption has, the speaker argues, particularly manifested itself in a tendency to drain meaning from words, especially printed ones. People read about war as about a sport—it is pure entertainment and language such as the “dainty terms for fratricide” (113) gets in the way of a more immediate comprehension of the actuality to which those words refer. People idolize the signifier rather than the signified—they worship textual idols and reveal an incapacity to sympathize or exercise their gift of autonomous imagination and self-willed judgment. In dealing with the problem of how to reverse this trend of superstition and idolatry, the speaker hopes for a revelation in which sign and signified are reunited,

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in which “Providence … should make us know/ The meaning of our words” and, in reattaching the real forms to symbols, enable a reassociation of feeling with sign (116) and return power to poetic utterance. This apocalypse of textuality is necessary for the translation of lyric sentiment into political reality. If isolated Britons feel nothing of what they read due to their isolation from continental events, it is necessary to reassociate signs with their objects before they can feel again and read the signs correctly. Occurring in a natural landscape, this reawakening of sensibility will guide them to moral feelings and moral action and reveal to them God’s law. Placing himself as an exemplar of the rehabilitative process, the speaker claims that from his close association with the forms of his nation, of this very space of isolation, it is possible for him to feel and know and not abstract: But, O dear Britain! O my Mother Isle! Needs must thou prove a name most dear and holy To me, a son, a brother, and a friend, A husband, and a father! who revere All bonds of natural love, and find them all Within the limits of thy rocky shores. O native Britain! O my Mother Isle! How shouldst thou prove aught else but dear and holy To me, who from thy lakes and mountain-hills, Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks and seas, Have drunk in all my intellectual life, All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts, All adoration of the God in nature, All lovely and all honourable things, Whatever makes this mortal spirit feel The joy and greatness of its future being? There lives nor form nor feeling in my soul Unborrowed from my country! O divine And beauteous island! thou hast been my sole And most magnificent temple, in which I walk with awe, and sing my stately songs, Loving the God that made me! (176–97)

He sings his “stately songs,” poems of hopeful political effect, as an example to those who “dote with mad idolatry” (172), but in so doing identifies the paradox of his reform project, the failure of which he implies

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is the consequence of the very idolatry he tries to vanquish. He is caught in a bind from which he cannot escape—as a writer he tries to use words and the images of lyric isolation to instigate a reconnection with nature and the one Sovereign, but the very corruption he tries to combat and reverse disables his audience from feeling through the medium of language he employs. He might be a good reader, but most of his readers are not. Although the speaker can claim that he sees England as a “magnificent temple,” as the post-apocalyptic paradise of a revived social order of autonomous thinkers and judges glimpsed in this and other poems, it is a private paradise from which he “sing[s] [his] stately songs/ Loving the God that made [him]” (196–7); it may be that no one outside this realm can or ever will hear the force of change expressed in this lyrical voice. This is the ultimate “fear” of the radical lyricist, one he prays is chimerical (“May my fears,/My filial fears be vain”: 197–8), finally retreating back into what now appears to be pure wishful reverie, an image of society as an outgrowth of natural processes and organizations that now seem impossible to reclaim. The realization of this fear is not merely thematized here, but also reflected in the generic instability of Coleridge’s two comments on the problematics of political lyric. Structurally, both “Reflections” and “Fears” suggest that political exhortation can be made from within lyrical space— the bracketing of lyric description and feeling tries to move seamlessly into a related political voice and back out again. The movement of each poem “making a rondo on itself,” although not unique to these works, suggests that from within an isolated lyrical “cottag’d vale” may arise an impulse to reorganize the basis of social interaction and perception back to an original, Edenic form. To embody this movement between separate realms, Coleridge actually attempted to invent a new genre of poetry, intermediate between the conversational lyricism he was developing and the more sermonistic, polemical, and political poetry he had attempted in “Religious Musings” and “Destiny of Nations.” This genre was the “sermoni propriora,” an appellation he only associated with “Reflections” and “Fears.” In Daniel E. White’s exploration of the linguistic and social roots of this subtitle to “Reflections on Having left a Place of Retirement,” he notes that, in the 1797 Poems, Coleridge complicated his already-uncertain generic definition of the poem by altering its original, hesitant title, “Reflections on entering into active life. A Poem which affects not to be Poetry,” into its better-known variant while adding the generic indicator, “Sermoni Propriora” (2001, pp. 175–98). As Kelvin Everest records, an

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undated autograph manuscript of “Fears” also bears the following annotation: N.B. The above is perhaps not Poetry—but rather a sort of middle thing between Poetry and Oratory—sermoni propriora.—Some parts are, I am conscious, too tame even for animated prose. (1979, p. 270)

Everest suggests Coleridge likely borrowed the subtitle from John Foster, who claimed the designation appropriate for all “unpoetical subjects, in very unpoetic expression, with loose metre” (p. 305, n. 35). Keach translates this as “more akin to prose” (quoted in White 2001, p. 189). White sees Coleridge’s corruption of the technically correct “propiora” into “propriora” as an allusion to his own negative assessment of Bowles’ 1802 poems as overly sermonistic. White finds in the term’s etymological roots evidence for the ideological genesis of “conversation poetry” in a conflict between separate traditions of religious Dissent. However, the most significant aspect of Coleridge’s usage for my purposes is not the term’s philosophical or etymological sources but rather Coleridge’s suggestion that the two poems he so labeled are an attempt to cross poetry and oratory— they are express attempts to influence through poetic language and explore the dynamics and problematics of that attempt. Coleridge thus sees it as necessary to create a new formal vehicle to instigate the type of relationship he wishes to establish between poet and audience. In a move that echoes the regulative nature of the Mosaic Dispensation itself and the perceived need for sanctioned and traditional forms of organization to prevent the deterioration of unregulated groups into violent, treasonous mobs, Coleridge here promulgates a lyric form to stabilize and control the nature of political reform through poetic dissemination. A regulative necessity posited in “Effusion XXXV,” Coleridge’s sermoni propriorae are an attempt to establish a new genre to combine aspects of already-­ established literary forms such as conventional lyric and religious sermon, a genre that speaks from within the private sphere of revelation to the public realm. But stylistically and generically speaking, the poems are failures. The reaction of modern critics (e.g., Everest), that both poems to a greater or lesser extent do not harmonize the competing voices of this hybrid genre, is direct evidence of Coleridge’s failure to launch a new genre of political lyric with success.13 The poems may be designed to contain cross-generic elements designed to bridge the gap between private, isolated, lyrical space

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and the public realm to which they are addressed, but their instabilities in tone suggest that, as formal vehicles, they are still perceived as somewhat inappropriate, as doing something that should not be done. The private, reflective moments and the beauty of the descriptive passages create a jarring contrast with the material more at home in “Destiny of Nations,” Joan of Arc, or “Religious Musings.” This sense of unease that registers in the modern consciousness is the direct consequence of the fact that Coleridge failed to make lyrical sentiment a convincing and effective vehicle for radical politics. Yet, in spite of these reservations, his attempts are significant and amount to a nascent theory of political radicalism through a poetry that seeks to rival and even displace the derelict institutions of law. If government tyranny was indeed undermining the independence of the courts, disrupting parliamentary sovereignty through rotten boroughs, place men and influence, if Chancery was merely a set of procedures without justice and habeus corpus suspended to enable the arbitrary imprisonment of any who thought in ways threatening to government power, then the rule of law was under dire assault. If Blackstone was right, agreeing with Rousseau that modern society exiled us from the clarity of vision and purpose that could only be found in an Edenic and aboriginal existence, then a poetry of nature that awoke in its readership the fountains of “true” feeling that would guide to moral action could instigate a political, spiritual, moral, and legal apocalypse: the cottag’d vale would both inspire and contain the radical autonomy of the individual and channel it into “bloodless” reform and renewal—if only Coleridge could find or construct an audience that could read aright. The inherently radical individual, with an immediate prophetic relationship to God and his law, would be in a position to interpret that law as he saw fit but would also be circumscribed by the landscape, hills and ocean—physical barriers to embody the boundaries sustained by sympathy, history, and reason. These same boundaries of convention and precedent surrounded the interpretation of common law, amounting to a restrained liberty of the individual to determine the direction of his own sovereignty (exercised through acts of reading law or poetry) bound within the tradition of the ancient English constitution that would ensure he did not abandon the true principles of liberty.

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(Un)Restrained Liberty This paradoxical dichotomy of a restrained liberty Coleridge dramatizes in one of his latest poems of the 1790s, “This Lime Tree Bower, My Prison,” first drafted in 1797 and later published in Robert Southey’s The Annual Anthology under the name “ESTEESI,” a pseudonym Coleridge later associated with adherence to the cause of liberty: [it] signifies—He hath stood—which in these times of apostasy from the principles of Freedom, or of Religion in this country, & from both by the same persons in France, is no unmeaning Signature, is subscribed with humility, & in the remembrance of, Let him that stands take heed lest he fall—. However, it is in truth no more than S.T.C. written in Greek. Es tee see. (Coleridge 1956, 2:867)

The poem’s setting is announced in a prose advertisement appended to the verse, in which the author explains that in June of 1797 some long-­ expected friends came to visit, but the poet was unable to accompany them on a tour of the area around his cottage because of an “accident which disabled him from walking during the whole time of their visit.” The poem describes the speaker’s sufferings as he waits within a “Garden Bower” and contemplates the experiences his absent friends have during their travels. They begin with an encounter almost reminiscent of imprisonment, winding down to a “still roaring dell, o’erwooded, narrow, deep,/ And only speckled by the mid-day sun” (10–11) to view a corpse-­ like “branchless Ash/ Unsunn’d and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves/ Ne’er tremble in the gale” (13–15). However, soon (as the speaker imagines) his friends emerge from this dark place and stand: Beneath the wide wide Heaven, and view again The many-steepled track magnificent Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea With some fair bark perhaps which lightly touches The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two isles Of purple shadow. (21–6)

The contrast between the two locations is supposedly most operative on one friend in particular:

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    Yes! they wander on In gladness all: but thou, methinks, most glad My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou had’st pin’d And hunger’d after nature many a year In the great city pent, winning thy way With sad yet patient soul, thro’ evil and pain And strange calamity! (26–32)

Movement from the dismal prison of the city and contemporary life, embodied in the valley of the Ash, into open and sunlit natural spaces, is supposed to work a balm upon those weighed down by the evil and pain of civilization, a balm associated with the cause of liberty: “So my Friend/ Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,/ Silent with swimming sense” (37–9). The echo here of Coleridge’s signature both emphasizes and disguises the radical resonances of his verse. Yet it is not merely the presence of nature that creates such effects, but the poetry of nature and the act of composing and reading it. Immediately after his first prayer to Charles (at 28), the speaker engages quite self-­ consciously in the craft of poetic artistry, calling on nature to obey his commands and present a near-perfect tableaux for the edification and joy of his absent companions:     Ah! slowly sink Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun! Shine in the slant-beams of the sinking orb, Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds! Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves! And kindle, thou blue ocean! (32–7)

This, of course, is what the speaker/poet has been doing all along, writing a poem in which he creates such natural images for his readers in a process which equally dramatizes his own imaginative journey along with his friends. As both author and reader of his own creation, he, like Charles, is freed: “A delight/ Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad/ As I myself were there!” (44–5). Although the speaker has not moved from his own prison, his heart is lightened, and he now comes to the revelation not only that “Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure” (61) but also that nature and the poetry of nature help forge and sustain bonds of pantisocratic sympathy and love between individuals. The poem’s last image is of a rook, which the speaker imagines connects him with Charles as it crosses

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the setting sun or flies “creeking” (74) over his head. This faintly ridiculous creature could even be Coleridge himself, at last freed from the bonds of injury and depression that pained him much of his life. As in “The Dungeon” and especially “The Foster Mother’s Tale,” poetry here is presented as a place of natural revelation in which the individual, twisted by imprisonment within civilization, can move to a world of spiritual and political liberty. Yet it is a place equally circumscribed by the chafing constraints of artificial convention. Charles Lamb (the friend addressed as “Charles” in the poem) wrote on August 6, 1800: For God’s sake (I never was more serious), don’t make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verses. It did well enough five years ago when I came to see you, and was moral coxcomb enough at the time you wrote the lines, to feed upon such epithets; but, besides that, the meaning of gentle is equivocal at best, and almost always means poor-spirited, the very quality of gentleness is abhorrent to such vile trumpetings. My sentiment is long since vanished. (Lamb and Lamb 1975, pp. 1:217–18; emphasis in original)

Although the apparent arc of the narrative describes a release from prison into the liberty of a natural world and life, it is at best temporary in Charles’ case. Only the fictional Charles moves along this path: redemption through sensibility in a natural landscape is no more real in rural England than it was in the penal colonies of New South Wales, pilloried in Capt. Alexander Maconochie’s Report on the State of Prison Discipline in Van Diemen’s Land (1845) as producing an “indefinite amount of suffering” in penal inhabitants under a regime in which the arbitrary power of supervisors led to the “systematic encouragement of evil” that was too much like slavery (p. 32). Lamb seems particularly upset about being written in to a subjectivity circumscribed by the conventions of sensibility: “In the next edition of the Anthology … please to blot out gentle hearted, and substitute drunken dog, ragged-head, seld-shaven, odd-ey’d, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the Gentleman in question” (Lamb and Lamb 1975, p. 1:224). Looking back over the space of a few years, the shoe no longer seems to fit; he feels trapped and misrepresented. Yet the artificiality of the subjectivity constructed within the lyric is as present in 1797 and 1800. Written within the discourse of sensibility, the shift in the speaker’s account of himself from depressed inmate to

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interconnected citizen of nature is just as much an artificial fabrication, implying the incapacity of a rhetoric of natural sensibility to affect the desired change. If one does not choose to operate within the expectations of generic convention, one does not have to, always leaving open the possibility in poetry or law for readings that refuse the constraints of history and convention. The composition of “Lime Tree Bower” and the aftermath of Lamb’s reaction showcase the simple but important point that it’s impossible to constrain acts of reading through conventional means. Once the lyric subject is placed in a space of imaginative freedom safe from legal censure, the physical, ideological, or intellectual boundaries of that space may be transgressed at will. One of the central points of “Lime Tree” may be that the bower is no prison for the imagination; it is equally that the imagination will brook no prison. Coleridge as author goes to great pains to shape the reading of signs in his poem, but Charles defies him nevertheless. This anxiety over interpretive discretion, inherent in legal theory and institutional practice for over 1000 years (from the Medieval ordeal to the Hardy Trial), necessarily finds embodiment in verses vitally concerned with the potential of poetic legislation. Literary transportation from a “prison” bower may expand the possibilities of the autonomous legal subject, but that expansion becomes impossible to check. In manifesting this anxiety, Coleridge plays out in the literary sphere a debate that was equally important in the legal arena, concerning the rise of precedent. Although it was likely the Hardy trial which brought this debate to Coleridge’s attention, the issues in that trial were expressive of a larger concern about the nature of legal precedent and the regulation of reading in the legal realm. Dependence on precedent had been a feature of English common law courts from at least the 1100s, but the notion of strict legal precedent, that like cases should be decided alike and records of cases should be kept as binding statements of legal principle to realize this ideal developed very slowly, in pace with the ability to make such records (Baker 1989, pp. 15, 37, 39; see also Williams 2012, pp. 52–3, and Bricker 2019, pp. 323–4). Moves toward this ideal were made even in the Tudor period, but a truly systematic recording of cases to enable a robust application of case law was only starting in the 1780s, likely due to the development of modern shorthand techniques (Baker 2002, p. 196; see also Holdsworth 1956–1982, p.  6:573). Unlike today, where the enormous volume of recorded judgments has fostered a legal culture in which the prior decision is almost always considered more authoritative than the writings of legal scholars, the patchwork of often unreliable case reports in the 1790s

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required a greater reliance on scholarly texts. As J.H. Baker claims in his treatment of the evolution of stare decisis, it was not until Park B’s (later Lord Wensleydale) 1833 opinion in Mirehouse v. Rennell that the modern notion of precedent as a historical development of uniform and consistent rules was first fully voiced (2002, p. 199). Parallel developments were occurring outside the Common Law courts in Chancery. When he was eventually elevated to the office of Lord Chancellor in 1801, Scott (the Hardy trial prosecutor who became Lord Eldon) imported these concerns about precedent and the regulation of reading into Chancery practice, seemingly adopting (perversely) the orientation to precedent which had defeated him in 1794. Eldon’s Chancery practice was always to defer to authority if it were on point, but to create certainty in the law even at the sacrifice of accuracy (Holdsworth 1956–1982, p. 13:620). Eldon’s prime goal was to maintain the integrity of English law as a logically connected system, to be guarded against any radical alteration (Holdsworth 1956–1982, p. 13:621) by deriving fixed and ascertainable principles from historical examples, providing a context within which to decide new cases; he took Hardwicke’s rules of equity and worked out in detail the scope and application of those rules through commentaries on the decisions of his predecessors. In Holdsworth’s opinion, “Eldon fixed the sphere of equity” by creating a context for legal interpretation that closed down interpretive freedom that could be so easily abused (p. 13:627). In the 1790s, legal anxiety over the possibility of interpretive freedom manifested in an emerging rhetoric of precedent which served to cover over the traumatic realization that packed juries, reactionary judges, and corrupt politicians had eroded the rule of law and closed down or even eliminated that space in which the citizen could be free. In his poetry of the same decade, Coleridge holds up his hope that in literature that space might be reinstated. However, although the rhetoric of precedent was largely successful in the legal sphere in quelling concern about acts of imagination (Bentham notwithstanding), Coleridge’s investigations offer less certainty. Perhaps lyric was too fragile a vehicle for the change he desired. Instead, he would need to find a more permanent and institutional manifestation of the cottag’d vale, an attempt I will detail in the next chapter.

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Notes 1. References to Coleridge’s prose and poetry are taken (with exceptions noted) from Coleridge (1969–). References to poetry (all in vol. 16) will be by line number, while references to prose will be in the form of “Works” followed by volume and page number. 2. The tradition of treating the Jewish “fall” into monarchy as an example of idolatry Coleridge would have likely encountered in William Warburton’s The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, Joseph Priestley’s Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion, and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, all sources referred to in Works p. 1:133n. 3. A more protracted discussion of the association between Coleridge’s ideas and those of Gerrald and French radicalism may be found in Works p. 1:145n, to which my observations are indebted. 4. This is actually the fourth version of the poem (of sixteen total), the genesis of which is traced in Stillinger (1994, pp. 27–8). 5. All references to Thomson’s poems are to The Complete Poetical Works of James Thomson (1908) and given parenthetically in the text. 6. Thomson’s “Harp” also contains a further reference (at 13–16) to Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows.” The allusion is noted in Thomson (1986, p. 438). 7. The poem was first published in The Morning Post and Gazetteer, September 6, 1799; this version, revised by Coleridge, is taken from Coleridge et al. (1829). 8. See Coleridge 1907, pp. 2:28–43. Coleridge gives an account of the genesis of the Lyrical Ballads project at pp. 2:5–7. 9. For a comparison of Pantisocracy and Coleridge’s view of the original Hebraic republic, see Murphy 2001, pp. 16–24. 10. Horace Walpole to Lord Stratford, June 12, 1780; cited in Bickham 2006, p. 96. Bickham reports that the noble savage figure was contested during the 1700s, new world peoples sometimes portrayed as brutal primitives, but that the trope gained hold again toward the end of the century when “Robert Southey [Coleridge’s close friend] and Richard Sheridan manipulated the histories of new world peoples to critique British Imperialism” (Bickham 2006, p. 96). 11. Willis 2008, pp. 403–4. See also The Discoveries of John Poulter alias Baxter who was apprehended for robbing Dr. Hancock, of Salisbury, in which the author describes how easily transported convicts could bribe their way back to Britain or run away from their masters in America. Bernard Mandeville’s An Enquiry into the Causes of the frequent Executions at Tyburn: and a Proposal for some Regulations concerning Felons in Prison, and the good

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Effects to be expected from them. To which is added, a Discourse on Transportation, and a Method to render that Punishment more effectual also complains that convicts too easily circumvented transportation, returned home early, escaped their masters, or received too light labor. In contrast, Cynthia Herrup notes the initially punitive perception of transportation (2004, pp. 121–30) and the many ways beyond the pardon that the criminal justice system could express mercy (1985, pp. 102–8). 12. This is a pun Coleridge had used before: “[The Jews] would therefore have applied their idleness to the pursuit of the alluring Ceremonies of Idle Worship” (Works p. 1:140). See also Everest (1979) for an excellent summary of the poem’s textual variations. 13. It might be more appropriate to suggest that Coleridge does not attempt to launch a “new genre” per se but to reclaim for poetry, especially lyric poetry, the propriety to make political commentary. See, for example, Barrell and Guest’s (2000) discussion of the various receptions of Thomson’s poetry in the 1790s.

References Alber, Jan. 2007. Narrating the prison: Role and representation in Charles Dickens’ novels, twentieth-century fiction, and film. London: Cambria Press. Baker, J.H. 1989. Records, reports and the origins of case-law in England. In Judicial records, law reports and the growth of case law, ed. J.H. Baker, 15–46. Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt. ———. 2002. An introduction to English legal history. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barrell, John. 2000. Imagining the king’s death. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barrell, John, and Harriet Guest. 2000. Thomson in the 1790s. In James Thomson essays for the Tercentenary, ed. Richard Terry. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Bickham, Troy. 2006. Savages within the empire. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Blackstone, William Sir. 1902. Commentaries on the laws of England. 4 vols. Ed. William Draper Lewis. Philadelphia: Rees Welsh. Brewer, John. 2009. Sentiment and sensibility. In The Cambridge history of English Romantic literature, ed. James Chandler, 19–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bricker, Andrew Benjamin. 2019. Is narrative essential to the law?: Precedent, case law and judicial emplotment. Law, Culture and the Humanities 15 (2): 319–331. Clark, J.C.D. 1985. English society 1688–1832. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coleridge, S.T. 1907. Biographia literaria. 2 vols. Ed. J.  Shawcross. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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———. 1956. The collected letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1969–. S.T.  Coleridge collected works. 16 vols. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Coleridge, S.T., P.B. Shelley, and J. Keats. 1829. The poetical works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. Complete in one volume. Paris: A. and W. Galignani. http:// www.rc.umd.edu/editions/shelley/devil/dev29vs35.html. Accessed 9 June 2014. Devereaux, Simon. 1996. In place of death: Transportation, penal practices, and the English state, 1770–1830. In Qualities of mercy: Justice, punishment, and discretion, ed. C. Strange, 52–76. Vancouver: UBC Press. Eugenia, Sister. 1930. Coleridge’s scheme of pantisocracy and American travel accounts. PMLA 45 (4): 1069–1084. Everest, Kelvin. 1979. Coleridge’s secret ministry. New York: Barnes and Noble. Fairchild, Hoxie Neale. 1928. The noble savage: A study in Romantic naturalism. New York: Russell & Russell. Garrett, Clarke. 1975. Respectable folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Herrup, Cynthia. 1985. Law and morality in seventeenth-century England. Past & Present 106: 102–123. ———. 2004. Punishing pardon: Some thoughts on the origins of penal transportation. In Penal practice and culture, 1500–1900, ed. Simon Devereaux and Paul Griffiths, 121–138. Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave. Hickey, Allison. 1998. Coleridge, Southey ‘and Co.’: Collaboration and authority. SiR 37: 305–349. Holdsworth, William. 1956–1982. A history of English law. 17 vols. London: Methuen. Hussein, Amal Ragaa Bassyouni. 2011. Transatlantic Romanticism: The English Romantics and American Nineteenth-Century poetic tradition. PhD diss., Durham University. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3197/. Accessed 12 June 2014. Ignatieff, Michael. 1978. A just measure of pain: The penitentiary in the industrial revolution. New York: Pantheon. Klancher, Jon. 1987. The making of English reading audiences, 1790–1832. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Lamb, Charles, and Mary Anne Lamb. 1975. The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb. Ed. Edwin W. Marrs, Jr. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lloyd, Henry Martyn. 2013. The discourse of sensibility: The knowing body in the Enlightenment. In The discourse of sensibility: The knowing body in the Enlightenment, ed. Henry Martyn Lloyd, 1–23. New York: Springer. Maconachie, Alexander. 1845. Benevolence in punishment or transportation made reformatory. London: Seeley, Burnside, and Seeley. Matthews, Ronald. 1971. English messiahs. New York: Benjamin Blom.

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McCalman, Iain. 1996. Mad Lord George and Madame La Motte: Riot and sexuality in the genesis of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. The Journal of British Studies 35 (3): 343–367. Morris, Marilyn. 1998. The British monarchy and the French revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press. Murphy, Michael. 2001. Rereading Coleridge’s pantisocracy. Coleridge Bulletin 18: 16–24. Myers, Victoria. 1997. The other fraud: Coleridge’s The Plot Discovered and the rhetoric of political discourse. In Romanticism, radicalism, and the press, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt, 65–82. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Orr, B. 2013. Richard Steele and the rise of sentiment’s empire. In The discourse of sensibility: The knowing body in the Enlightenment, ed. Henry Martyn Lloyd, 25–42. New York: Springer. Paine, Thomas. 1984. The age of reason. New York: Pantheon. Remer, Gary. 2008. After Machiavelli and Hobbes: James Harrington’s commonwealth of Israel. In Political Hebraism, ed. Gordon Schochet, Fania Oz-Salzberger, and Merav Jones, 207–230. New York: Shalem Press. Roe, Nicholas. 1988. Wordsworth and Coleridge: The radical years. Oxford: Clarendon. Shaffer, Elinor S. 1975. “Kubla Khan” and the fall of Jerusalem. New  York: Cambridge University Press. Sheats, Paul. 2002. Young Coleridge and the idea of lyric. Coleridge Bulletin 20: 14–31. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. 2001. The poetry of sensibility. In The Cambridge companion to Eighteenth Century poetry, ed. John Sitter, 249–270. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stillinger, Jack. 1994. Coleridge and textual instability. New  York: Oxford University Press. Thomson, James. 1908. The complete poetical works of James Thomson. Ed. J. Logie Robertson. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1986. Liberty, the Castle of Indolence and other poems. Ed. James Sambrook. Oxford: Clarendon Press. White, Daniel E. 2001. “Properer for a Sermon”: Particularities of dissent and Coleridge’s conversational mode. SiR 40 (2): 175–198. Williams, Ian. 2012. Early-modern judges and the practice of precedent. In Judges and judging in the history of common law and civil law, ed. Jishua Getzier and Paul Brand, 51–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Willis, James. 2008. Punishment and the cultural limits to state power in late 18th-­ Century Britain. Punishment & Society 10 (4): 403–404. Wind, Astrid. 1998. “Adieu to all:” The death of the American Indian at the turn of the eighteenth century. Symbiosis 2 (1): 39–55.

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Wordsworth, William. 2008. The prose works of William Wordsworth. Eds. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks. Zolo, D. 2010. The rule of law: A critical reappraisal. In The rule of law, ed. Pietro Costa and Danilo Zolo, 3–72. Dordrecht: Springer.

CHAPTER 4

Imagination and the Lyric Constitution

In his work of the 1790s, Coleridge sought to claim poetry as a space for dissent, a haven protected from and by law in which the individual might reimagine the world bounded by ideological and historical constraint. However, since readers (such as Charles Lamb) could reject the conventional positioning Coleridge sought to encode in his work, a larger, institutional program was necessary to modify the reading audience into one capable of championing the ancient constitution and the rule of law. In this chapter, I will trace how in the decades following his 1790s experiments Coleridge mines legal discourse for mechanisms of stability to deploy in his literary and philosophical works in an attempt to restrain acts of innovation and imagination in the exercise of liberty within this lyrical haven. Although such attempts must necessarily fail as surely as any characterization of Lamb as “Gentle-hearted Charles,” they seek ultimately through rhetorical authority to inculcate a regime of belief and faith analogous to that which conjures into being the rule of law itself.

The Ancient Mariner: Regulating Print and Innovation The hope and concern regarding interpretive discretion which Coleridge implies in “Lime Tree Bower” finds poignant expression in the Coleridge’s development of his most canonical poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. L. Barr, Romanticism and the Rule of Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74878-4_4

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(the Rime), and, in particular, the 1817 gloss to that poem. In characterizing the gloss as an attempt to control the circulation and symbolic overdetermination of a text that itself thematizes the secret sharing of revolutionary sentiment, I will suggest that the gloss functions as both a registration of the broader cultural anxiety regarding the radical potential of the imagination and an unsuccessful mechanism to repress the Jacobinism latent in a poem drawn from Coleridge’s supposedly more radical past. Moreover, in reading the gloss as an extension of concerns about the implementation and interpretation of legal language, a concern Coleridge inherits from the Hardy trial and expresses in his 1814 Letters to Justice Fletcher, I will suggest that the gloss tracks Coleridge’s struggle to repress and control his own imagination and his own predilection for unbridled invention and becomes an echo of both traditional and concurrent attempts in legal discourse to inform, shape, and limit the bounds of legal reading. Situated in a context of legal institutional developments, the Rime’s gloss and particularly its failure to control poetic meaning come to embody the inevitable failure of any attempt to regulate the literary or legal imagination. Concurrent with the repression of radical sentiment through legal means which followed the Hardy trial rose an equally stifling effort in the literary realm to regulate the possibility of radical expression in belles lettres. If Thelwall’s open-air meetings, rife with the reading of Thomas Paine and broader talk of the “inalienable rights of man,” were proscribed by The Seditious Meetings and Assemblies Act, other venues for rebellion remained, at least in the opinion of Sir Francis Jeffrey, writing for the fledgling Edinburgh Review. In his (in)famous inauguration of a “new school” of poets in the 1802 review of Robert Southey’s Thalaba, Jeffrey saw Jacobinism rising once again in the leveling sentiments of the Lake Poets: A splenetic and idle discontent with the existing institutions of society, seems to be at the bottom of their serious and peculiar sentiments. Instead of contemplating the wonders and the pleasures which civilization has created for mankind, they are perpetually brooding over the disorders by which its progress has been attended. They are filled with horror and compassion at the sight of poor men spending their blood in the quarrels of princes, and brutifying their sublime capabilities in the drudgery of unremitting labour … The present vicious constitution of society alone is responsible for all these

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enormities: the poor sinners are but the helpless victims or instruments of its disorders. (Jeffrey 1802, p. 1:71)

Jeffrey suggests that this new school is analogous to a religious and political “conspiracy” set to overturn the established laws of poetry, the sacred doctrines of poetic convention, and even the established constitution of the nation by prioritizing the sentiments of the common man over those of the higher classes (1802, pp. 1:63–67). Invoking the antiradical rhetoric of the 1790s, he claims that the true threat of Southey’s work is analogous to that of Paine, Hardy, and Thelwall in the previous decade. These poets amount to a cadre of rebels who seek not merely to legislate new laws of poetic diction, but to overturn the poetical and even political constitution. They exhibit Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “discontent with the present constitution of society,” violate all accepted regulation of poetic form, and seek to reinvent the social structure with a “present vicious constitution” (1802, pp. 1:64, 66, 71). They are a Jacobin “fraternity” fomenting discord and revolution, seeking to establish a new “moral character” through the promulgation of verse: the specter of rebellion rises not merely through the influence of overtly political texts such as Paine’s The Rights of Man, but even through poetic circulation. Picking up the mantle dropped by the 1790s courts, Jeffrey sees his role and that of the Edinburgh as identifying and rooting out this conspiracy and all such literary treasons before they can bear fruit. Authorities in both the legal and literary realms, therefore, saw a crucial need to regulate Jacobinism in print, the radical potential of language to promulgate ideas subversive to the state. Circulating en masse and in secret, uttered plainly or in the guise of poetry, such revolutionary sentiment was an explicit threat not merely to the laws but also the fabric and structure of English society. Jeffrey places this threat in literary expression—the Lakers’ portrayal of the present constitution as “vicious” is an attempt to supplant and undermine Britain itself. In the rapid proliferation of periodical reviews during the mid-1790s to early 1800s, the review system sought to establish itself as an institution to promulgate and enforce literary laws to halt the potential for revolutionary sentiment in literary works. Jeffrey’s Thalaba review not only extended the legal metaphor patent in the Edinburgh’s motto (“The judge is condemned when the guilty is acquitted”) but also picked up on an antirevolutionary theme emphasized in the first book ever reviewed in the Edinburgh. The discussion of De L’Influence attribuee aux Philosophes, aux Francs-Macons, et aux

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Illumines, sur la Revolution de France by J. Mournier takes issue with the author’s explanation of the causes of the French Revolution and, instead, suggests that mass publication, circulation, and discussion of radical sentiments was its most important root: The question … is not whether the revolution could have been accomplished without these occurrences; but whether these are sufficient to account for it of themselves; and whether they leave nothing to be imputed to the influence of the preachers of liberty, and the writings of republican philosophers. Now, upon this question, we profess to entertain an opinion not less decided than that of M. Mournier, though it happens to be diametrically opposite … [The Revolution] proceeded from the change that had taken place in the condition and the sentiments of the people; from the progress of commercial opulence; from the diffusion of information, and the prevalence of political discussion. Now it seems difficult to deny that the philosophers were instrumental in bringing about this change; that they had attracted the public attention to the abuses of government, and spread very widely among the people, the sentiment of their grievances and their rights. (Anon. 1802, pp. 1: 7–8)

In short, the influence of “publications” lay at the heart of the revolution and helped breed a “spirit of discontent and innovation” (1802, p. 1:8). The desire to police print and its potential to foment revolution was emphasized by the British Critic in its opening preface of 1793. In response to accusations of compromised judgment in their prospectus, the editors suggested that they would always show partiality when judging literature in defense of the English religion and constitution: If we were to err on any side … it certainly would not be in opposition to the favorite opinions of our countrymen, or in defiance and contempt of the best feelings of true Britons, but rather in behalf of them. We made these declarations as an assurance to the nation, that at least in THE BRITISH CRITIC, a literary register, in which their genuine sentiments would be respected, and in which the most scanty measure of justice would not be allotted to those writings which defend their established religion, and the unperverted form of their political constitution: such as they have long enjoyed, and such as they have long revered it. (Anon. 1793–1813, p. 1: iii)

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The Critic’s editors went so far as to suggest that their anthology of reviewed books and literary judgments would amount to a kind of literary case law: If there were a library endowed sufficiently to collect all valuable productions that appear, to such a record it would naturally apply; and the reports of a court of criticism, though not pretending to infallibility, would undoubtedly be consulted, if not with more use, at least with more pleasure, than the reports of a court of law. (p. 5:2)

Although the conception of the review as a literary trial court did not arise in the 1790s (the 1731 Gentleman’s Magazine likened itself to “an Abridgment of the Law” in its opening number), there is some evidence to suggest that reviews beginning in the 1790s took very seriously their duty to cull through masses of printed material in an effort to systematically and almost legally defend the moral and political constitution of the nation (excerpted in Cave 1987, p. 30). Jeffrey’s Thalaba review is merely one pointed example of this effort. In his delayed response to Jeffrey’s Thalaba review fifteen years later in the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge locates the new Jacobinism not so much in poetry as in attempts, like Jeffrey’s, to channel and regulate poetry’s political effect. In the Biographia, Coleridge suggests that the current organization of periodicals, as “synodical individuals” behind which individual reviewers hide in anonymity, encourages a lack of consideration in their critical judgments amounting to a subversion of the constitution of the “literary republic” (Works pp. 7:ii:108, 7:i:42). Writing in the context of a degradation of the status of books (from the height of “religious oracles” to the depths of “culprits to hold up their hands at the bar of every self-elected, yet not the less peremptory, judge”; Works, p. 7:i:57), Coleridge traces what he perceives as an analogous usurpation in the status of the author: Poets and Philosophers, rendered diffident by their very number, addressed themselves to “learned readers;” then, aimed to conciliate the graces of “the candid reader;” till, the critic still rising as the author sunk, the amateurs of literature collectively were erected into a municipality of judges, and addressed as THE TOWN! And now, finally, all men being supposed able to read, and all readers able to judge, the multitudinous PUBLIC, shaped into personal unity by the magic of abstraction, sits nominal despot on the throne of criticism. But, alas! as in other despotisms, it but echoes the decisions of

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its invisible ministers, whose intellectual claims to the guardianship of the muses seem, for the greater part, analogous to the physical qualifications which adapt their oriental brethren for the superintendence of the Harem. (Works, p. 7:i:59)

In Coleridge’s estimation, the critics are “invisible ministers” utilizing guile and bribery to manipulate the opinions and discretion of a populace that is the sovereign of a republic of letters (Works, p. 7:i:59). Mass circulation of print and the mass ability to read it has created a body with ample power, but with a judgment eroded by critical influence. Having usurped the author’s position, the public body of readers, like a Jacobin Club or a National Assembly, lashes out wildly and indiscriminately in a reign of terror instigated by those who rule behind the scenes. Critics, in control of readers, assemble themselves into a collective to overawe the literary constitution; periodical critics are the lead members of a convention treasonous against established standards of literary interpretation and judgment. Attempting to regulate the Jacobinism of print, these authorities have absorbed the values they are supposed to reject: subjectivity and innovation in interpretation enable a Jacobinical imagination to flourish even there. That this corruption of the public’s ability to read originates in the tendency of critical discourse to sever the present from the past, Coleridge suggests in a series of open letters to Justice William Fletcher regarding his address to the grand jury of County Wexford, Ireland, in the Summer of 1814, letters Coleridge specifically incorporates into the Biographia (Works, p.  7:i:192). In his address, Fletcher congratulates the people of Wexford for returning to peaceful ways after the uprising of 1798 and debunks as exaggerated all recent reports of disturbance in the county (Fletcher 1758–, pp. 513, 515, 520). From his own extensive experience on the bench prosecuting crime in the region, he concludes there is no scheme of “disaffection and sedition” at work, that the Legislature’s enactment of new criminal statutes and its invocation of the old Insurrection Act to counter these supposed schemes amount to a complete (and unwarranted) suspension of the English constitution (Fletcher 1758–, p. 530). Echoing arguments advanced in the Catechism of the United Irishmen circulated in the wake of the 1798 rebellion, Fletcher instead lays any discontent at the feet of absentee landowners, the failure of economic regulation (allowing the mass forging of bank notes), and the collusion of the magistracy with the Protestant Orange Men in the persecution of Catholics

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(Musgrave 1995, pp. 828–33; Fletcher 1758–, pp. 514–17; summarized in Works, p. 3, ii, 373). These seemingly rather moderate comments instigate Coleridge’s characterization of Fletcher as expressing an insidious Jacobinism more perilous and entrenched than any found in 1790s England. Coleridge emphasizes that Fletcher is a representative, even an embodiment of the king and his law: I could not indeed forget that in the delivery of this charge you were sitting, as the representative of your Sovereign, in that most awful function of sovereignty, the administration of the common laws to the common subjects of his United Kingdoms. (Works, p. 3:ii:376)

In criticizing Parliament’s implementation of the “old Insurrection Act” and the expense of the Peace Preservation Bill, Fletcher appears to attack the very laws he had sworn to uphold, revealing (in Coleridge’s opinion) a partisan self-interest that should be the duty of a king’s representative to suppress (Works, p.  3:ii:376). Fletcher’s orientation to the law in his address scandalizes Coleridge, who suggests that it undermines Fletcher’s status as the Crown’s representative and allies him to “anonymous criticism,” which is a “species of Jacobinism, proceeding from the same source, and tending to the same end, the rage of innovation, and the scorn and hatred of all ancient establishments” (Works, p. 3:ii:396). Fletcher becomes an instance of factionalization, of an individual breaking with an established, historical order and forswearing his oath to the sovereign. This is a particular manifestation of the pervasive presence of trade unions, secret societies, and all “club government,” the members of which swear oaths to a small body and advance its interests, more immediately personal interests than those of the national order (their allegiance to which is embodied in their competing oath to the sovereign; Works, p. 3:ii:393). These are societies strongly reminiscent of Scott’s Hardy trial characterization of a subversive SCI and LCS, and Coleridge sees in them the same potential for a more general usurpation of the rule of law. Fletcher and all other judges, Coleridge argues, must always see themselves as situated within an institutional history, one that restricts their pronouncements and informs how they position those utterances for the mass digestion and interpretation of the reading public. Coleridge’s great fear seems to be that, by severing himself from history, Fletcher will promulgate the same kind of “rage of innovation” that

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he and other readers (like periodical reviewers) seem to embody in 1814 (when the letters were written), in 1815 (when the letters were incorporated into the Biographia manuscript), and in 1817 (when it was published with additions). The press has, Coleridge complains, republished Fletcher’s charge for the “malcontents and potwise senators of the alehouses,” allowing them to appropriate and further pervert the judge’s sentiments (Works, p.  3:ii:377). Here, words are fragmented, reformed, and borrowed—twisted by “senators” who appear not merely as the risible descendants of Scott’s revolutionary clubs, influenced by periodical Robespierres, but also as the menacing reincarnation of the Waterford alehouse conspirators of 1797 (Musgrave 1995, p. 645). In Coleridge’s opinion, moreover, the character of Fletcher’s address itself is so malleable that circulation could transform it into a voice that actively speaks against its author: within the paradigm established by the periodicals and modern reading practices, law itself is transformed into something that subverts law. Uncontrolled circulation and interpretation under the Jacobinical influence of the review system inevitably finds revolutionary and radical expression in the hands of students: taught to dispute and decide, to suspect all, but their own and their lecturer’s wisdom, and to hold nothing sacred from their contempt but their own contemptible arrogance, boy-graduates in all the technical, and all the dirty passions and impudence of anonymous criticism. (Works, p. 3: ii:396)

Although Coleridge’s tone in these letters borders on the hysterical and he may be inventing an occasion to voice concerns that had been simmering for some time, he is likely remembering (as does the Justice himself) that Fletcher addresses the same county which was the only region in Ireland to expel the English imperial presence and set up a short-lived, independent government in the 1798 rebellion. As Daniel Gahan’s analysis of the rebellion’s origins suggests, circulation of Painite ideas, through such media as the Catechism and Constitution of the United Irishmen, did much to both instigate and sustain a rebellious spirit which, after an initial setback at Kilthomas on May 27, 1798, eventually won the Battle of Oulart Hill and took both Eniscorthy and Wexford, only to be broken at New Ross on June 5: In the present great Era of Reform, when unjust Governments are failing in every quarter of Europe; when Religious Persecution is compelled to abjure

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her Tyranny over conscience; when the Rights of Man are ascertained in Theory, and that Theory substantiated by Practice; when Antiquity can no longer defend absurd and oppressive Forms against the common Sense and common Interests of Mankind; when all governments are acknowledged to originate from the People, and to be so far only obligatory, as they protect their Rights and promote their Welfare:—We think it our Duty, as Irishmen, to come forward, and state what we feel is our heavy Grievance, and what we know to be its effectual Remedy. (Gahan 1995, pp. 112–113)

Alluding specifically to The Rights of Man and owing its existence to the phenomenal circulation of that text, this Constitution of the United Irishmen and the uprising it accompanied is the logical end of circulation in rebellion that Scott and Eyre had feared in 1794 and which continues to frighten Coleridge in 1814 and 1817. The Wexford insurrection is proof positive that the unregulated contagion of print can lead to the actual manifestation of rebel states that exist outside the control of any sovereign or tradition and which even go so far as to administer their own judicial tribunals (Musgrave 1995, pp.  794–5). Here, the rebels create, through an act of writing, a polity that immediately (in the words of Eyre and Scott) topples the existing, legitimate government. Much as the overwrought tone of Edmund Burke’s Letter to a Noble Lord may rise from his imagining Irish-style rebellion on English soil, so Coleridge’s anxiety in the Fletcher Letters stems from the seemingly very real possibility of mass circulation and reading creating a tangible threat to the British constitution. Here is an interpretive freedom too unrestrained to support any rule of law. To help counter this threat, Coleridge’s express purpose in the Fletcher Letters is to create a commentary or gloss to help stabilize the value of the jury charge on “objective” merits and, thereby, constrain this revolutionary potential of mass reading through an application of universal “justice”: It becomes … a debt of justice equally to myself and to your Lordship, that I should in the first place declare what parts and injunctions of the charge I do not controvert, in what points I either coincide with your Lordship, or submit my own judgment to your greater experience and more ample means of information. (Works, p. 3:ii:377)

Presumably as the representative of a national, nonfactionalized interest, Coleridge will supplement the judge’s “information,” will rectify the misappropriation of Fletcher’s words, and diffuse the Jacobinical sentiment

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they bear. Similar to a strategy he employed in 1795’s “The Plot Discovered,” Coleridge’s commentary on the jury address will act as a framework or form within which the public can evaluate and interpret the charge. Without such intervention, the revolutionary contagion spreads, threatening to destroy not only the coherence of the British nation and its skein of customs and shared beliefs, but also the constitution itself. In these letters, Coleridge reveals a concern very close to that expressed by Scott and Eyre in the treason trials of 1794, that reading unfettered by regulation and tradition, occurring in isolated and secretive locations, can lead to the creation of bodies capable of destroying Britain. Therefore, when Coleridge incorporates these letters into the Biographia, he is seeing (as Jeffrey had years before) the radical potential in literary expression and literary commentary to undermine the constitution as surely as any legal utterance or reading of it. Periodicals contain a spirit of Jacobinism, “which the writings of Burke exorcised from the higher and from the literary classes, [and which] may not unlike the ghost in Hamlet, be heard moving and mining in the underground chambers with an activity the more dangerous because less noisy” (Works, p. 7:i:192). In the Biographia, Coleridge picks up where he had left off in the Fletcher Letters and characterizes the Jacobinical subversion of the reviewing system as arising from an anti-constitutional predilection to eschew established law for personal innovation: [My] point of objection … applies in common to the general [periodical review] system … I am referring to the substitution of assertion for argument; to the frequency of arbitrary and sometimes petulant verdicts not seldom unsupported even by a single quotation from the work condemned, which might at least have explained the critic’s meaning, if it did not prove the justice of his sentence. Even where this is not the case, the extracts are too often made without reference to any general grounds or rules from which the faultiness or inadmissibility of the qualities attributed may be deduced; and without any attempt to show, that the qualities are attributable to the passage extracted. (Works, pp. 7:ii:112–13)

Invoking legal metaphors (“petulant verdicts,” “condemned,” “justice of his sentence”) to show his awareness of the regulatory role adopted by the reviews and to recall the legal battles over print regulation in the 1790s, Coleridge suggests that periodicals had failed as institutions of literary regulation—the reading practices of the current reviewers are arbitrary,

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without coherence or precedent, and lead to a system of judgment and reading that is unanchored in tradition or reason. In short, modern reviewers read according to the dictates of fashion and party—their views are not the result of dispassionate, historically contextualized decisions but dictated by allegiance and political agenda. Invoking the anti-Jacobin rhetoric of the Hardy trial, Coleridge accuses these “synodical individuals” of forming into radical and revolutionary bodies to usurp the constitution of the “literary republic.” This fear of mass circulation and the Jacobinical effects of unregulated reading Coleridge imports into his 1817 revision of the Rime, in particular its marginal gloss. As Scott Hess points out in his 2001 article, “The Wedding Guest as Reader,” the Rime can be interpreted as a dramatization of print circulation and reception. Although Hess focuses primarily on the 1798 version of the poem with its generally more conspicuous relationship between the Mariner and the Wedding Guest, he concludes that the 1817 version and its gloss continue to situate “the Mariner’s self-­ representation within the symbolically internalized contexts of the print market and the hermeneutical encounter of reading” (Hess 2001, p. 31). Hess’ main point is that the Rime embodies the ability of authors to construct themselves through print circulation and place themselves at the center of a new social dynamic in which individuals are connected through print circulation. I would add that the gloss, placed within the context of Coleridge’s concerns about the revolutionary potential of mass circulation and reading, unsuccessfully represses his anxiety about the potential of all literature, both imaginative and legal, to escape interpretive control. That the Rime has and can be read in a multitude of ways is beyond question. As Raimonda Modiano suggested in 1977, the poem is a confusing text, with many possible, even mutually exclusive interpretations, religious, political, and otherwise (Modiano 1977, pp. 40–1). Modiano employs this observation to suggest that the Rime showcases the limits of expression, revealing that language, “although it is the only means by which the Mariner can relive his past, finally binds him to an inaccurate view of it” (p. 42). Modiano feels the poem’s textual ambiguity is indicative of the Mariner’s confused mental state, showing a gap between events as they are experienced and as they are remembered and recapitulated. As Modiano notes, this textual malleability was felt even in Coleridge’s own time and has now reached the point where, in the words of David Perkins, the poem has “achieved the classic status of omnisignificance, like Hamlet” (Modiano 1977, p.  40 n.1; Perkins 1996, p. 425). Taking Modiano’s

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observation as a reflection on critical practice itself, Perkins portrays especially the 1817 poem as a kind of literary Rorschach test, wherein the critic constructs the kind of Coleridge who will best support the interpretation the critic wishes to find in the text (Perkins 1996, p. 429). Building on the duality of historical perspective delineated in Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology and his article “The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner,” Perkins argues that Coleridge intentionally built layers of interpretive guidance into the text, creating a series of successive historical readings, each peculiar and distinct to its own supposed time (McGann 1981, pp.  35–67; Perkins 1996, p. 444). Perkins and Hess, therefore, read a similar poetic dynamic from different perspectives: while the latter sees the author attempting to control his own construction before an audience, the former sees the audience as controlling that author’s construction, as (to borrow Coleridge’s hyperbolic phraseology in the Fletcher Letters and Biographia) manifesting a rage for innovation and usurping the textual sovereign through a Jacobinical reading practice. Given Coleridge’s sensitivity to the radical possibilities inherent in print circulation, I would read the gloss as an attempt to quell anxiety over textual usurpation in the literary and legal spheres. The encounter between the Mariner and Wedding Guest is a clandestine one, their communication held in secret at the fringes of the community, represented by the wedding itself. The content of the Mariner’s tale is also radical, if not revolutionary: the supernatural agents and occurrences he describes potentially undermine not only established Christian doctrine but also the state that doctrine supports (see, e.g., Modiano 2001, pp. 271–96 and Murphy 2002, pp. 62–75). At the very least, the Mariner produces some kind of revolution in how the Wedding Guest sees himself and the reality around him. Made a “sadder and a wiser man,” he eschews the community of which he had previously wished to be a part and seems to become an echo of the Mariner himself, lorn and thoughtful beyond the music of the celebration. Moreover, although the poem itself depicts not a mass publication but the relation of a tale between merely two people, the publication of their meeting as the text of a poem and its circulation to a (potentially) mass audience completes the depiction of Coleridge’s anxiety—this singular meeting now has been noised abroad and can be read and reread in many different ways by many “strangers” to the author. The plot of the poem itself seems to depict the cultural concern Coleridge traces in the Fletcher Letters and Biographia.

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Although, according to Jack Stillinger, Coleridge wrote no less than eighteen versions of the poem, perhaps the most significant addition he made to the text was the 1817 gloss revision, a commentary seemingly intended to stabilize and guide the reading of this ambiguous, radical text (1992, pp. 127–46). The gloss accompanying lines 97–102, for example, seeks to clarify the action by adding detail not in the text itself, stating that the crew, by changing their attitude to the slaying of the albatross, implicate themselves in the Mariner’s crime. A more extreme example appears next to lines 393–7, which relates the two voices to the Polar Spirit’s judgment. While Stillinger sees the addition of the gloss as adding logic to the narrative, Huntington Brown’s 1945 characterization of the gloss is perhaps more relevant. As evidently the first critic to suggest that the glossator was someone other than the “Bard” who supposedly composed the tale, he claims that the gloss arose at least partially in reaction to the critical consensus that the earlier version of the poem was incomprehensible (Stillinger 1992, p. 145; Brown 1945, p. 322). He portrays the bard and the glossator as voices participating in a drama, the gloss comprising an intermediary between the bard and the modern or contemporary (mystified) reader (Brown 1945, p. 324). As such, the gloss becomes a filter, an attempt to organize experience and interpretation. David Pirie suggests this organization at its most extreme amounts to an outright misreading, the gloss amounting to a conservative Christian lie, intentionally reducing the overdetermination of the text into a mainstream religious orthodoxy (Empson and Pirie 1972, pp. 214–15). The gloss has the effect of taming and controlling the rebellious text, limiting its potential to foment discord and undermine a literary or political constitution. I use the words “political constitution” not merely because an attack on the church could easily be construed as an attack on the state it supports but also because of the conflation between literary and legal utterances Coleridge made in the Biographia and Fletcher Letters, a conflation embodied in the Rime itself. Although Coleridge famously described the poem as a “work of pure imagination” in his 1830 response to Anna Barbauld, he also included in the Rime all the elements of a trial and punishment. Although the Mariner’s crime has often been interpreted through a religious lens, it can equally apply to invoke the legal context of reading and writing that was of such concern to Coleridge in the Fletcher Letters and elsewhere. As Peter Kitson  (1996), Patrick Keane  (1994), and Michael Murphy (2002) have suggested, the Mariner’s “crime” (as it is described in the gloss next to line 100) and sentence reflect, for all their supernatural

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imagery, many realities of the Pitt-era persecution of radicalism under the Bloody Code and the Gagging Acts (see also  Hillier  2009).  , Kitson, Keane, and Murphy Perhaps more than a response to the French Revolution or lament for Thelwall’s political and social exile, the poem reflects on the cultural forces that enabled the effective suppression of radical sentiment through the instrumentation of legal interpretation. After committing his crime, the Mariner is subjected to the judgment of his peers (a jury), and they find him not guilty, based on their own utilitarian morality. Although the crew reverses this judgment based on a superstitious reading of signs which is analogous to the ancient trial by ordeal, the Mariner soon enters the jurisdiction of a higher, supernatural court (Baker 1990, pp. 5–6). Tortured by starvation, thirst, and the weight of the albatross on his body, the Mariner comes to look like one suffering the peine forte et dure of Medieval trial procedure, whereby authorities forcibly encouraged an accused to submit “voluntarily” to the jurisdiction of the common law (as was then required). In blessing the water snakes, the Mariner signals his submission to this higher court, the loss of the albatross signaling both his entry into this new paradigm of justice and the commencement of his true trial and punishment under that dispensation (Baker 1990, pp. 508–9). Now subject to the judgment of the Polar Spirit, the Mariner is sentenced to an eternity of tale telling. Although (to apply Modiano) the interaction between gloss and text undermines the entire notion of eyewitness testimony (which became an essential part of the new criteria for judgment under the legal regime that replaced the trial by ordeal), applying Perkins’ interpretation of the gloss as one of a series of historically situated readings of a trial document suggests that the gloss is just as much a reading of precedent (and therefore the creation of a new precedent) that attempts to reduce the original text to a pithy essence, sometimes called the ratio decidendi of a case or its “moral.” This was the interpretive controversy at the heart of the Hardy trial and which rests in the essence of the rule of law itself. For Coleridge’s reader, the gloss provides a historically situated interpretation that seeks to limit meaning-­ making from the text of a (somewhat bizarre) case, placing the Rime gloss within the contemporary legal institutional movement toward the modern notion of precedent. As I’ve noted in the preceding chapter, courts of both law and equity in the 1790s and early 1800s were trying to find ways to guide and constrain legal interpretation through strict interpretation of and adherence to previous judicial decisions.

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In the Rime gloss, I would suggest that Coleridge creates a historical dialogue analogous to the work of Erskine, Eldon, and the legal institutional development of the precedent system. In each case, fear of innovation in the act of reading and interpreting leads to an act of glossing, a restrictive set of practices that attempts to insert the text into a historical sequence of other texts intended to stabilize and limit meaning. In each case, the author attempts to “inform” the act of interpretation in the same sense that Coleridge wished to supplement Justice Fletcher’s “information” in the Wexford Grand Jury address. As outlined in Chap. 2, the concept of “form” in law is an ancient one, being perhaps the first attempt in common law to limit discretion in the act of reading. When the power to do justice, to enforce compliance with law through the application of legitimized force, shifted from a communal to a personal authority (eventually the Sovereign) in the tenth century (Holdsworth 1956–1982, p. 1:11), the king’s delegation of this authority to an increasingly professional group of common law judges required that the authority be limited, initially by the so-called writ system of legal forms. While the old king’s Eyre (in essence itinerant judges) had had virtually carte blanche to travel the country and decide cases as they saw fit (wielding a despotic authority that sometimes led to the emptying of whole villages at the rumor of their approach), the judges of the then-new Court of King’s Bench were restricted by a series of royal writs that stated, in essence, the exact circumstances in which the king’s justice could be invoked under the common law—only so long as the acts of an accused or defendant could be fit within the description of the offence on the writ would the court grant relief (Holdsworth 1956–1982, pp.  1:271–2). As Holdsworth explains, the chancellor who held the Great Seal of the king necessary to endorse the writs which established the forms of action had the ability to modify or even introduce new writs or forms of action, but only until 1244, when that right was returned to the king’s council where it was only rarely used, leaving the chancellor only a narrow range of authority to modify existing writs (see Holdsworth 1956–1982, pp. 1:398ff.). This discretion was to be exercised on the basis of “conscience” and came to be regarded as the last manifestation of the king’s justice failing a remedy at common law. When a particular case brought to a common law court did not fit exactly within the forms of action (which rapidly were no longer seen as merely administrative authorization for an action but as actually defining common law rights and relief: Holdsworth 1956–1982, p. 1: 66), the chancellor could modify the form to create fit and produce “justice.” An example

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of this was the customary omission by the Chancery clerks of the phrase “vi et armis” on the writ of trespass on the case (between 1285 and 1360—see Holdsworth 1956–1982, p. 1:73). These forms of action are still a part of law today, finding manifestation in the so-called “causes of action” or “elements” of criminal offences. Simply another way of inscribing historical constraint into acts of judgment and interpretation, the forms of law came to be supplemented by a system of precedent that at least partially arose in reaction to rapid social and economic developments in the eighteenth century, developments to which Chancery did not adapt (as evidenced by Mansfield’s tenure on the Court of King’s Bench, detailed in Chap. 2). In the nascent development of a legal precedent system and in the drama of the Hardy Trial, concerns regarding the reading of signs in legal decision-making had once again breached the surface of public consciousness. Influenced by these various strands of anxiety, Coleridge’s gloss “informs” the Mariner’s story in a manner analogous to the forms of law. The gloss not only closes down interpretation, it also informs the text— existing in the margins and interlined between stanzas, it physically creates a container and barrier that holds the language of the poem in place, a function best exemplified by the gloss accompanying lines 131–4 in many printings. The gloss “justifies” the (left) margin of the poem and (in this one case) even intrudes between stanzas. Just as the forms of action in the writ system aimed to restrict discretion in the act of judicial interpretation, so the gloss attempts to circumscribe reading of the poem, physically and intellectually. The Mariner relates the experience of his trial and punishment, the text becoming a transcript of the trial that, when interpreted by the glossator, becomes precedent and form both. In the Fletcher Letters, Coleridge argued that judges must couch their sentiments within the discourse of the judicial profession. They must, in short, behave within the scope of precedent and the limits or historically established forms of the profession. The Rime gloss, read within this context, becomes an embodiment of the forms of justice—it speaks to an existing cultural anxiety over the rebellious possibilities inherent in published language of any kind and seeks to contain in a literary poetical setting the most dangerous manifestation of that rebelliousness, as it arises in the process of legal interpretation and application. However, although, as a symptom of the cultural anxiety over mass publication, the gloss cannot help but express a conservative, repressive element, the interplay between text and gloss (as Wall notes) seems more

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a conscious attempt to foreground the complexity of reading and interpretation itself: these “interacting discourses [are] critiques of one another,” leading to suspension of the interpretive, evaluative faculty (Wall 1987, p.  180). As early as 1972, William Empson was arguing that the gloss tends to “misrepresent the poem by translating its ambiguities into simplistic equations”: it seems to intentionally distort and reduce the import of the poetic text (Empson and Pirie 1972, p. 43). The gloss, as a mechanism of repression, carries traces of the anxiety it seeks to control and deny. As Modiano states, “one of the central paradoxes of the Mariner’s situation [is that] he can relieve himself of his inner agony and retain his sanity after his return from the vast solitudes of the ocean only by shaping an otherwise formless, incomprehensible, and unbearable past into a structured narrative with a beginning, climax, ending—and a moral lesson as well” (Modiano 1977, p. 42). At a fundamental level, the Rime is a poem about the power of language to bind and mesmerize. As Susan Eilenberg has shown in Strange Power of Speech, the Mariner is a man without identity, save that which he can construct through telling his tale. He is the embodiment of the speaking text, a dead letter expressing a power to compel an audience that includes himself, the Wedding Guest, and perhaps even those readers entranced by the quality of Coleridge’s verse (Eilenberg 1992, pp. 31–4). Like the specter of law itself, the Mariner holds our attention only so long as he speaks and we choose to read. Like a judge crafting a precedent for the future, the Mariner attempts to pronounce the ratio or moral of his case, that one must eschew the unruliness of a Wedding feast for the more somber community of church worship, and place oneself within a network of beings and intelligences: “He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast. He prayeth best who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.” (612–17)

Yet, as much as the Mariner tries to place an interpretation on his own tale and (in a move analogous to the gloss) attempts to guide the future conduct of the Wedding Guest or reader, he fails. As soon as his story ends and the Wedding Guest moves outside the Mariner’s influence and

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jurisdiction, there is no indication that the Mariner’s moral has any impact on the Guest’s future conduct. The Wedding Guest indeed becomes a “sadder and wiser man,” but there is no depiction of his loving anything with more intensity or greater awareness than before—if anything, the Mariner’s tale and the sadness of its effect have engendered the opposite. The Wedding Guest is last seen in a limbo between two types of community, the riot of the Wedding and the conservative quietude of the church. As the encapsulation and expression of the Mariner’s text, the Wedding Guest and his future are uncertain. The poem’s denouement, after the departure of the Mariner at line 620, depicts a reality outside the Mariner’s rhetorical control and, in this extra-jurisdictional space, the Wedding Guest is free to arrive at his own conclusions, to read and apply the poem as he sees fit. The effect of the tale has escaped the Mariner’s and glossator’s containment: in the purely imaginary space existing beyond the bounds of the poem, the Guest, situated at the fringes of society, and the reader are able to innovate without restriction. Two hundred years of critical attention have still not exhausted the interpretive possibilities. In this potential for freedom and rebellion lies not only the attack on legal positivism levied by the critical legal studies movement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (an attack that Coleridge is perhaps commencing against Bentham, one of its earliest English proponents) but also  the unraveling of law and society itself. Without the illusion that print and the pronouncements of judges like Justice Fletcher can have a stable meaning to guide the application of force through time, justice becomes a game of “casting dice,” each accused or litigant suffering a Mariner-like limbo of life in death until freed or damned by random, despotic power. Within such an arbitrary system, no rule of law can exist. That such an experience severs the Mariner from community and polity is perhaps alarming enough, but that the recounting of such an experience through textual circulation enacts a further such severance in the Wedding Guest comes close to realizing the fears of Eyre, Scott and evidently Coleridge himself: that within mass publication and reading lies an interpretive potential that cannot be mastered, a potential that, when manifested in the literary or legal sphere, can lead to the end of constitution and society both. As an embodiment of radical politics, the Coleridgean lyric failed. Pilloried as reactionary, apostate and arch conservative both by his contemporaries and by posterity, Coleridge did little to emphasize the radical strain of lyric later in his career and, in fact, did much to marginalize its political content through his explorations of imagination in the Biographia

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and elsewhere. In his treatment of “Fire, Famine and Slaughter” and Coleridge’s attachment in 1815 of an apologetic gloss, John Barrell documents one example of how Coleridge began to frame poetry as barren of all political expression (Barrell 2000, pp. 643ff.). The 1817 gloss to the Rime, and its failure to contain innovation and radicalism, is simply one pointed reminder that poetic and legal radicalism could not be restrained, that it might be best to bleed that poem at least of the possibility for radical political effect. This was a conclusion at least nascent in “Kubla Khan.” If, as Elinore Shaffer argues, that poem is Coleridge’s archetype of poetry as prophecy, an expression I argue Coleridge saw as the immediate communication between the subject and God which spread an inherently republican ethic through its denial of all intermediate authority, “Kubla Khan” equally expresses the collapse of this political sentiment into marginalized, apolitical lyric. Just as Kubla, poet and prophet, creator of a lush and protected realm, is on the brink of becoming involved in a “war” or political conflict prophesied by ancestors, the poem breaks into a depiction of idolatry in which poets are worshipped as gods and war and revolution forgotten. The worship of poets or tyrants as authors of “mighty meaning” in lieu of the one God simply replicates the status quo in nineteenth-­ century England; the collapse of political force launched from within a protected space into a depiction of idolatry perhaps embodies Coleridge’s tacit recognition that lyric could not be effective in the political realm— maybe here Coleridge suggests that the poet must stay behind his walls, that, to the extent he tries to instigate political action from within lyrical form, he inevitably falls prey to the forces of unbridled imagination, innovation, and radicalism that had found such violent and damaging expression in the political realm of the 1790s and would later raze most of Europe in the Napoleonic Wars. As Paul Foote suggests in his introduction to Red Shelley, a conservative reaction to such possibilities resulted in an aestheticization of Romanticism itself, a depoliticization that perhaps may have been extended to literary expression more broadly.

Institutionalizing the Lyric Coleridge’s reaction to the revolutionary potential of literary and legal innovation was not necessarily the complete de-politicization of poetry so much as an attempt to create a political institutional context in which literature and law must be read. In May of 1811, Coleridge wrote a strident letter to the London Courier regarding sentences handed down to

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criminals in the recent County Sessions, among these the whipping of three women for various acts of petty theft: Shakespeare, who alone of all the dramatic poets possessed the power of combining the profoundest general morality with the wildest states of passion … whose moral aphorisms are … sparks of fire that fly off from the iron, …; our philosophic Shakespeare has not suffered this debasement of our common nature [the whipping of women] to … elude the inevitable tact of his moral sense: and we cannot doubt that hereafter our Legislature, which has already shewn itself so friendly to all dispassionate and unfactious attemptstoamendthepenalcode,willallowustorepeat,byauthority,thePoet’sbidding— “Thou rascal Beadle, hold thy bloody hand! Why dost thou whip that woman?”—Lear. (Works, pp. 3:ii:139–41)

In this instance, Coleridge turns England’s “philosophic Shakespeare” into a legal authority (his emphasis) to refute the legislative pronouncement embodied in current penal law. The artistic creations of this greatest English poet contain “moral aphorisms” that guide individuals to just action better than any statute or legal precedent. Moreover, these principles are “dispassionate and unfactious,” standing as a potential objective corrective to the supposedly party-driven interests that guide innovation in the legal and political realm. But what may go unnoticed in this application of Shakespearean precedent is Coleridge’s role as selector and interpreter of the quotation. As a dramatic utterance, the quotation’s meaning is at best ambiguous, nor does Coleridge explain why a quotation from perhaps MacBeth or Julius Caesar, encouraging murder and punishment, might not be more appropriate. What Coleridge presents here as authority is not so much the moral aphorism of England’s national poet as law derived through interpretive practice, wherein one presented as having a special relationship to authority is given the capacity to act as sibyl or prophet, selecting and interpreting that authority in some desired fashion. In voicing doubts about the injustice enacted through current legislation, Coleridge joins Jeremy Bentham, William Godwin, and even Sir William Blackstone in a concern over the failure of contemporary political and legal institutions to manifest “justice.” Unlike his contemporaries however, as he outlines more fully in On the Constitution of the Church and State (“Church and State”), Coleridge suggests that justice should arise from the interpretive aesthetic of a group of literary and cultural critics,

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the “clerisy.” Although, as we have seen, Coleridge in his own poetry takes up Shakespeare’s mantle to advocate for ethical legal and political practice, he ultimately suggests that a larger and more systematic program of “trickle down” innovation (properly regulated) must be implemented. In Church and State Coleridge erects a constitutional scheme to enable a national reading community guided by this clerisy, so that the circulation of print through that community will result in readings of literary and legal texts regulated by a shared sense of custom and value. Here is the potential projection of the ideal literary and political imagination into a regulated forum of discourse. Using the Bill for the Relief of His Majesty’s Roman Catholic Subjects (“The Catholic Relief Bill”) as the focus of interpretation, Church and State becomes one extended guide to the reading of that bill and its constitutional implications, thus demonstrating the clerisy’s role in the process of political decision-making (here, the evaluation of proposed legislation) and showing that role to be a new manifestation of the systematic organization Coleridge sees as necessary to curtail the radical potential of free will in the act of interpretation, by judge certainly but even more importantly by the subject under the rule of law whose unbridled imagination could spark a revolution as damaging and long-lasting as that of 1789 France (see Coleridge’s own characterization of his project in Works, pp. 10:11–12). In Church and State, Coleridge advocates a form of social organization in which the balance between opposing and mutually regulating structures is maintained by an external organization of trustee-like figures, the clerisy. Near the start of his treatise to propound a new constitutional form, he defines how a constitution should be constructed: A Constitution is the attribute of a state, i.e. of a body politic, having the principle of its unity within itself, whether by concentration of its forces, as a constitutional pure Monarchy, which, however, has hitherto continued to be ens rationale, unknown in history … —or—with which we are alone concerned—by equipose and interdependency: the lex equilibrii, the principle prescribing the means and conditions by and under which this balance is to be established and preserved, being the constitution of the state. (Works, pp. 10:23)

“Antagonistic powers” within the constitution itself maintain balance and preserve the English nation from the kinds of “disturbance” (i.e., revolutions and wars) that had recently occurred in Europe (Works, p. 10:23).

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These powers, or opposing interests in the state, Coleridge labels “PERMANENCE and … PROGRESSION” (Works, p.  10:24). These opposing interests Coleridge claims are embodied in the landed classes and the “Novi Homines,” or rising, mercantile and financially mobile middle classes, respectively (Works, pp. 10:24–5). The goal of the latter, he suggests, is to acquire a sufficient mass of mobile property or personalty to be able to transform it into real property, to acquire titles and hereditary entitlements, and to become “the staple ring of the chain, by which the present will become connected with the past; and the test and evidence of permanency afforded” (Works, p. 10:25). Thus, Coleridge associates each opposing class force with a further opposition embedded within economic and legal discourse. The landed classes derive their power mainly from real property, the others from the mobility and speculative potential inherent in personalty. Thus, their fundamentally opposed and mutually regulating social roles are further manifested in a type of property, a step Coleridge sees as necessary stemming from as far back as the lecture of 1795 when, under the influence of Burke, he theorized that only the backing of property (especially real property) could give the power necessary to any group to maintain power and authority over the frenzied and untutored mob that was the fear of every fledgling democrat (e.g., see Works, p.  1:6). However, Coleridge goes on to suggest that even this fundamental opposition lying at the heart of the state needs regulation. That regulation is provided by the trusteeship of a new group, the “clerisy.” Coleridge describes the clerisy as a “permanent class or order” with the following organization and duties: A certain smaller number were to remain at the fountain heads of the humanities, in cultivating and enlarging the knowledge already possessed, and in watching over the interests of physical and moral science; being, likewise, the instructors of such as constituted, or were to constitute, the remaining more numerous classes of the order. This latter and far more numerous body were to be distributed throughout the country, so as not to leave even the smallest integral part or division without resident guide, guardian, and instructor; the objects and final intention of the whole order being these—to preserve the stores, to guard the treasures, of past civilization, and thus bind the present with the past; to perfect and add to the same, and thus to connect the present with the future; but especially to diffuse through the whole community, and to every native entitled to its laws and rights, that quantity of knowledge which was indispensable both for the

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understanding of those rights, and the performance of the duties correspondent. (Works, pp. 10:43–4)

In short, the clerisy are guardians of knowledge and culture who disseminate and maintain cultural values over time. They are a conglomerate body with a permanence established through legal institutionalization who control both real and cultural property or “nationalty” and can stop it from being alienated, transformed, and destroyed—this property is their source of power and authority, analogous to the realty and personalty held by the Landed and Mercantile classes, respectively. An important distinction, however, between these groups and the clerisy is that the latter do not hold their nationalty for their own good but for the use of the nation— they “preserve” and “guard” these national treasures for the people’s enjoyment. This division between ownership and enjoyment is a pattern analogous to that found in the legal concept of trust. The technical idea of a trust does not appear early in Coleridge’s work. Perhaps the first notice he takes of it (in the context of fiduciary relationships) is in the Watchman article on the case of Docksey v. Panting. In a report partially or completely written by Rev. John Edwards, the Watchman describes Thomas Erskine’s speech on behalf of the plaintiff in a case of fiduciary breech, in which an apothecary (Panting, the defendant) convinced Peter Garrick, the senile brother of David, to revise his will and bequeath all his estate to the defendant. In the report, as Garrick is described in terms of his brother’s famous portrayal of Lear, Panting’s violation of the brother becomes somewhat extravagantly described as a violation of the actor and, moreover, as a violation of the actor’s work done in the cause of bringing Shakespeare to the stage. Fiduciary breech becomes the violation of a cultural inheritance. Coleridge was at least impressed by Erskine’s speech, and we may perhaps interpret Erskine’s moral outrage at the fiduciary breach as Coleridge’s own (Works, p. 2:142 n2). Yet, although Coleridge does not more fully explore his interest in fiduciary relationships until Church and State itself, the prevalence of trusts in the contemporary social and legal spheres may have suggested to him the utility of the trust as a metaphor governing relationships between clerisy and nationalty. The trust had its heyday through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, finding its strongest expression in the desire of the landed gentry to restrict alienation of real and (to a lesser extent) personal property in their heirs. Although the doctrine of estates had always applied to land,

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allowing the establishment of tenures less than the fee simple, such as the fee tail and life estate, the common law decision allowing entails to be barred had short-circuited the utility of these lesser tenures to restrict alienation in heirs (see Capell’s Case, 76 Eng. Rep. 134 (K.B. 158 1)). Unlike the fee simple (which allows full rights to the owner to, e.g., sell the property), the fee tail estate bound the current holder of that interest to alienate the property only to the heirs of his body. Thus, barring the entail (the “tail” being the restriction to the descendants) essentially converted the fee tail to a fee simple. After that decision, an individual with a fee tail could freely alienate property, not just mortgage it to the hilt. Real property could be traded like a commodity. However, the trust embedded at the heart of the legal structure known as the “strict settlement” could solve this problem. Schematically, a strict settlement was the granting of a life estate to a son (usually a groom on the occasion of his wedding) with a remainder to his unborn heirs with the provision that, should the groom’s estate determine or end (e.g., he tried to sell it) prematurely (i.e., before his death), the land would go into trust for the remainder of the groom’s life and then devolve to the groom’s male heirs. The trust was necessary because the life estate to the groom (remainder to his heirs) was considered to create a fee tail in the groom, a fee tail with only a contingent remainder (to unborn children) which was barrable at common law—that is, without the trust, the groom actually got a fully alienable fee simple with no guarantee that he would keep the land in the family. Thus, the trust was crucial to ensuring that the family dynasty remained intact between generations. Only the imposition of a trust to maintain the contingent remainders (to the unborn heir or heirs) enforced absolutely the will of the grantor. Lawyers developed the strict settlement (with the vital trust element) as a reaction to the unfortunate effect of the barrable remainder in order to fulfill the desire of their clients to control property dynastically. Thus, the trust (in both the strict settlement and in the executorship) allowed the creation of a type of property that could be effectively controlled by the dead, one in which (when necessary) the legal title was separated from the beneficial ownership, entailing the preservation of the property for future generations (Spring 1988, pp. 454–60). The strict settlement was the (virtually) sole vehicle through which the landed classes were able to and did control the devolution of real property through a series of generations (from the 1700s through the early twentieth century). The reason that a trust was so effective in maintaining this control from beyond the grave was because its administration and the

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legal title to the trust property resided with one party (the trustee or trustees), while the equitable benefit or enjoyment of the property resided with the trust beneficiaries according to the dictates of the trust instrument as administered within the conscience of the trustees. The conscience of the trustee was that which bound him to follow and supplement the orders of the deceased and administer the trust property fairly according to the instrument’s dictates (in the case of a strict settlement, this was often a bare or simple trust without restrictions save on alienation). Thus, the trust enabled control beyond the point of alienation and allowed a grantor the same control over personal as real property. Furthermore, the trust maintained an immortal conscience which ensured the controlled and proper devolution of this inheritance. In a very strong sense, eighteenth-­ century lawyers were dealing in estates practice with the very same legal theoretical issue Dicey struggles with in his characterization of the rule of law: To what extent can the past control the future? If the principle of parliamentary sovereignty entails that no parliament can ever control a future parliament, then the certainty and stability of law required for a robust rule of law to exist seems to dissipate. Writing at the same time as the rise of a robust systematic reliance on legal precedent, Coleridge therefore begins to create a system of historical conservation and reading regulation analogous to what then begins to develop in the legal sphere to regulate the reading of precedent and legislation (although it is certainly the case that lawyers had been concerned to systematize and regulate the reading of legislation specifically for some time, as evidenced in the Hardy trial). If the strict settlement could allow the past to control the future (to some extent) in order to preserve the heredity of a family, could not a concept analogous to the trust, the clerisy and its sense of history, also provide that stability craved by a rule of law expressed through and sustained in literature? In suggesting that the clerisy holds the nationalty in trust, Coleridge invokes a form of legal control intermediate between those available to realty and personalty. Trust can encompass and combine both forms of property. Metaphorically, therefore, the clerisy can knit together realty and personalty, upper and middle class, noble and merchant, permanence and progression—past and future. Above all, the trust was a vehicle for enabling the will of the past to be manifest in the present and into tomorrow. It was a means of control partly fixed and partly adaptable to particular circumstances based on the conscience of the trustee. By “constituting” a “trust” (which is still a technical term referring to trust formation) out of public

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and private property for administration by the clerisy, Coleridge implies that the clerisy itself will become the embodiment of historical and traditional ideology that will both guide and be modified in accord with the conscience of the trustees. Due to the construction of the constitution itself, insofar as the nation was required to listen to the clerisy’s containing dictates, the nation would come to express the clerisy’s conscience, an echo of the past that determined the alteration of the political form in years to come and guide the will of the people into appropriate political, literary, or religious expression. The clerisy is thus “an essential element of a rightly constituted nation, without which it wants the best security alike for its permanence and its progression” (Works, p.  10:69). The clerisy becomes the mechanism through which the regulation of convention in lyric may be projected into the public sphere: only through this trusteeship function can the imagination of individual subjects be regulated so as to contain its inherent radical potential. Historically informed and poetically inclined (and prophetically close to the sublime source of God’s eternal language and law), the clerisy project the “cottaged vale” onto the political landscape at large. The practical function of the clerisy Coleridge himself demonstrates in Church and State: Coleridge as interpretive guide becomes a representative of the Clerisy and acts to direct his reader’s act of judgment by uttering a body of traditional cultural and academic knowledge necessary both for the reading of this one bill and for the exercise of discretion by any large body of people that decides the future state of the law, the constitution, and the nation. In doing this, Coleridge creates an institution designed to safeguard the framework of society, a constitutional function Coleridge suggests the common law judges have failed to uphold. Historical sources for Coleridge’s notion of the clerisy are many, but they are often ones that tie the clerisy to the interpretation and application of the law. One example is in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy in 1818, in particular in his description of the Pythagoreans. In his Second Lecture, recorded in the Ferer manuscript as having been given on December 28 1818, Coleridge calls Pythagorus the “first philosopher,” describing him in terms remarkably similar to those he would apply to the clerisy a decade later in the Constitution of Church and State. Pythagorus was of a wealthy but middle-class background, having been raised in a trading town, a center of commerce that provided him with opportunity to converse with mariners, to travel and see much of the known world (Works, p.  8:i:65). On return, he immigrated to Southern Italy because

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the political climate under the dictator Polycrates would, he felt, create “factions and revolutions inconsistent with his purpose,” and hoped to begin a broad-ranging project of education (Works, p. 8:i:69). Through appearing disinterested and objective, he convinced first the highest ranks of people, but eventually even the lowest, that their current miseries arose from ignorance. Although the people requested that he provide them with constitutions or modes of government, he refused, claiming that they must find their own form of government which could not be instigated or continued without self-reformation. To encourage this self-reformation, he created schools in which the carefully selected pupils were trained in morality and self-discipline, only then being offered some of the master’s secret truths so as to prepare their minds for the greater truths that they would discover on their own. Coleridge describes this as the method of “moral politics,” in which the student does not become mastered by received wisdom, but has an inner principle awoken that exerts a self-­ governing force to cover multiple future situations (see Works, p. 8:i:70 n84 for the sources of this idea). These students would then leave the school and participate in the two great ends of the Pythagorean method— to prepare men to be governed and to govern. Consequently, many cities took all their magistrates from the ranks of the Pythagoreans. However, in pursuing rulership the Pythagoreans began to neglect education, and therein lay the seeds of their own destruction—unprepared for self-­ government, roused by demagogues, the people rebelled against this perceived privileged, prosperous, and exclusive organization. It disintegrated (Works, p. 8:i:71). Coleridge saw the Girondins of the 1795 Moral and Political Lecture suffer this fate, and it is anxiety over this doom which leads to his admonitions to the clerisy for restraint in the 1829 Church and State. The role of the clerisy, insofar as it is similar to that of the Pythagoreans, is to govern through a dissemination of knowledge that awakens appropriate modes of thought and discretion. A further source Coleridge expresses for the clerisy is in the Levites, described in the Second Lecture on Revealed Religion as “the Lawyers as well as the Priests of the Country” whose interest it was “to make up Quarrels and prevent lawsuits to the utmost of their Power” (Works, p.  1:137). Moreover, they were “teachers in order to keep the People free from Idolatry, and they were directly appointed by Moses” (Works p. 1:137). As he states in Church and State, the role of the Levites in arbitrating disputes and maintaining cultural tradition was part of the “perfection of the machinery” of the Hebrew

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state. Their function in that ancient nation is analogous to the one Coleridge propounds in his treatise (Works, pp. 10:34, 32–5.). Whether the clerisy is a caste of Greek philosopher kings who govern and judge according to a principle of morality woken within them by the study of moral rules and self-discipline or a priestly order that both teaches and maintains a traditional mosaic law while applying it to resolve disputes between citizens, Coleridge often specifically stresses the legalistic nature of their guardianship: they help in the permanence and progression of “laws, institutions, tenures, rights, privileges, freedoms, obligations” (Works, p. 10:53). In at least one draft he also states their role is to train up the populace into “legality” and “the obligations of a well calculated Self interest” (Works, pp. 10:213–14). This role of embodying and expressing a traditional knowledge to guide a public (often legal) exercise of discretion is very similar to that described by Blackstone as the role of the common law judge. For Blackstone, the royal judges are the arbiters of an unwritten common law “discovered” by applying reason to tradition: “They [the judges] are the depositary of the laws; the living oracles, who must decide in all cases of doubt, and who are bound by an oath to decide according to the law of the land. Their knowledge of the law is derived from experience and study … and from being long personally accustomed to the judicial decisions of their predecessors” (Blackstone 2001, p. 1:69). This “law of the land” of which the judges are depository is a law supposedly common to us all evidenced by established tradition: in our law the goodness of a custom depends on it’s [sic] having been used time out of mind; or, in the solemnity of our legal phrase, time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. This is it that gives it its weight and authority; and of this nature are the maxims and customs which compose the common law. (Blackstone 2001, p. 1:67)

Thus, steeped in a knowledge of tradition maintained and supplemented by the written rules of past decisions, the judge speaks as the member of an institutionalized community that does not innovate so much as gradually perfect the expression of a supposedly complete and stable ground of justice: For it is an established rule to abide by former precedents, where the same points come again in litigation; as well to keep the scales of justice even and

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steady, and not liable to waver with every new judge’s opinion; as also because the law in that case being solemnly declared and determined, what before was uncertain, and perhaps indifferent, is now become a permanent rule, which it is not in the breast of any subsequent judge to alter or vary from, according to his private sentiments. (Blackstone 2001, p. 1:69)

Blackstone, like Coleridge, sees this role as maintaining the coherence and balance of the constitution. As Stanley Katz argues in his introduction to a modern facsimile edition of the Commentaries, Blackstone conceived of the royal judges as guardians of the constitution, “constitution” at that time being defined as all the laws of the nation. Existing outside the tripartite structure of English government, the judges nevertheless played an important role in keeping the balance between King, Lords, and Commons (Katz 1979, p. xi). Evidence for this position in Blackstone is implicit but extant. For example, he at one point stresses the independence of judges from the king and his ministers and agents and places this independence in the context of other 1688 reforms that placed the law above the king, such as regulating the laws of high treason and restraining the king’s pardon for impeachments in Parliament (Blackstone 2001, p. 4:433). Here, a century before Dicey, Blackstone articulates his own theory of the rule of law. By safeguarding the law, the judges safeguard the constitutional balance. This is a role Coleridge explicitly discusses in Church and State, suggesting that guarding and expressing the rule of law must now ultimately be taken up by the people in consultation with the clerisy. Citing the 1648 pamphlet “The Royalist’s Defence,” Coleridge acknowledges that the role of judges is to uphold the common law and ensure that parliament follows these laws: Upon the whole the matter clear it is, the Parliament itself (that is, the King, the Lords, and Commons) although unanimously consenting, are not boundless: the Judges of the Realm by the fundamental Law of England have power to determine which Acts of Parliament are binding and which void. (Works, pp. 10:97–8)

However, Coleridge goes on to assert that judges now refuse to fulfill this sacred duty, leaving it to fall to a new institution: [This right] has been suffered to fall into abeyance. [Consequently] the potency of Parliament [is the] highest and uttermost, beyond which a court of Law looketh not: and within the sphere of the Courts quicquid Rex cum

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Parliamento voluit, Fatum sit! [Whatever the King with Parliament has decided, let it be Fate]. (Works, p. 10:97)

In an allusion back to the imprisonment of Leveller John Lilburne in 1645 (where his main argument in defence was that the people held ultimate legal authority) (Green 1987, pp. 347–8; see also pp. 307, 311, 336, and 382.), Coleridge maintains that the right to determine law still adheres in the people, quoting the following verse of the Puritan George Withers from that time: Let not your King and Parliament in One, Much less apart, mistake themselves for that Which is most worthy to be thought upon: Nor think they are, essentially, the STATE. Let them not fancy, that th’Authority And Priviledges upon them bestown, Conferr’d are to set up a MAJESTY, A POWER, or a GLORY of their own! Bet let them know, ‘twas for a deeper life, Which they but represent— That there’s on earth a yet auguster Thing, Veil’d tho’ it be, than Parliament and King. (Works, p. 10:10)

This “auguster Thing” is the very readership Coleridge addresses and guides through a reading of the Catholic Relief Bill in Church and State. This is the body he wishes to reform through philosophical argument and poetic example. The relationship Coleridge suggests should exist between clerisy and populace mirrors closely that which Blackstone posits between judge and jury. Looking back to the decision in Bushel’s case (roughly contemporaneous with Lilburne’s trial), Blackstone emphasizes that the judge can no longer control the jury’s verdict—they cannot be imprisoned, starved, or punished for rendering a “wrong” verdict (Blackstone 2001, pp. 3:354–5). The judge’s role is to give directions and advice and to provide the legal context (i.e., the context of custom and history) within which the jury will fit its factual findings to a verdict: When the evidence is all gone through on both sides, the judge in the presence of the parties, the counsel, and all others, sums up the whole to the jury; omitting all superfluous circumstances, observing wherein the main

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question and principle issue lies, stating what evidence has been given to support it, with such remarks as he thinks necessary for their direction, and giving them his opinion in the matters of law arising from that evidence. (Blackstone 2001, p. 3:375)

This is the role Coleridge enacts as clerisy in Church and State. Suggesting that the status of judges as constitutional guardians is now defunct, he lays the power in the people, properly guided by the context of precedent, poetry, and history provided by the clerisy, to keep, safeguard and evolve the constitution in a fit and stable direction. This power, he suggests, is exercised primarily through acts of interpretation, the clerisy holding in trust the cultural keys to appropriate reading. The raison d’être of Church and State is a description of the idea of a constitution so as to provide guidance to Coleridge’s readers (an educated elite) who are like the second level of clerisy who will go out, change, and safeguard the nation. As Coleridge is at pains to point out, the idea of the constitution is something ineffable but which can be manifested (imperfectly) in a political system (Works, pp. 10:18–20, 2). By describing what he believes to be the best manifestation of that idea, Coleridge (like a representative of the first level of clerisy) gives an objective basis on which others can evaluate alterations or additions to the current constitutional manifestation in political organization, including the current Catholic Bill under consideration in Parliament. The commentator in Church and State supplies criteria for judging legislative text, a context that guides the interpretation, a framework for reigning in imagination and unbridled innovation in the act of interpretation. Articulating fundamental constitutional principles, the author of Church and State provides the final criterion by which all particular frames of government must be tried: for only [in the constitution] can we find the great constructive principles of our representative system (I use the term in its widest sense, in which the crown itself is included as representing the unity of the people, the true and primary sense of the word majesty); those principles, I say, in the light of which it can alone be ascertained what are excrescences, symptoms of distemperature and marks of degeneration; and what are native growths, or changes naturally attendant on the progressive development of the original germ, symptoms of immaturity perhaps, but not of disease; or at worst, modifications of the growth by the defective or faulty, but remediless, or only gradually remediable, qualities of the soil and surrounding elements. (Works, p. 10:20)

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Although the metaphor is predominantly medical, it starts with the legal— the clerisy, like a judge, provides the framework in which new ideas will be “tried.” In short, Coleridge envisions the clerisy as not merely guardians of literary or cultural taste, but as authorities who contain a mass of shared knowledge that will enable the “correct” interpretation of literary and legal texts, interpretations that will ensure that the shape and framework of the nation remains stable and intact during any period of social or political change. Coleridge, like a Shakespearean critic, Pythagorean statesman, or Levite, is an oracle of a “common law” on which to base decisions in the political realm, an activity in which he is eager to train his audience. In Coleridge’s mind, there is no separation between legal and literary discourse: being a cultural guardian means to interpret legal and literary writing with equal authority. The clerisy must read Shakespeare and legal precedent with equal facility and authority, for they must embody the capacities of sage and common law judge if they are to guide the polity to express truly the law common to us all and assert a rule of law in which there remains some space for freedom. However, the ultimate principle to guide the interpretation of legal texts arises, Coleridge suggests, in the literary realm. Although his appeal to Shakespeare as moral and legal authority is clear in his letter on the whipping of women, Coleridge again invokes Shakespearean authority as the motto to Church and State itself: THERE IS A MYSTERY IN THE SOUL OF STATE, WHICH HATH AN OPERATION MORE DIVINE THAN OUR MERE CHRONICLERS DARE MEDDLE WITH. (Works, p. 10:10)

Added to the second edition, this adaptation from Troilus and Cressida suggests that “mere chroniclers,” mere historians, cannot fully apprehend the nature of the state. Looking merely at historical precedent is insufficient. The “mystery in the soul of the state” is, by implication, something open to exploration by Shakespeare, Coleridge’s epitome of authorship, and, by extension, open to other authors and those who study their works. The literary sphere and most particularly Shakespeare become for Coleridge the quintessential embodiment of the nationalty, cultural property, and sense of common value that will guide legal and literary interpretation.

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As far back as 1808, Coleridge had been speaking of Shakespeare not as some wild, radical genius who broke the historically established laws of literary propriety, but as a legislator of the true poetic law, as one who expressed the laws of poetry written in the heart of every person which corrected the corrupt manifestation of these laws found in established literary and legal institutions (Works, pp. 5:i:78–9). R.H. Fogle, in his study of “organic unity,” first fully articulated Coleridge’s quest for objective principles of judgment, noting his claim that if there is any basis on which to judge art there must be: in the constitution of the human soul a sense, and a regulative principle, which indeed may be stifled and latent in some, and be perverted and denaturalized in others, yet is nevertheless universal in a given state of intellectual and moral culture; which is independent of local and temporary circumstances. (Fogle 1962, pp. 37–8)

Following in the eighteenth-century tradition of Addison, Johnson, and Blair, Coleridge argues for innate taste that must necessarily be expressed by any sufficiently developed mind living within the requisite “state of intellectual and moral culture.” Like his conceptual forebears, Coleridge attempts to articulate the elements of taste as a set of maxims, a task necessary before they can be used to constitute an objective measure for literary judgment. In his analysis of Shakespeare, the embodiment of the English literary heritage, Coleridge begins to shape (actually find or insert) his guide to judgment under the head of “organic unity,” a concept he develops from Leibniz, Sulzer, Herder, Goethe, and particularly Schlegel. As Fogle shows, Coleridge places organic unity at the center of the human imagination embodying a “fundamental reconciliation of opposites” (Fogle 1962, p. 52). The principle of organic unity, supposedly the pattern and form of life and thought, becomes the criterion of judgment in the aesthetic and legal realms. Coleridge’s reading of Hamlet, for instance, treats the first scene as “a microcosm of structural harmony, containing gradation, transition, development, contrast and variety of intensity and pace” (Fogle 1962, p. 16). The scene is a whole in itself which is repeated throughout the play, all the component parts creating a unified harmonious body which constantly repeats itself in miniature. Within any artistic work is the germ or seed from which it grows in a complex, fractal design, ever-repeating the pattern of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis which is the reconciliation of opposites Coleridge sees as the essential form of

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this seed: While the nebulous concept of “organic unity” in truth supplies no more objectivity to the process of judgment than the politically driven criteria Coleridge himself decries, the concept does have a putative English history, in Shakespeare—a history giving it the supposed cultural context and containment Blackstone (and Coleridge) saw as so crucial to the purity and justice of the common law. The concept of balance and inner harmony Coleridge imports into his conception of the state—those who maintain that balance, the clerisy, thus become an expression of the Shakespearean common law. In literature we find the proper and restrained expression of our interpretive practices and our political imagination. However, in spite of his efforts to anchor reading practices in supposedly objective and culturally common criteria and principles, Coleridge cannot avoid the very innovation and Jacobinical imagination he decries in lawmakers. As with his manipulation of the quotation from Lear used to condemn the whipping of women, in his work he reveals the same predilection to modify as any judge or legislator. The verses Coleridge cites in Church and State and attributes to Withers have Coleridge’s own significant alterations and emendations. In his alteration of line 9 (substituting “ a deeper life” for “a deeper thing,”), deleting part of line 10, omitting lines 11–26, and altering the last two lines from the original (originally “And, know there is, on earth, a greater-thing,/ Than, an unrighteous Parliament or King”), he reveals that the office of clerisy is open to the same attack Bentham levied against the office of common law judge, that he is an inventor, that the common law he guards and discovers is suffused with “fiction,” a “syphilis which runs into every vein and carries into every part of the system the principle of rottenness” (Bentham 1962, p. 5:92). This is the very same accusation that was levied against Sir John Scott’s work as solicitor general during the Regency Crisis and which Coleridge revives in reaction to Scott’s (Lord Eldon’s) Wat Tyler decision in 1801. On November 20, 1788, George III had what was likely the first of his periodic lapses into insanity, instigating a flurry of political activity and legal wrangling to determine who should run the state during his disability. Speaking on the issue of appointing a regent to administer the king’s affairs, namely to open parliament in order that legislation could be passed to appoint a regent, Scott was of the opinion that no regent was needed, that the political capacity of the king was intact (if not his personal capacity) and that the constitution established no precedent for appointing a regent in such a situation. There was especially no precedent, he urged, that the next in the line of succession should be regent; this was the Prince

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of Wales whose politics were greatly at odds with those of his father and the established government. In such a case, Scott argued, it fell to Parliament to appoint whatever regent it saw fit. In concluding his argument to the House, Scott stated: I will therefore vote for the Commission upon the simple ground of preserving the forms of the constitution; and be it remembered that upon the preservation of the forms depends the substance of the constitution. (Campbell 1878, p. 8:405)

Since the king’s “politic capacity” remained intact, it was sufficient to affix the king’s seal to the commission to open parliament so that legislation could be passed appointing the regent. Although the king’s fit of madness passed before it was found necessary to appoint the regent, the opposition’s reaction to Scott’s maneuvering is telling. As Campbell records, Scott’s maneuvering was seen in the twentieth edition of The Rolliad as a kind of prestidigitation that placed his act of legal interpretation on par with MacBeth’s witches’ spell: INCANTATION, or Raising a Phantom; Imitated from “MacBeth,” and lately performed by His Majesty’s Servants in Westminster.

Thunder.—A Caldron boiling. Enter three Witches

First Witch.    Thrice the Doctors have been heard, Second Witch.   Thrice the Houses have conferr’d. Third Witch.   Thrice hath Sydney cock’d his chin,         Jenky Cries—Begin, begin. First Witch.    Round about the caldron go,         In the fell ingredients throw.         Still born foetus, born and bred         In a lawyer’s puzzled head,         Hatch’d by ‘Metaphysic Scott,’         Boil thou in th’enchanted pot. All.        Double, double toil and trouble;         Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

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Second Witch.   Skull, that holds the small remains         Of old Camden’s addle brains;         Liver of the lily’s hue,         Which the Richmond carcass grew;         Tears which, stealing down the cheek         Of the rugged Thurlow, speak;         All the poignant grief he feels         For his sovereign—or the Seals;         For a charm of powerful trouble,         Like a hell-broth, boil and bubble. All.       Double, double toil and trouble;         Fire burn, and caldron bubble. Third Witch.    Clippings of Corinthian brass         From the visage of Dundas;         Forg’d address, devis’d by Rose,         Half of Pepper Arden’s nose;         Smuggled vote of City thanks,         Promise of insidious Banks;         Add a grain of Rollo’s courage,         To inflame the hellish porridge. First Witch.    Cool it with Lord Kenyon’s blood.         Now the charm is firm and good. All.       Double, double toil and trouble;         Fire burn, and caldron bubble.         Enter Hecate, Queen of the Witches. Hecate.      Oh! well done! I commend your pains,          And ev’ry one shall share i’ th’ gains. (Cited in Campbell 1878, p. 8:409)

Campbell adds that Lord Belgrave likewise satirized Scott’s efforts in the following lines: With metaphysic art his speech he plann’d, And said—what nobody could understand. (Campbell 1878, p. 8:410)

Many began to see Scott as one who dissembled and used his legal authority to disguise decisions made on more arbitrary and less legally consistent and coherent grounds; moreover, they saw Scott’s act of legal interpretation as associated with a kind of literary imaginative flight of fancy—he created and manipulated precedent. Published in The Rolliad in 1789, the MacBeth satire implies Scott’s exercise of “legal judgment” is imaginative,

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fickle, arbitrary, and unbounded by any considerations of precedent. Scott is here satirized as a kind of original author—he makes a “stillborn” something from nothing, or at most from a hodgepodge of trivial and unrelated ingredients stirred in an “enchanted pot.” This accusation of invention Coleridge himself picked up and levied against Scott in 1801. Poking fun at Scott in a note to “An Ode to Addington” printed in The Morning Post of May 27, Coleridge alludes to the one-time prosecutor’s ability to play fast and loose with interpretive rule: Sir J. Scott, the present Chancellor, is the only enlightened expounder of prophecies. He foretold the fate of the East India Bill, from Revelations; and the condemnation of Horne Tooke and Hardy, from the celebrated Act of Edward III. His brother, Sir William, if we may venture to judge from his profound and mysterious elucidatory comments on ordination and marriage, may be joined in this sacred office. (Works, p. 3:i:264)

Although Coleridge here satirizes Scott, Lord Eldon, as a prophet, the central message, that Eldon’s exercise of judicial discretion is arbitrary and despotic, is a serious one. Equity, claims Coleridge in an attack on Eldon’s inequitable stance during the Bullion Controversy, is supposed to be “equal justice for all mankind, whether authorized by law or not” (Works, p.  3:iii:12). Justice for Coleridge is that which arises from reading law within its historical and institutional context—it must be read within a system or it will merely express the desires of the interpreter and threaten the foundations of the rule of law. What Coleridge sees Eldon doing is a kind of wrong-headed “prophecy”: he engages in a form of literary interpretation that is unbound by anything but his own predilection and, as a consequence, is satirized as always reading a text incorrectly. Although, in Church and State, Coleridge designs a constitutional balance guarded by cultural trustees, trained to find and express a “common law” that contextualizes and grounds public exercises of discretion, his manipulation of his own precedents reveals them to be just as groundless and “imaginary” as the common law expounded and preserved by the common law judges the clerisy are supposed to replace. Coleridge is trying to be the Ancient Mariner, guiding his audience’s interpretation. He is trying to be the glossator, supplementing and contextualizing the signs before his readership. However, he is really the Wedding Guest, wandering outside textual bounds, driven by his own imagination and desire. Although in

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developing a cultural trust to guide acts of reading Coleridge attempts to both enable and contain acts of imagination and innovation, he can’t because he lacks poetic faith. If, as Santoro, Zolo, and Thompson suggest, the rule of law can produce real justice according to the extent in which the polity believes in its efficacy, then Coleridge’s rhetorical tour de force in Church and State may equally attempt to invoke a similar self-incarnation. As Scott and Eyre argued in the Hardy trial, political innovation noised abroad may gather to it a following and may institutionalize itself and usurp power from older forms of government. As influential as Coleridge’s ideas were, they didn’t catch on, perhaps due to the revolution that lay at their core. A Moderate Radical For Coleridge, the Hardy trial signaled not only that radical expression needed a haven (a “cottag’d vale”) in which to circulate and ferment free from government censure, that the citizen needed an ideal guide to subjectivity under the rule of law, but also that print media, circulating ideas outside the regulatory jurisdiction of such a haven, could lead to uncontrollable and violent consequences. That Coleridge invoked notions of trust and common law to ground and control what he saw as an otherwise unbounded capacity in the public to exercise political discretion (through acts of reading) and realize on that discretion in political reform does not make him an apostate to an early radicalism but a consistently moderate radical who, up through the writing of that supposedly most conservative of political tracts, The Constitution of Church and State, was calling for often extreme constitutional reform. Although, like Eldon and all practitioners of a common law process relying on the “discovery” of a universal morality through the investigation of precedent, Coleridge often performs a sleight-of-hand, inventing rather than “discovering” rules of conduct, such activity makes him more, not less radical—he becomes a radical in conservative clothing, invoking an ideology of tradition to cover what began and ended as an exercise in political innovation and imagination. This may make him seem a manipulator and rhetorician, but he was in good company, and, in the final analysis, it is just as easy to characterize his invocation of tradition and precedent as an appropriation of rather than a collusion with conservative government strategies to forestall reform. The blatant radicalism of Paine, Spence, Thelwall, and Lee had gained nothing

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for the reformist cause but persecution, execution, and transportation. Coleridge’s attempts at more measured innovation couched within an ideology of tradition and common law seems a logical reaction to the effects of government force exerted on the radical movement in the 1790s. These developments make him not apostate, but English, at the center of his culture and time. While radical expression needed protection from government tyranny, Coleridge was perhaps forced to recognize that radical expression needed also to be restrained. Although it may have been as vain an attempt as poetic radicalism, Coleridge’s drive toward the regulation of interpretive innovation places his aesthetic practice squarely within a common law tradition that both sought to produce justice and ultimately formulated the rule of law. However, that repeated traces arise in his work regarding an inability to control his own interpretive acts (or a readership constructed through his poetic paradigm) suggests he at least intuits the insights of William Blake, that maybe a lack of regulation, context, and propriety in the act of interpretation is something to be embraced, that from this reality of “perpetual revolution” may still spring the potential for a stable political subject and legal regime.

References Anon. 1793–1813. The British critic. London: F. And C. Rivington. ———. 1802. Review of De L’Influence attribuee aux Philosophes, aux Francs-­ Macons, et aux Illumines, sur la Revolution de France by J. Mournier. Edinburgh Review 1: 7–8. Baker, J.H. 1990. An introduction to English legal history. 3rd ed. Boston: Butterworths. Barrell, John. 2000. Imagining the king’s death. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bentham, Jeremy. 1962. The works of Jeremy Bentham. 11 vols. Edited by John Bowring. New York: Russell & Russell. Blackstone, William. 2001. Commentaries on the laws of England in four volumes. 9th ed. London: Cavendish. Brown, Huntington. 1945. The gloss to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Modern Language Quarterly 6: 319–324. Campbell, John. 1878. Lives of the lord chancellors and keepers of the great seal of England. 10 vols., 7th ed. New York: Cockcroft. Cave, Edward. 1987. The best of the Gentleman’s Magazine 1731–1754. Edited by E.A. Reitan. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.

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Coleridge, S.T. 1969–. S.T. Coleridge collected works. 16 vols. Edited by Kathleen Coburn. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Eilenberg, Susan. 1992. Strange power of speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and literary possession. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Empson, William, and David Pirie, eds. 1972. Coleridge’s verse: A selection. London: Faber and Faber. Fletcher, Sir William. 1758–. Judge Fletcher’s charge. In Annual register of world events: A review of the year 1814. London: Longman’s, Green & Co. Fogle, Richard Harter. 1962. The idea of Coleridge’s criticism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gahan, Daniel. 1995. The people’s rising: Wexford 1798. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. Green, Thomas Andrew. 1987. Verdict according to conscience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hess, Scott. 2001. The wedding guest as reader: “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” as a dramatization of print circulation and the construction of the authorial self. Nineteenth-Century Studies 15: 19–36. Hillier, Russell M. 2009. Coleridge’s dilemma and the method of ‘Sacred Sympathy’: Atonement as problem and solution in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Papers on Language & Literature 45: 8–36. Holdsworth, Sir William. 1956–1982. A history of English law. Vol. 17 vols. London: Methuen. Jeffrey, Sir Francis. 1802. Review of Thalaba the Destroyer, by Robert Southey. The Edinburgh review, 1:73. London: Longman’s, Green & Co. Katz, Stanley N. 1979. Introduction to Blackstone’s Commentaries, iii–xiii. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Keane, Patrick. 1994. Coleridge’s submerged politics: The Ancient Mariner and Robinson Crusoe. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Kitson, Peter. 1996. Coleridge, the French Revolution and the Ancient Mariner: A reassessment. Coleridge Bulletin, n.s. 7: 30–48. McGann, Jerome J. 1981. The meaning of the Ancient Mariner. Critical Inquiry 8: 35–67. Modiano, Raimonda. 1977. Words and ‘Languageless’ meanings: Limits of expression in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Modern Language Quarterly 38: 40–61. ———. 2001. Historicist readings of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the sciences of life, ed. Nicholas Roe, 271–296. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murphy, Michael. 2002. John Thelwall, Coleridge and the Ancient Mariner. Romanticism 8: 62–75. Musgrave, Sir Richard. 1995. Memoirs of the different rebellions of Ireland from the arrival of the English. 4th ed. Edited by Steven W.  Myers, and Dolores E. McKnight. Fort Wayne, IN: Round Tower Books.

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Perkins, David. 1996. The ‘Ancient Mariner’ and its interpreters: Some versions of Coleridge. Modern Language Quarterly 57: 425–448. Spring, Eileen. 1988. The strict settlement: Its role in family history. Economic History Review 2nd ser. 41(3): 454–460. Stillinger, Jack. 1992. Multiple versions of Coleridge’s poems: How many Mariners did Coleridge write? Studies in Romanticism 31: 127–146. Wall, Wendy. 1987. Interpreting poetic shadows: The gloss of the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Criticism 29 (2): 179–195.

CHAPTER 5

Blake’s Perpetual Revolution

Emmanuel Joseph (Abbé) Sieyès, whose “Qu’est-ce que le tiers-état?” to a great extent radicalized the direction of the nascent French Revolution, argued that while monarchical power necessarily became circumscribed by its encounters with historical and social forces, the sovereign nation’s authority had no predetermined constraint: it could become whatever was needed and imagined (Sieyès 1789, p.  1). Unlike Coleridge, Sieyès felt that political innovation in the aftermath of revolution need not be bound by context or history. This was the paradox at the heart of Dicey’s theorizations of the rule of law and central to the distinction between English and European Law (see Zolo 2010, pp.  7–18 and Portinaro 2010, pp. 353–5): How could a sovereign parliament be bound by tradition or a range of interpretive practices? Although the notion of unbound and violent innovation was an oversimplification of the French Revolution perpetuated in Britain by such influential figures as Edmund Burke (especially in the near-hysteria of his Letter to a Noble Lord), it was a radical prospect seemingly expressed in the American “experiment” and in the French constitutional debates (an apparent inconstancy evidenced by four distinct constitutions in the first ten years of the Republic: Boyron 2013, pp. 7–10). Excited by the prospect of revolutionary change, the Coleridge of the 1790s nevertheless expressed concern with this unrestrained potential of the political imagination; however, a powerful poetic embodiment of this more unrestrained ideal of the rule of law can be found in the prophecies of William Blake. From Coleridge’s efforts to both protect and control the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. L. Barr, Romanticism and the Rule of Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74878-4_5

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radical expression of the imagination, we turn now to Blake and his more revolutionary and unfettered characterization of his readers’ interpretive and political potential. Blake’s class experience may have led him to conclusions similar to those of E.P. Thompson, that law may be the servant of the ruling elite but nevertheless expresses an ideology equally binding on that elite, creating a space in which the disenfranchised can instigate conflict to assert and create rights and freedoms. This space of conflict and autonomous imagination can be found in Blake’s work, but it is a space he threatens to explode.

Toward a New Justice: “The Proverbs of Hell” In the opening plates of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake sets forth the “Argument” for a program of religious and political subversion that would guide him into the next decade and beyond. Here he tells an allegorical story of political and legal displacement that he proposes to set right: the “villain” has driven the “just man” to “barren climes” where he now “rages” like a madman against the assumed “mild humility” of those who have supplanted him. As Blake suggests in the following plates, these villains are none other than priests who created a system to enslave those around them. He goes on to explain that the primary mechanism used by these priests to exile this “just man” has been the Bible: through the interpretation of these “poetic tales” (pl. 11)1 they have created an ethical framework that condemns rage and energy as evil, even labels it as “insanity” (pl. 6), and lauds reason and passivity as good (pl. 4). The process whereby the poetic genius that initially inspired biblical stories establishes this inverted and rigid system Blake describes on plate 12: once written down (and presumably canonized and “arranged into libraries,” as claimed on plate 15), a “priesthood” inevitably arises to interpret those words in restrictive ways used to enslave the general populace. Thus does genius become law. In the concluding portions of the work, Blake announces two strategies for undoing this priestly death grip on the minds of the nation: a method of “infernal reading” and the production of a “Bible of Hell.” For an example of the process and effects of “infernal reading,” one need look no farther than the “Memorable Fancy” of plates 17–20, in which an angel leads the speaker through a mill to reveal an infernal scene of impending damnation. Assuming the speaker is one of the “vulgar” commonly controlled by priestly ideology, the angel determines the speaker’s place of eternal punishment as between the “black & white spiders”

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(pl. 18) of this Dantesque Hell expected through traditional biblical interpretation and used to extract strict moral obedience according to the priestly code; however, the speaker’s mind is too strong to be controlled— he perceives the scene to be of a harper sitting and singing by a riverside. He dismisses the angel’s “metaphysics” (pl. 19) easily and substitutes for it a vision of original creativity and inspiration: the Davidian harper is an embodiment of Godly “Poetic Genius,” according to the Ezekiel of plates 12 and 13. Through his refusal to be co-opted into the angel’s ideology, the speaker could be said to “read” the angel’s phenomena in a different and “diabolical” way. Concrete objects within the sequence transform into books (the “skeleton of a body” taken away from the scene turns out to be Aristotle’s metaphysics, pl. 20), suggesting that the entire scene may be the bodying forth of textual constructions and ideologies. Through a reinterpretation of the physical embodiment of the angel’s conventional ideology, the speaker comes closer to poetic inspiration and artistic genius, genius that could be expressed in the singing of a harper or the creation of a Bible of Hell to counter or supplant that currently misused by the priesthood. Contrary reading and contrary writing will undermine the basis of priestly power and redeem the “just” but raging man from his exile. This basic understanding of the program Blake sets out in what has been traditionally regarded as a kind of prospectus to his later works suggests a relationship between poetry, religion and morality, but also leaves out a great deal. How does poetry become religion? How does religion become morality? How does morality control and “enslave?” Most importantly, exactly how can contrary reading and writing undermine power in the real world that exists beyond the allegorical? To attempt to answer parts of these questions, my investigation will begin with an assertion, that Blake’s program is not merely to rescue some random individual or even some embodiment of all enslaved under the dominion of priestly authority, but specifically to rescue the “just man,” that is, a man who embodies an original ethical code that existed before the priesthood. Blake’s opening allegory suggests that diabolical reading and inspired poetic writing will reclaim not merely a people but a sense of justice lost under state religion. Like Hobbes’ Leviathan rising from a Hell created and maintained by religious ideology (pl. 18), the state rises from the priestly ethical system and legislates laws to ensure obedience to it: poetry has become law, and, consequently, Blake must undermine not only the Bible but the legal system it supports.

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Much of the legal analysis of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell has been done in the context of antinomianism. Jeanne Moskal’s Blake, Ethics and Forgiveness (1994) is the most extensive treatment of that ideology in the text. She notes that antinomianism arose after the English Civil War as a way of translating political struggle into religious terms and held, among other things, that the greatest good was the breaking of law, as that led to freedom. Moskal rightly traces elements of this in the Marriage, particularly in the characterization of Christ on plate 23 as epitomizing morality when he transgresses divine law. As Blake plainly states, “no virtue can exist without breaking [the] ten commandments.” Yet, it is possible to overstate the antinomianism of the text and to end with a characterization of it as merely antinomian. As Moskal herself suggests, antinomians often felt that God had no existence except in the human heart, that the world was moving to a third dispensation (to supplant those of the Old and New Testament) that was written in and on the heart (18). As antinomian, Blake is not merely concerned with the destruction of conventional ideology but with its replacement. In the Marriage, he not only announces the beginning of an ideological conflict with the current system of injustice, but also an interest in replacing it with another system, one to which the “just man” may return after long wandering. One of the more remarkable stylistic features of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is the inclusion near its beginning of a long sequence of proverbs Blake largely invented.2 The series stretches for four plates and is perhaps the single most recognizable element of the work. These “Proverbs of Hell” are Blake’s first nascent attempt to describe a Third Dispensation and the relationship he sees between his writing, wisdom literature, and the law. In the introduction to the Proverbs, he states that he has been to another place, Hell, a place of energy, genius, “torment and insanity” and wants to give his readers a taste of their ideology, a sense of the character of Hell’s people and the “wisdom” they embody (pl. 6). Holstein and Villalobos both relate Blake’s proverbs to a resurgence and modernization of the Old Testament wisdom tradition at the time Blake composed The Marriage (Holstein 1975, pp. 26–41; Villalobos 1990, pp. 246–59). Villalobos relates Blake to Lowth’s discussion of proverbs in Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, concluding that, although the Book of Proverbs exerted only a moderate influence on Blake, his later tendency is to use gnomic or proverbial phrases to interrupt narrative flow and change notes or scenes in the prophecies such as Milton or Jerusalem. Villalobos also sees Blake as parodying the tradition discussed by Holstein, in which men like Lavater

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and Trussler “reiterated conventional understanding of the Old Testament letter of the law” by explicating biblical and popular proverbial sayings to a mass audience (p. 257). Although Villalobos does not extrapolate on the relationship between proverb, wisdom, and law, the connection is important for Blake’s religious and political radicalism. As the Book of Proverbs itself states, the pedagogical goal of proverbs is to confer “instruction of wisdom, justice, and judgment, and equity” (1:3). Similar to the Devil, who writes a verse of Chatterton, as God did for Moses, “on the sides of the rock, with corroding fires” (pl. 6–7), Blake inscribes his proverbs into tablets of copper, used in his idiosyncratic printing process: these proverbs are at least impliedly presented as a new kind of decalogue to promulgate new laws at odds with those currently infesting public space. As one modern scholar reports, the relationship between wisdom literature such as the proverb and law is a very close one. In Wisdom and Law in the Old Testament, Joseph Blenkinsopp suggests that Israelite law is really just a specialization of “clan wisdom” contained in various forms in the Old Testament (1983, p. 130). In particular, he argues that the “two great rivers” of wisdom and law became combined during the process of scribal professionalization, the publication of Deuteronomy being a highly significant milestone in this process. Deuteronomy equates national wisdom with recognition and observation of the law (Deut. 4:6–7). When Israel ignores the law, it is regarded as foolish (32:28–9) (Blenkinsopp 1983, p. 131). That Book also contains an explicit statement regarding the relationship between wisdom and law, suggesting that earthly law is a revealed, simplified but understandable and observable form of divine wisdom: For this commandment which I command you this day is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, “Who will go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?” But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it. (30:11–14)

As Moses states in his final words:

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The secret things belong to Yahweh our God; but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law. (29:29)

In short, Deuteronomy suggests that law is revealed wisdom; law is that portion of divine wisdom that we are capable of knowing and following (Blenkinsopp 1983, p.  131). Blenkinsopp argues that the scribes who wrote Deuteronomy were involved in a specific historical program of religious and social reform intended to combat state corruption and return the people to a more traditional, agrarian system (p. 99). The Book’s insistence that the laws be studied, explicated, and taught (e.g., 1:5, 4:1, 10, 36, 5:1) as “God-given discipline” (4:36, 8:5, 11:2) that leads to wisdom (4:6) was part of an ideological battle in a political and legal revolution (Blenkinsopp 1983, p. 100). The scribes thus legitimated all the laws of Deuteronomy (including those regarding judge’s conduct, the creation of a system of courts and appeals, the hiring and support of clergy, the setting up of a constitutional monarchy, and the various agrarian laws) by relating them to an original divine “wisdom” of which they were merely an earthly manifestation (pp. 97–8). Blenkinsopp therefore gives a history of the creation of Deuteronomy not unlike the history of Blake’s Marriage—the creation of wisdom literature in response to government corruption in an attempt to reinstigate a set of values and laws now “lost” has a historical, biblical precedent of which Blake might have been aware. Within this rubric, proverbs (one element of wisdom literature) are simply proto-laws, words that come to be transformed into laws that support particular social, ideological, and political programs. Blenkinsopp is a modern scholar, and I have been unable to find evidence that Blake read any contemporary scholar who argued along his lines. Geddes’ translation of the Old Testament stops before he ever gets to the Book of Proverbs, and thus he never discusses their status as either law or wisdom. In his Prospectus, he does more generally characterize the Old Testament as “a code of laws and a system of morality delivered to [both Christians and Jews] from Heaven; the object of their belief and the rule of their conduct” (Geddes 1786, p.  3). An earlier scholar, John A. Edwards, expresses similar sentiments more specifically related to proverbs. In his A Discourse Concerning the Authority of the Bible (1695), he defines a proverb as “like graviter dicta, sentences of great weight and importance, called by the hebrews mashal,” as “any eminent speech or smart saying for the use of life and direction of manners” and as a “moral

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or religious saying that was of singular worth and excellency.” To Edwards, proverbs are “dominatrix sententia, a Speech that hath the Preeminence above others, a Saying of great Authority and Force, and [that] therefore deserves to be highly esteemed by all” (1695, p. 3:381). However, all I can assert with certainty is that Blenkinsopp’s historical analysis of the relationship between wisdom and law accords closely with that suggested by Blake. The transformation of poetic genius and then written language into an ethical system used to coerce and enslave is the story that both Blake and Blenkinsopp tell. Particularly the implied comparison between Blake’s proverbs and the decalogue suggests that he is offering an alternative to the ten basic laws of Christianity, laws that form the essential basis of the contemporary “Bloody Code.” The historical relationship between proverb and law suggests that proverbs may be something less implicated in the dynamics and politics of ideological control. What Blake may do is write a wisdom literature before it turns into law, to give something closer to the divine original, “the secret things [that] belong to Yahweh our God.” However, these are faint indications only. In 1791, before the government resorted to the instrumentality of law to conduct political policy and radical repression, the Proverbs of Hell seem as much to import a cultural as a legal tradition from the paradise called “Hell.” I offer this brief exploration of what the proverbial form may have meant to Blake only to illustrate his early and essential interest with the relationship between poetry, religion, and the ideology of textual interpretation and its expression in earthly law. By closing some versions of the Marriage with the statement, “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression,” Blake does claim that his proverbs and the entire text of the Marriage are implicated in issues of law and justice that were raging at that time. Unlike the ideals of “equality for all” enshrined in the French Constitution (and the American) and in the political rhetoric of Painite radicalism beginning to sweep England, Blake invokes the Aristotelian notion that law must be applied unequally—laws for lions must be (but currently are not) different than laws for oxen. Blake both recognizes and even appears to undermine conventional notions of the rule of law. It would be difficult to read such a phrase in 1791 without linking it to the topic of law, justice, and constitutionalism infusing the public sphere. He gives very few indications at this point regarding how and why his version of law should and must apply unequally, but that he is centrally interested in pursuing the issue seems certain. Blake tries to extend and detail the notions he began to explore in the Marriage. The path he then begins to pursue is broadly analogous to Coleridge’s:

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starting in The [First] Book of Urizen, Blake tries to show how his work might create for itself a jurisdiction in which to dispense a new brand of justice and, after long deliberation, arrives at how a readerly encounter with his work could bring that justice to fruition by reshaping his audience into a collection of unfettered actors. In its radical freedom, such actors will both embody and threaten the rule of law itself.

The Fires of Prophecy Developing his “Bible of Hell” contemporaneously with the English treason trials, Blake searches for his own version of the Coleridgean “safe haven,” a refuge from corrupted law in which the individual might assert freedom of expression and individual autonomy. Unlike Coleridge, Blake looks not to the Machiavellian and Harringtonian paradigm of country living in close connection with nature and a “natural” state of justice, but to the biblical and prophetic tradition. Imagining an encounter with abolitionist and radical Christian poet, William Cowper, Blake reflected on the role that “insanity” might play in defining this safe space: Cowper came to me and said: “O that I were insane always. I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane? I will never rest till I am so. O that in the bosom of God I was hid. You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us all—over us all—mad as a refuge from unbelief. (E 662)

In The [First] Book of Urizen, Blake expands on how madness, legal and prophetic, might disrupt the relations between religion, law, and monarchical authority, to reclaim a radical autonomy of the imagination for himself and his readership that might reestablish divine justice in the earthly realm (see also Erdman 1954 pp. 235, 288; Mee 1992, pp. 2, 162, 163; and Makdisi 2003, pp. 260–312). In Blake’s day, kingship was supported by an interpretation of the Bible that obedience to the monarch’s rule was “one of the general duties of Christianity” (Morris 1998, p. 105). As Blake would say in his annotations to Robert Watson’s Apology for the Bible, all legal codes were “given under pretence of divine command”: he saw monarchy falsely legitimize itself through a putative derivation from scriptural rule (E 618). This understanding of the sovereign’s basis of authority and likely a more general observation of the “squire and parson” basis of English society, led Thomas Paine to observe that any assault on the political and legal establishment

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also required a challenge to biblical hermeneutics.3 Readings of Urizen must take into account the instability of its textual form and the political ramifications of its affinity with higher critical practices; however, it is also important to find within Urizen the means by which it attempts to remove itself from the legal realm Paine sees as supportive of current biblical reading practices, a support the text itself theorizes as the seemingly inevitable ossification of inspired text into tyrannous law. If God’s inspired word could be twisted into a mechanism of oppression, what could save any inspired text from a similar fate? Further, how could any prophet, in an effort to undo such appropriation, escape the fate of a prophet like Richard Brothers, whose voice was silenced by legal prosecution? I will argue that the mechanism for the exemption Blake posits in Urizen is not merely textual instability (an instability institutionally minimized but still found, after all, in the Bible itself) but a device to remove the prophetic text and the inspiration it carries from the legal realm that threatened to co-opt and silence it. This mechanism is nothing short of a representation of the prophet and text as insane. By figuring this exemption for the prophet and his work as the exemption accorded to the insane in law, Blake has the inspired text deny itself any authority—both authority through which the prophet may be prosecuted and authority through which the text itself could petrify into a tyrannous and oppressive law. As Blake would claim many years later, to be mad was to be protected from unbelief and to reside in an inspired “refuge” in “the bosom of God.” The beginnings of this idea can be found in 1794, with Blake finding in the “fires of prophecy” with which Los protects his creation in Urizen a space exempt from the corrupting influence of the legal realm: in the madness of a prophet or a book split and divided against itself could this safe and inspired refuge be found.4 Any reading of Urizen is vexed by the lack of a standard text: all eight copies are different. Moreover, it would not be too extreme to assert that Urizen in large part cannot be read—its narrative and thematic structure are too divided and fragmented. Some critics see such instability as an expression of German Higher Critical Principles filtered to Blake through the Joseph Johnson circle. As Jon Mee summarizes: “There are two basic ways in which The Book of Urizen, The Book of Ahania, and The Book of Los contest the cultural hegemony of the received Bible. First, they refute any notion of ‘manuscript assumed authority’ through their own structural indeterminacy. Secondly, this general feature of Blake’s work interacts strongly with the peculiarities of the treatment of the Bible itself in the

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three poems, which shadow quite closely distinct sections of the Bible in order to parody or subvert them” (Mee 1992, p. 163; see also McGann 1986, pp. 303–24). Mee suggests that, far from signaling “a break with the political commitments of poems like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and America,” this indeterminacy and ironic parody in the later works continues that commitment by attacking the basis of the English social order. Mee spends little time exploring the exact connection between biblical interpretation and legal authority, suggesting only that the Bible was a vehicle promoting an ideology that found a potent manifestation in law itself. However, reading Urizen in light of the Richard Brothers controversy and the shifting nature of kingly authority supplied by Morris gives a more detailed picture. If the act of prophecy, either of supplanting the accepted interpretation of the Bible or of creating new scripture to supplant and compete with the Bible itself, could be viewed as an attempt to insert the prophet above the king and closer to God, then the implementation of the law of sedition and treason (later, of blasphemous libel) to shield the sources of monarchical authority from attack was the legal expression of the Bible’s cultural authority, one providing king and government a justification for rule. Sedition and treason prosecution in large part defined the relationship between textual instability and monarchy. Sedition and treason were seen as not only crimes against the king and state but also as crimes against God. One barrister pointed out in 1795 that the king was a quasi-divine figure to whom “the law attributed immortality and perfection … [and] ascribe[d] to him so great and so transcendent a nature that … the people [were] led to pay him the most awful respect, and to look to him as superior to other beings” (Morris 1998, p. 132). In a 1793 case for seditious words uttered by the dissenting minister William Winterbotham, Crown counsel asserted: “It has been laid down by divine authority, that there is no power but what is derived from the supreme Being—therefore to cry out against the government where there is no occasion, is a crime. And for a man living under mild and equal laws, to preach sedition and discontent, is blasphemy against the majesty of Heaven” (Morris 1998, p. 133). Although this suggests only that seditious and treasonous intent was perceived as blasphemy, it is not a large step to suggest that blasphemy, or any interpretation of the Bible that gave it any political meaning unacceptable to the government, could also be seen as evidence of seditious and treasonous intent. Passages from various state trials around the period of Urizen’s composition suggest that the government was highly sensitive to any

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interpretation of scripture or prophetic invention that bore even a slightly radical message. Winterbotham was indicted and convicted not for delivering a political speech, but for giving a biblical sermon that interpreted scriptural passages in a way that could be construed as having a political meaning. Although the evidence given by prosecution witnesses conflicted drastically with that given by the defense, Exodus 13:8 was supposedly taken as an occasion to comment on how the just and equitable laws established after the Glorious Revolution had now fallen into abuse, threatening the rule of law. In spite of a spirited defense led by Vicary Gibbs, the jury convicted, fined, and imprisoned Winterbotham on two counts of uttering seditious words. The fine (200 sterling with a 500 sterling good conduct surety for five years) and jail time would have ruined him.5 Winterbotham’s double prosecution is one example of government hypersensitivity to scriptural interpretation. George Gordon’s imprisonment for libel in 1787, specifically for using the Bible “for the wicked purpose of promoting mutiny and sedition,” is a more distant but notorious example of this conservative penchant (McCalman 1996, pp. 359–60). Although these cases are in some sense merely particular battles in the broader dissenting debate in which the institutions of king and Church of England were regarded as mutually supporting and mutually vulnerable to any attack on conventional religious doctrine, they are also demonstrations of just how and where dissent met government force: the court of law. The court of law was the locale in which the relationship between biblical authority and monarchical rule was explored and tested. The courts were a government “inquisition” that examined and censured through the mechanism of treason, sedition, and libel law any biblical reading that could possibly undermine the divine status of the monarch (see Morris 1998, p.  122, for Maurice Margarot characterizing a Scottish judge as “grand inquisitor”). Blake’s claim in the Watson annotations that all legal codes are justified by a supposedly divine origin reveals his awareness of the need of legal discourse and government action to defend conventional biblical interpretation. The court was the locus of “state religion.” Thus, if Blake were to practice safely and effectively the kind of inspired reading and interpretation displayed in his prophecies, if he were to find and express his own autonomy and liberal subjectivity, he had to find a way out of court, a way to immunize his prophecies against the religious and political mechanism of treason and sedition law. In 1794, Blake must have anxiously observed the government’s attempts to utilize the potent and potentially far-reaching law of high

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treason to cut off the head of the radical movement. Although, according to Joseph Viscomi’s estimates, the first copies of Urizen were printed in the fall of 1794, that is, before the Thomas Hardy trial itself, Blake may have been influenced by Chief Justice Eyre’s address to the grand jury regarding the Hardy indictment in October of that year (Viscomi 1993, pp. 279–86). Here Eyre expounded his understanding of what it meant to commit high treason, to “compass and imagine the death of the king,” and suggested that any mere picturing in the mind of the king’s death could become treason under certain circumstances: “From the moment that this wicked imagination of the heart is acted upon, that any steps are taken in any manner conducing to the bringing about and effecting the design, the intention becomes the crime, and the measure of it is full” (Howell 1809–1826, p. 24: 201). As William Godwin quickly pointed out in Cursory Strictures, his initially anonymous and widely disseminated reaction to Eyre’s address, construing the law in such a manner gave carte blanche to any jury member to use his own imagination to construe treason from otherwise equivocal acts, acts that could be quite “remote” from any direct king killing. For example, a meeting of civic-minded individuals to discuss parliamentary reform could be construed as a treasonous attempt to create a legislative body to supplant and overawe the existing parliament, such an act being inextricably associated with overthrowing the government and killing the king (Howell 1809–1826, pp. 24: 225–6). Since no one can peer into the mind of another and judge intent or imagination directly, any act could potentially be construed as evidencing, either directly or through a long line of association, an imagination of regicide that was never really there: a mental picture of king killing was hardly needed, since the jury’s construction of overt acts could posit its existence regardless. Godwin argues that in the current political and social climate of radicalism and lurking revolution, imaginations will be even more inclined to interpret acts in the worst possible light, to construe them as evidencing treasonous intent when they were actually directed towards other ends (Howell 1809–1826, pp.  24: 219–20; 222–3). Blake must have found Eyre’s expansive definition of treason highly alarming. Although Godwin suggests only that Eyre’s interpretation puts a “perpetual bar to all associations, delegations, and consultings respecting any species of grievance,” the dangers of publishing such grievances would have been equally obvious (Howell 1809–1826, p. 24: 230). The employment of equivocal and allusive poetic language lay an author wide open to construction of all kinds. Under Eyre’s understanding of the law, any

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literary text could be evidence of a treasonous imagination, and publication an overt act designed to bring that imagination into reality. Scottish sedition trials, English prosecutions for seditious words and high treason—government force exerted against radicalism through a court room instrumentality—this legal pressure fell squarely on radical literature. Writing in 1793 and 1794, Blake needed to find in “the fires of prophecy” a mechanism to deny authorial intent: prophecy vitiated such intent, deferring it to the ultimate fount of inspiration in God. The legal equivalent to such an absence of intent was the defense of insanity that was developing throughout the 1790s and the early nineteenth century. Madness is a motif Blake intentionally invokes in the Urizen narrative, becoming a basic thematic and structural principle of his work. In reaction to aggressive censorship, Blake produces an insane text so divided as to deny its own authority and legal responsibility. Los, the central prophetic figure of Urizen, is mad. Plates 6 and 7 show his rapid decline into insanity when Urizen is torn from his side. Beyond the figural references to his distressed mind (he “wept howling,” he “groans, gnashes,” and in the alternate chapter IVa, he is described as “mad”), Blake suggests that Los has also been literally deprived of “reason” (“Urizen” being a possible pun on the phrase “your reason”). Further, in plate 7, Los is depicted as raving, kneeling, with arms crossed on his chest and hands drawn to the sides of his head as if to dull the sounds of his own uncontrollable anguish. It was not, after all, terribly odd for a prophet to be considered mad. Blake’s vision of Cowper extolling the virtues of prophetic madness accorded with the popular notion that an individual “touched” with insanity was in more direct communication with a higher power. The ideal of Pauline holy madness had been endorsed in the eighteenth century by George Whitefield, a tradition which survived into Blake’s day among New Dissent (Porter 1987, pp. 67, 267). A specific example of this attitude in Blake’s time was the belief of The World’s Doom editor, who, writing in reaction to the Brothers verdict, saw “prophecy, poetic genius, and madness [as] so nearly allied as to be almost indistinguishable” and suggested that madness may in fact be a prerequisite to prophetic ability (Barrell 2000, p. 535). Blake often lamented that “madness” was a label invoked by the uninspired to marginalize true inspiration.  Sir Joshua Reynolds supposedly called “Vague Enthusiasts or Madmen” those who do not agree with his artistic taste (E 647). As Blake later complained: “if the Inspiration is Great, why Call it Madness” (E 642)? This is a theme Blake continued

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until near the end of his career, suggesting in the Laocoon inscriptions that certain nations “are states in which all Visionary Men are accounted Mad Men; such are Greece & Rome: Such is Empire or Tax—See Luke, Ch. 2, v. 1” (E 272). For Blake, the quality of a text that made it either inspired or mad acted as a kind of switch. Those who were themselves uninspired saw inspired work as the product of madness while those who were inspired themselves in turn felt the work’s inspiration. As Blake goes on to say in his Discourses annotations: “Reynolds’ Opinion was that Genius May be Taught & that all Pretence to Inspiration is a Lie & a Deceit, to say the least of it. For if it is a Deceit, the Whole Bible is Madness” (E 642). Blake sees in Reynolds’ wrongheaded and uninspired view of art a mindset that would construe even the foremost example of inspired text as the product of insanity. As Blake asserts in the Descriptive Catalogue, while men like Mortimer were widely considered mad, Blake at least could comprehend his inspired artistry and appreciate his genius (E 636). He saw the perception of his own work in a similar light. In his Exhibition Advertisement, he refers to a supposedly popular notion that his works are “a Madman’s Scrawls” (E 528). In his notebook “Public Address,” Blake suggests that this is an attitude shared by members of his own profession, English engravers: “It is very true what you have said for these thirty two Years I am Mad or Else you are so both of us cannot be in our right senses Posterity will judge by our Works” (E 573). The “madness” of any particular artistic work could act as a selection device: “I am Mad or Else you are.” Those who read the text as the product of madness dismissed the work, while those who saw it as inspired lauded the artist as prophet. Blake invokes notions of madness in Urizen to make a related point. Trapped in Urizen’s world, Los appears mad, especially as pictured on plate 7. Perhaps the most enduring interpretations of Los’ posture there (extant in all versions of Urizen save one) are as visual pun (Los is so severely foreshortened that he has “no body”—that is, is a “nobody”) and as silenced radical (“the visual grammar of manacled men with padlocked lips was … thoroughly absorbed into popular culture”).6 However, no padlock is present; on the contrary, Los’ mouth is opened so wide that one can see he has no teeth or tongue (although a tongue is present in the late copy G and also [unextended] in the 1794 copy J). Far from being a silenced radical, Los seems to make a great deal of (evidently inarticulate) noise. His are the howlings of mad prophecy—stripped of reason and the capacity to render inspiration into understandable signs (with no tongue or teeth one cannot form words), his meaning cannot be understood,

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much like the Urizen text itself. The utterance of pure inspiration without articulation into transmittable and abstract figures sounds and appears very much like madness. Yet, as mad as he may appear, Los is equally a prophet who wishes to communicate, and he must create text for that purpose. As Ian Balfour argues, Blake saw a need for prophecy to have textual form, creating a strict identity between poetry and prophecy (2002, p.  136; see also p.  144). Further, Blake may have looked to the persecution of John Thelwall and other radical orators in 1794 as an indication that writing prophecy was perhaps a more controllable and covert way to manifest political thought than speaking to multitudes. Yet, Urizen illustrates the tragic consequences of prophecy’s codification into law, expressing a fundamental concern with the relationship between inspiration, textuality, and law. Even prior to the text is an image of reading, writing, and judgment that sets the tone for the volume. The title page reveals a bearded figure, reminiscent of Moses, the original receiver of the law and (perhaps in Blake’s estimation) the inventor of the alphabet, writing from the Book of Judgment (as Leslie Tannenbaum claims; see Balfour 2002, p. 144, and Tannenbaum 1982, p. 222). Although Tannenbaum is somewhat unequivocal in his assertion, the title page at least depicts writing as occurring in the shadow of stony tablets, looming like gravestones or the decalogue behind a writing of Urizen. In the course of the narrative, Urizen’s first action after formation is to write text that promulgates a set of rules simultaneously religious, political, and legal: a Book of Brass proclaiming “One King, One God, One Law.” In short, Urizen creates a constitution setting out the organization of the eternal society that precludes political rebellion or prophetic inspiration. These are laws of sedition and treason that ensure that the king, Urizen or George III, remains the fount of all authority in the realm. Comparisons have been made between images of Urizen and George III: both are old despotic lawgivers who dampen political and religious revolt.7 In a possible repetition of the civil war, the eternals rebel and refuse Urizen’s self-originating legal and religious fiat, setting as a fitting guardian over his place of exile the prophet, Los, whose inspiration should act to keep the ossifying forces of law at bay (5:38–6:1). However, if (as in plate 12 of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell) writing is automatically associated with law, with a restrictive set of rules and practices at odds with the mad spirit of inspiration, it would appear that Los’ impending act of prophecy must be doomed.

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The eternals’ victorious rebellion and Los’ subsequent acts of prophecy actually invoke a complex set of legal and higher critical principles entering the public sphere at this time. In the aftermath of the English and American revolutions and in reaction to monumental claims made by legal scholars such as Sir William Blackstone to an underlying logic in the custom of the common law, there were many like Jeremy Bentham, who arose to challenge the normative grounds on which English social organization lay its claim to authority, and to argue that all such authority was in fact self-­ constituted and reliant on the tame complicity of the governed. In his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780; pub. 1789), Bentham conceived of law not as an expression of divine or natural order but as pure speech act: “a law is a command.” It is a communication between those authorized to make laws and those bound to follow them. Blackstone’s common law was an imaginary thing designed to placate the masses into agreeing with the supposed wisdom of custom when, in fact, legal obeisance did and should flow from the simple command of the sovereign. He famously asserted that Ovid’s Metamorphoses could become law if it were promulgated by a body with sufficient authority (excerpted in Bentham 1969, p. 141). As with the figure of Urizen, who seeks authority to command simply on the basis that he has a book that claims such authority, the sovereign’s authority is circular and self-created. As Bentham argues, authorization to make law arises only from the so-called “discoercive” laws, sentences written into constitutions supposedly granting power to make lesser laws by exempting lawmakers from the rule that law must be a command given by one in authority. Thus, law is an illocution based upon a (self-created) illocution, a circularity Angela Esterhammer summarizes nicely: “[For Bentham] the right to make laws is conferred by a law that exempts lawgivers from certain of the laws that apply to the public in general” (2000, p. 69). For Bentham, the lawmaker initially resides in an extralegal position, outside the realm of law and then falls into the legal realm as he is bound by the duties and obligations he creates in the compact with the people. Urizen, separate from the other eternals, tries but initially fails to acquire the requisite legal authority through writing. Through the capacity of text to create and be interpreted to create a monolithic authority, Urizen could succeed just as the church priests have succeeded in erecting a king. Legal authority flows from a primal moment in which the regime seizes power and self-reflexively legitimates itself through the acquiescence of the governed, from an act of reading that is outside the legal realm and which constitutes it: “The ultimate efficient

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cause of all power of imperation over persons is a disposition on the part of those persons to obey: the efficient cause then of the power of the sovereign is neither more nor less than the disposition to obedience on the part of the people” (Esterhammer 2000, p. 70). Thus, authority may only be conferred retrospectively, by the uptake a law receives by the populace supposedly under legal command. Bentham therefore recognizes that the authority of a law itself lies in the rhetorical effect of it as text and how it constructs its author as one empowered to promulgate law that should be obeyed. To remain in power, a sovereign must do everything possible to disguise the fact that authority must be given and cannot be commanded. Law is something that rises up to entrap any and all who allow themselves to be entrapped by it. However, in Urizen, Urizen’s writing is insufficient to convince the eternals of his authority and they rebel. What defeats Urizen’s textual claim to legal authority is the inarticulate and multiple “rage” (4:44) of the eternals. The madness of this conglomerate body and of their chosen, prophetic, representative, Los, is the antidote to petrific and authoritative text. Blake once made a telling assertion regarding the monolithic and authoritative status of Moses, another Urizen-figure, lawgiver, and sovereign: “If Moses did not write the history of his acts. it takes away the authority altogether it ceases to be history & becomes a Poem of probable impossibilities fabricated for pleasure of moderns say but I say by Inspiration” (E 616, cited in Mee 1992, p. 167). Thus, although the “authority” of a monolithic textual figure may have been constructed and exploited by priests and kings to create obedience, the multiple authorship of the Pentateuch still evidenced inspiration. As Elinore Shaffer notes, biblical apologists began (later in the 1790s) to see the multiple authorship not as undermining the Bible’s position as inspired text but as further evidence for it—if so many different people at different times could arrive at similar and congruous conclusions, the verity of their inspiration is mutually supported (1975, pp. 84–5). Although Blake hated the institutional uses to which the Bible had been put (see Mee 1992, p. 167), he saw the inspired nature of that Bible, evidenced through its textual instability and multiple authorship, as very real. Thus, the defeat of Urizen by the eternals also plays out the process of higher biblical criticism: the figure of Moses cedes to a multiplicity of inspired individuals who replace the self-substantiated authority of the sovereign with the authority of God as conveyed through the collective inspiration of the prophets. The Preludium itself gives some indication of the importance of this theme to Urizen, insofar as it announces the book’s status as dictation

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from a divine source and describes the content of that dictation as tracing the “Priests assum’d power” in controlling the signs of religion to create political dominance (2:1ff.). Thus, Urizen places itself immediately within the prophetic tradition of quotation, described by Shaffer and, more recently, invoked by Balfour as the model by which the poet defers authority from the self to another, otherworldly source, in an effort to suggest that his work is truly inspired. Prophecy is the antidote to despotism: to prophesy is to kill the king. However, as soon as Los is moved to inscribe his prophecies, he again gives birth to law. The first utterance made by the otherwise insane and mute prophet is the physical articulation of Urizen as both a figure and a book. Implicated with the writing of books of laws and tyranny from the very beginning, Urizen is recollected and constrained by chains with “numb’ring” (10:18) links (numbered like the verses of Urizen). He is “bound” like a volume and (in the rare chapter IVa) made with “rivets of iron & brass” into a new version of the “Book of Brass,” which he presented to the eternals earlier in the narrative. Los’ creation of Urizen also invokes other images of Blake’s printing process as described by Viscomi. “Sulphureous foam” (10:21) recalls gas bubbles forming during the etching process; the “roll” of the “eternal mind” (10:20) refers to the rolling press (Viscomi 1993, pp. 78–88). The consequence of Los articulating his inspiration is not only the reconstitution of king and law but also the silencing of the prophet. After this writing process, Los’ bellows and hammer fall quiet; his voice is “siez’d” (13:39). Los and Urizen are both now “closed” to all interpretation; the fires of inspiration decay (13:41ff.). Here is an allegory of the ossification of inspired word into law and a playing out of the theme announced in the Preludium. Just as Urizen is later depicted as a despotic pharaoh-like ruler overseeing all the people of the earth, so, in Blake’s estimation, did the language of scripture become exploited, utilized, and petrified into laws that legitimated the rule of George III and defended his “sanctity” from all attack. Words had been interpreted and frozen to create unassailable authority. The result of Urizen’s reconstitution, a recreation analogous to the writing and later corrupt utilization of the Old Testament to legitimize tyranny, is “The Net of Religion” (25:22), the complex of king, priesthood, and ideology that Blake decries as “state religion.” However, as Blake suggests later in the poem, prophecy has the capacity to form a space isolated and protected from this Urizenic complex of law and religion:

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    Los encircled Enitharmon With fires of Prophecy From the sight of Urizen & Orc. (22: 42–4)

Orc, the child of Los and Enitharmon, is a figure of rebellion and anarchy. Just as the dissenting and rebellious voices of radicals in the 1790s awoke the wrath of law and prosecution in trials for seditious libel, seditious words, and treason in 1793 and 1794, Orc’s cries fully awaken Urizen to continue his domination (20:26). As Jenny Graham (2000) notes in her detailed study of political and legal events in England during 1789–1799, although the period just after the French Revolution (1790–1792) was relatively devoid of sedition and treason prosecutions, trials began to proliferate in 1793 and 1794 as anarchy and violence began increasingly (at least in English accounts of the revolution) to characterize French activities. Orc and Urizen were at war in 1790s courtrooms, and Urizen looked to be winning, as the Scottish sedition trials indicated and Eyre’s characterization of treason law threatened. However, Urizen’s dominance results merely in another rebellion, led by his son Fuzon, that closes the volume. Born into a world in which prophecy transforms into an adversarial legal paradigm, Orc can only rebel within and against a set of legal constraints he cannot escape—he is chained with links of “pain and sorrow” that drop from his father’s breast (20:8 ff), and his cries of anguish serve only to awaken the tyrant. Although Urizen’s pharaoh-like rule results in a further rebellion, we cannot believe that it will be any more successful than Orc’s. To reinvoke Shaffer and Balfour, prophecy in the 1790s was perceived as a kind of quotation; the prophet was never an individual speaking in his own voice but rather invoked the authority of another as the ultimate source of his words—herein lay the secret of prophetic immunity. Such madness and insanity circumscribed an extralegal realm. As Joel Eigen traces in his historical work on the law of insanity in 1790s England, insanity, although not specifically “pled” as a defense at this time, accounted for a good many acquittals at (e.g.) the Old Bailey in the early part of the decade (Eigen 1995, pp. 18–28). More famous examples were those of Margaret Nicholson and John Frith. Nicholson was detained in 1786 for attempting to stab the king with “an old dessert knife” (Macalpine 1969, p. 310). After being examined by Pitt and the Privy Council, she was adjudged insane and never tried. Frith threw a stone at the king’s coach in 1790. Unlike Nicholson, he was arraigned but found unfit to plead. These and a multitude of less notorious examples of

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legal madness abounded in the decade, illustrating that the insanity defense was a remarkably effective way to escape prosecution, often with very scanty evidence (Eigen 1995, pp. 18–30; especially p. 28). Although practice varied from judge to judge, before 1800 a determination that an accused was insane could actually result in the prisoner going completely free, without necessarily being held over for asylum committal (Eigen 1995, pp. 21–2). Although the law of insanity did not attain its modern form until the watershed case of Daniel McNaughton in the 1840s, insanity has always been difficult for the law to deal with. Ever since the importation of a notion of moral guilt or mens rea as an element necessary for every crime, the status of the insane to fulfill that criterion has been questioned. Likely borrowing from Justinian’s maxim of 533 that “madmen have no will,” Henry de Bracton was the first in England to incorporate a mental element into the definition of crime: one needed the voluntas nocendi or “will to harm” in order to be adjudged guilty (Eigen 1995, p. 35). In Beverley’s Case, Sir Edward Coke invoked Bracton to claim that “The punishment of a man who is deprived of reason cannot be an example to others. No felony or murder can be committed without a felonious intent and purpose” (p. 35). Sir Matthew Hale followed Coke in his 1736 treatise Pleas of the Crown, claiming that a total deprivation of reason or even a partial insanity could negate criminal intent. Thus, the effect of insanity was to exempt the accused from prosecution and judgment in a court of law—legal responsibility would not attach to the insane and the mad individual was, in many respects, living in an extralegal sphere, controlled and administered by the chancellor as guardian of lunatics. When Blake was writing Urizen, lunacy and its association with radical discourse had been much in the public eye. The madness of George Gordon and its connection with radical politics had been felt in the public sphere since the early 1780s. As Ian McCalman has argued, Burke, in his 1791 Reflections, reconstituted Gordon’s specter into a symbol connecting millenarianism, reform, regicide, and insanity (1996, p. 346). Gordon himself had attempted to defend the sanity of Nicholson, who herself came to be used by Pitt as an emblem of “the insane consequences of ‘disloyal’ opposition” (Poole 2000, p. 73). Frith expressly characterized his stone throwing as an expression of reform and radical discontent (Poole 2000, p.  91). There was the growing sense that radicalism and insanity went hand in hand, creating a cultural resonance Blake likely sought to exploit in his text.

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However, the most prominent event to bring insanity and the strange legal status of the mad to Blake’s mind was the Regency Crisis of 1788. Although the prevailing opinion of medical experts was that the king was not actually “insane” but was rather under the influence of an external affliction (which modern medicine has diagnosed as porphyria), the popular conception of the king’s state was that he had indeed been and continued periodically to be “insane,” unfit to govern. Reports existed that the chief magistrate of England and the head of the national church had been treated as a common lunatic, confined, deprived, and intimidated; a popular surge of literature on the subject of insanity followed (Macalpine 1969, pp.  288–94 and 359–63). At least one of these books Blake read (Spurzheim’s Observations on Insanity), although not until 1819, many years after writing Urizen. However, although parliament was forestalled from voting on a regent before the king’s recovery, the crisis did result in another odd legal consequence—the solicitor general, in an effort to maintain the authority of the majority regime in the face of a potential Prince of Wales regency, suggested that the king’s personal and political personalities could be “split.” Sir John Scott, years before his tenure as attorney general, suggested that the personal indisposition of the king in no way affected his “politic capacity,” which supposedly remained intact and capable of opening parliament so that a commission could be struck to appoint a regent. As Scott pointed out, if this politic capacity was seen as incapacitated by the king’s illness, the executive branch of government would cease, even the courts would stop functioning. Thus, the mere symbolic presence of a (mentally incompetent) body on the Throne of England had to be sufficient to imbue the royal seal with authority to open parliament. The king, in short, was absent or fragmented from himself (see Campbell 1878, pp. 8: 403–15 for an account of Scott’s activities during the Regency Crisis). This notion of insanity as a splitting or absence took some precedent from legal practice. The development of the insanity defence in the 1790s courts worked on a theory of absence that implied a fragmentation of the self that vitiated authority. The mad were referred to and referred to themselves in ways that supported notions of fragmentation and absence. One accused was regarded as “a will out of control” (Eigen 1995, p. 6). One defendant claimed, “I was out of my wits.” Another stated, “As I sat by the fire, something came over me … I could get no command of myself” (Eigen 1995, p. 9) In the 1787 case of Francis Paar, the accused suffered from a head injury that left him “totally ignorant” of his actions during

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certain moods. People suggested that he had almost changed into another person on the two occasions he tried to kill his wife, that he was “absent” at his own crime (Eigen 1995, pp. 31 and 33). Although other theories of insanity existed, madness was also often implicitly compared to a state of inspiration. In the Walker case, the key test was said to be if the accused was “not in possession of his right senses … [and had acted] under some pressure or disorder of the mind … [that made him] a mere instrument in the hands of providence.” If so, “he is not answerable to the laws of God or man for what he has done,” becoming a “mere mechanism.” The forces that controlled the body of the lunatic were variously described as “the visitation of God (or Heaven),” a “nervous fever” (i.e., disease), “something you and I cannot get to the bottom of,” or “spirits” (Eigen 1995, pp. 11 and 45). Although the exact nature of insanity and its interaction with legal culpability was in flux, there was always the impression that the accused was a mechanism of another force, that he had been deprived of will and sovereignty (his mind seen as “dethroned” in one case) and that this exempted him from the punishments of the legal realm (Eigen 1995, p. 77). The very notion of derangement or being “out of one’s mind” (a phrase also used at the time) suggested this kind of fracturing and absence of authority (Eigen 1995, p. 96). In its desire to drain authority from the individual, the legal discourse of insanity merely expressed notions of insanity prevalent in other spheres. As Steve Poole notes in his study of regicide in England, given the legal, social, and political climate of the early 1790s, there was little chance that a traitor like Frith could have been found sane and liable for his actions in 1792. With the madness of the king, his sympathetic treatment of Nicholson and the government’s recent exploitation of the Nicholson incident to illustrate the supposed humanity and mercy of the nation’s legal code (Poole 2000, p. 92), the odds were in favor of Frith’s being found insane and exempted from legal penalty. Roy Porter notes that laypeople were quick to capitalize on advances in mental medicine and modern characterizations of insanity to “shrug off responsibility” more generally and even suggests that Cowper saw his own madness as an attempt to escape divine “judgment” and vitiate responsibility for bad acts committed early in life (Porter 1987, pp. 13 and 265). It is unknown if Blake saw Cowper’s madness in this light, but it was well known that “Mad” George Gordon went to prison not as a lunatic but as a libeller (Poole 2000, p. 76).

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The insanity of prophecy was therefore a likely mechanism to exempt the prophet and his work from prosecution in the legal realm. Urizen not only emphatically declares its status as quotation and derivation from the source of multiple others (“the Eternals”) but also signals through its conflict between various versions and within each version a profound fragmentation and absence of authority. Some versions of the text have a duplicate chapter four; one version tells the story more from Urizen’s perspective than the others; all versions have at least two stories of creation. Images and plates are reordered from copy to copy—even within copies the relationship between image and word is notoriously unstable. This is a text that has no authority: written by one who denies he writes it, speaking continually at cross-purposes, no one (at least no one within a court’s jurisdiction) is responsible for anything written here, nor is there any coherent single thread to assign to any author a fixed meaning that could be prosecuted. This is the textual instability of prophecy that, in Blake’s eyes, would select its audience: the uninspired would dismiss it as mad while the inspired would comprehend its genius. Unlike the preachings of Winterbotham or the explicit prophecies of Brothers, unlike the equivocal actions of Hardy and Thelwall, Urizen is a book that cannot be prosecuted. It does not reveal any coherent strain of intent. The fragmented multiplicity of its utterance situates it within a prophetic tradition that vitiates authority. In short, the text exhibits a “madness” that exempts it from the legal realm. Here then is a space safe from the pressure of law in which the poet can formulate and articulate a program for radical change. Like Coleridge’s “Cottaged Vale,” it is isolated from outside influence and censorship. In short, it mirrors the safe space which the rule of law was supposed to provide for citizens, but (in Blake’s estimation) most emphatically did not. Although, insofar as it constituted a vitiation of intent, Blake’s extralegal space is quite distinct from Coleridge’s “cottag’d vale,” Blake’s proposed obliteration of the self still performs the activity of Pyle’s imagination, providing a bridge between the forms of this world and the divine intent and justice of the next. Similar to Blackstone’s characterization of the discovery of the common law through a process of collective prophecy, Blake’s prophetic poet not only speaks from within a space isolated from legal attack, but also has access to the true origins of justice which he may speak to the nation at large in an attempt to reform the state into one more conducive to the rule of law. By acting as a “switch” and inspiring those select few who might see this “mad” poetry as inspired expression,

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The [First] Book of Urizen grants to its audience the radical autonomy of imagination needed to construct their own understanding of the text. In doing this, it creates the possibility for a revived rule of law flowing from the hands of a multiplicity of readers and interpreters, although the poem’s paradigm also simultaneously instigates the potential unwinding of the rule of law. The “Orc Cycle” which Blake inaugurates in the poem as an oscillation between authoritarian law (Urizen) and absolute individual freedom (Orc and Fuzon), envisions the rule of law as only an ephemeral midpoint between two extremes. This moment of balance and relative calm (perhaps embodied in the family unit of Los, Enitharmon, and Orc, shielded by the “fires of prophecy”) is brief and soon disappears in Orc’s cries, Urizen’s reaction, and Fuzon’s revolution that closes the poem. Although its periods of stability may be brief, this process has the distinct benefit of allowing for real and sometimes rapid change instigated by powerfully imaginative individuals and movements. It is in the roughly contemporaneous America: A Prophecy that Blake explores the radical freedom that this kind of radical autonomy can exercise in the public sphere. The model of Blake’s revolution is not (as in Coleridge) a contextualized and controlled one seeking stability, but one that looks forward to the continual oscillation of “perpetual revolution” without looking back.

Of Law and Forgetting The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations; The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up; The bones of death, the cov’ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry’d. Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening! Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst; … They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream. Singing. The Sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night; For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.

So proclaims Orc, the personification of imagination and revolution in Blake’s America: A Prophecy (6:1–5, 12–15). Conceived and engraved in 1793 in the early aftermath of the French Revolution, this conglomeration of image and poetry is Blake’s fantastical rereading of historical event

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into quasi-religious statement about the American War of Independence progressing into a pan-European revolutionary conflagration. What revolution leads to, Blake suggests, is an act of forgetting—all that is behind appears “a dream” and all that lies ahead is endless possibility. Examining the image Blake engraved to accompany Orc’s declaration (in which David Erdman finds echoes of the US Declaration of Independence: 1954, E 23; cited in Nudelman 2003, p. 38), the predominant visual motif is one of rebirth. While the text equivocates between calling revolution an iteration of Christ’s reincarnation or of the rapture, the image at least emphasizes a denial of the past: the central figure is seated on a moldering corpse but looks away from it, away from the trauma of death and the mute facts of history, to gaze skyward at some putative divine inspiration. Although this positioning almost certainly symbolizes Blake’s hope for the French Revolution (and possibly a new English revolution to come), and also his notion of the privileged position of the poet/prophet/author (the figure’s body resembles Michelangelo’s David, but its face is close to some of Blake’s self-representations), I would submit it also embodies Blake’s theory about the process of revolution: that change and the expression of personal freedom requires a looking away from the past, a sublimation of the trauma of violent rupture into a new and elevated religious (or political or legal) ideology. That vines and flowers both grow from and seem to cover over the body in the lower portion of plate 6 is perhaps Blake’s allusion to the dominant political sublimation of his own time, that the overthrow of tyranny in America and France was not a break with but a reinstitution of a supposedly ancient legacy of individual rights that had been suspended by Monarchical despotism but, according to Thomas Paine, had seemingly recommenced in the natural wilderness of the North American continent, where colonists in closer contact with a primordial state of living could reconnect to an inheritance of Rousseauian liberty and equality (Mulvihill 2000, pp. 380–2; 393–4). A mythology of ancient rights supplants that of kingly authority while seamlessly covering over the historical rift of revolution. We look forward by inventing a past that never was to mute the fear of wholesale political innovation. In the body of his text, Blake expands on this visual suggestion. Although the mythic rhetoric is difficult to decode, the broad strokes of the plot are these: at the start of the poem, Orc languishes in chains, tended by the Shadowy Daughter of Urthona whose silence embodies the limited freedom of the colonists under George III. Orc soon breaks his

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bonds, rising as a fiery figure from the Atlantic, quickly inspiring Washington, Paine, Franklin, and Warren to commence rebellion against the despotic rule of “The Guardian Prince of Albion” (George III and his minions). The prince calls for assistance from his thirteen angels (the governors of the colonies) but is rebuffed, and they retreat to the ancient isle of Atlantis, recently arisen in the place from which Orc flamed into freedom. The prince sends plagues and vast waves against America to quench Orc’s revolutionary fires, almost succeeding, but the burning wrath of the revolutionaries causes the plagues to rebound on the cities and people of England, kindling a revolutionary fervor there in which laws of religion and nation are subverted, in which people become free to return to a natural state of individual rights, a common law space in which they might pursue the “desires of ancient times.” Thus do Blake’s antinomian tendencies find expression in a fashion that would not be completely alien to Coleridge—such ancient desires could still possibly contain and channel an otherwise untrammeled collective imagination. Yet at this point, Blake’s enthusiastic rewriting of history ceases and he turns to speculation about the future of revolution itself, introducing without warning on the last plate of the poem a new character (at that time) named “Urizen.” (16:2). He descends from the heavens, dousing and obscuring Orc’s flames with his tears and chilling mists, introducing a reactionary dénouement to this tale in which “angels and weak men twelve years should govern over the strong.” Although Blake announces that “their end should come, when France received the Demons light” (16:14–15), the image with which he closes is one of orthodoxy and constraint, with even a hint that Orc himself has again been bound (in the shadows on the rocks above). Read in the context of The [First] Book of Urizen’s more extended investigation of this figure in the following year, America’s reactionary conclusion implies that Urizen is nothing less than an unstoppable intellectual and social force: when one ideology dies, reason demands another take its place. Urizen introduces the pity and piety of Christian convention as a way to tamp down revolutionary change. While on the one hand this may suggest that state religion works in Britain and her colonies to resist any real or fundamental change, on the other hand (and more abstractly) it suggests that after revolution there will always be some new piety, some golden calf to the worship of which will fall even the likes of Washington, Paine, and Warren. Put another way, what emerges from this earliest of Blake’s prophecies, expanded as we have seen in his later work of the 1790s, is a theory about

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the oscillation between imagination and reason as expressed in art and politics. From a place of constraint, imagination and rebellion inevitably spark into life, cause traumatic social change, and then settle back into a religious and legal orthodoxy in which imagination and rebellion are again bound, reason (Urizen) coming to sublimate trauma into an object of worship (his heavenly law) which then serves to constrain the very freedoms rebellion initially supported. While The [First] Book of Urizen explores the theory behind this early iteration of the Orc cycle, America shows this theory rising from historical observation. The even earlier Marriage of Heaven and Hell further suggests that this political and legal practice is equally a psychological one that registers in imaginative processes—genius and poetry become codified, subject to priesthood, legalized, and then utilized to subjugate a nation. Artistic, political, and legal acts all follow an identical pattern. The Marriage and Urizen both suggest that the first step to shredding the net of Urizen is freedom in the act of interpretation, in reading. One should look to the dead letter just as the figure in America plate 6 looks to the body beneath—that is, not at all. Signs provide a scaffold or substructure only to support the (sitting) figure who looks away to a new horizon (or Urizen). If, as Dicey suggests, the rule of law depends on structured attention to the meaning of legal language, Blake’s position would both laud the imaginative autonomy and potential of the individual and also deny the possibility that law conveyed through text can ever or should ever have a stable meaning. In his poetic exploration of how a new nation is formed from the ashes of a colonial past, Blake unconcernedly reveals the conflict between parliamentary autonomy and the rule of law that so concerned Dicey. It is through individual inspiration that the path forward is revealed: look away from the body beneath and drive your plough over the bones of the dead to begin, Orc-like, a new iteration of the endless oscillation between free genius and law. For Blake, the rule of law always results in oppression. Freedom within bounds is an illusion, a brief moment of “balance” soon lost and unlamented in the fight for a new freedom. What Orc generates in America is a fantasy of Atlantis, geographically and ideologically an intermediary between the old regime (England) and the new (United States), which, being an expression of imagination in concrete form (text and nation state both), quickly becomes the abode for the colonial governors, a new priestly class whom Urizen will come to enslave in his “state religion” (see Nudelman 2003, p. 33, for a related notion of what this space represents). The space that exists behind the fires of prophecy is both haven and cage.

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Pietro Costa suggests our modern concept of the “rule of law” arises in reaction to the trauma of Robespierre’s terror (2010, pp. 87–8). Both the rule and Atlantis are imaginative sublimations and constructions needed to stave off the uncomfortable truth Blake is so eager to reveal. What results in Blake’s critique, then, is a radical counter to Coleridge’s concern that revolutionary change be muted and contextualized so the nation might return to an ancient and robust ideal of the rule of law. To look back to history and the body beneath is to replicate Urizen’s net of religion, to cage the self, and subject the otherwise-emancipated individual immediately to the same restrictive legal regime one supposedly rails against. This is the position of Oothoon and Bromion in 1793’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion. It is Fuzon’s fate in 1795’s Book of Ahania and Orc’s own circumstance even at the start of America. Perhaps Blake suggests we are all, at heart, worshippers of our own innocence: like little Thel, we would rather run back to the vale of Har than take responsibility to explore new possibilities of growth, sexuality and death. If Har is Blake’s “cottag’d vale,” it reveals that vale to be just another trap. If this is a vision of the rule of law, of a space for justice to supplement its defunct institutional manifestation in the 1790s, it is an odd one. As with Coleridge, poetry and prophecy may be a sheltered region in which to reimagine the world, but the form Blake sees that imagining take is utterly unlike that which Dicey and Coleridge theorize. After his own brush with the law in 1804, Blake composes the prophecies of his later years, revealing a marked sensitivity to the radical possibilities of the poetic subjectivity he articulated in the 1790s. The ruination of a preexisting regime and the inevitable erection of a new order obliterates the historical and conventional foundations on which a rule of law must exist. Orc may arise as Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, but may equally come as Robespierre, Napoleon, or even Hitler. Blake’s quest for a solution to this dilemma is the subject of the next chapter: in the divided authority and perspective of the Lambeth Books lies an aesthetic principle which might serve both to enable and to channel the unruly autonomous imagination, which would enable us to rise above the endless revolution of the Orc cycle and attain legal, political, and cultural stability, without sacrificing Blake’s ultimate allegiance to genius and the individual voice.

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Notes 1. In Blake 1982, hereafter abbreviated as E followed by page number. Poetic references will be given in the form of plate followed by line number (e.g., 20:1) using the plate numbering in Erdman 1974. 2. For an analysis that parallels the following, see Goode 2006. 3. Although Paine, in The Age of Reason (1984), claims only that a religious revolution must necessarily follow political upheaval, his emphasis on the “adulterous connection between church and state” expressed in the legal protection of religious doctrine suggests the need to undermine both religion and political structures. See Mee 1992, pp. 162 and 163. 4. I have no wish to return to speculations about Blake’s sanity or insanity, speculations Morris Eaves noted in 1976 had thankfully passed away decades earlier into “the innocent and nostalgic half-light of primitive psychology” (pp. 121–22). My investigations are purely into how Blake employed cultural and legal notions of insanity in his work. 5. The report of the trial and decision may be found at Howell 1809–26, pp. 22: 823–75. Interestingly, Brothers himself later saw Winterbotham as a kindred spirit, requesting by letter that the minister prepare his room at Newgate for Brothers’ imminent arrival. See Barrell 2000, pp. 530–1. 6. See the commentary to plate 6 in William Blake (1995, pp. 32–3). Note that Worrall, working from Copy D, numbers this plate 6 and not 7, as it is numbered in Erdman and Bentley. 7. Following Erdman’s suggestion that Blake “spiritualizes” and typologizes George III in America (1979, pp.  577–87, 581), Vincent Carretta notes Paine’s characterization of George III as “Pharaoh of England” and discusses several more direct comparisons between the king and Blake’s Urizen (1990, pp. 148, 173, 222, and 240).

References Balfour, Ian. 2002. The rhetoric of romantic prophecy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Barrell, John. 2000. Imagining the king’s death. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bentham, Jeremy. 1969. A Bentham reader. Ed. Peter Mack. New York: Pegasus. Blake, William. 1982. The complete poetry and prose of William Blake. Ed. David V.  Erdman. Comm. Harold Bloom. Berkeley: University of California Press. (abbreviated “E”).. ———. 1995. The Urizen books. Ed. David Worrall. London: William Blake Trust. Blenkinsopp, Joseph. 1983. Wisdom and law in the old testament. New  York: Oxford University Press.

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Boyron, Sophie. 2013. The constitution of France: A contextual analysis. Oxford: Hart Publishing. Campbell, John. 1878. Lives of the Lord chancellors and keepers of the great seal of England. Vol. 10. 7th ed. New York: Cockcroft. Carretta, Vincent. 1990. George III and the satirists from Hogarth to Byron. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Costa, Pietro. 2010. The rule of law: A historical introduction. In The rule of law, ed. Pietro Costa and Danilo Zolo, 73–149. Dordrecht: Springer. Eaves, Morris. 1976. Postscript: Blake’s abnormal psychology. Blake: an illustrated quarterly 9 (4): 121–122. Edwards, John. 1695. A discourse concerning the authority of the Bible. London: Printed by J.D. for Jonathan Robinson, John Taylor, and John Wyat. Eigen, Joel Peter. 1995. Witnessing insanity: Madness and mad doctors in the English court. New Haven: Yale University Press. Erdman, David. 1954. Blake: Prophet against empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1974. The illuminated Blake. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. ———. 1979. America: New expanses. In Blake’s poetry and designs, ed. Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant. New York: Norton. Esterhammer, Angela. 2000. Of promises, contracts and constitutions: Thomas Reid and Jeremy Bentham on language as social action. Romanticism 6 (1): 55–77. Geddes, Alexander. 1786. Prospectus of a new translation of the holy bible. London: R. Faulder. Goode, M. 2006. Blakespotting. PMLA 121 (3): 769–786. Graham, Jenny. 2000. The nation, the law and the king. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Holstein, Michael E. 1975. Crooked roads without improvement: Blake’s ‘proverbs of hell’. GEN 8: 26–41. Howell, Thomas Bayle, Ed. 1809–1826. State trials. Vol. 33. London: R. Bagshot. Macalpine, Ida. 1969. George III and the mad-business. New York: Pantheon. Makdisi, Saree. 2003. William Blake and the impossible history of the 1790s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McCalman, Iain. 1996. Mad Lord George and Madame La Motte: Riot and sexuality in the genesis of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. The Journal of British Studies 35 (3): 343–367. McGann, Jerome. 1986. The idea of an indeterminate text: Blake’s bible of hell and Dr. Alexander Geddes. Studies in Romanticism 25 (3): 303–324. Mee, Jon. 1992. Dangerous enthusiasm. Clarendon: Oxford. Morris, Marilyn. 1998. The British monarchy and the French revolution. New Haven: Yale University. Press.

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Moskal, Jeanne. 1994. Blake, ethics and forgiveness. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Mulvihill, James. 2000. “The history of all times and places:” William Blake and historical representation in America and Europe. CLIO 29 (4): 373–394. Nudelman, Bryan C. 2003. Spaces of transformation: Liminality and William Blake’s America: A Prophecy. Lamar journal of the humanities 28 (1): 33–46. Paine, Thomas. 1984. The age of reason. New York: Pantheon. Poole, Steve. 2000. The politics of regicide in England, 1760–1850. New  York: Manchester University Press. Porter, Roy. 1987. Mind-forg'd manacles. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Portinaro, Pier Palo. 2010. Beyond the rule of law: Judges’ tyranny or lawyers’ anarchy? In The rule of law, ed. Pietro Costa and Danilo Zolo, 353–370. Dordrecht: Springer. Shaffer, Elinore. 1975. Kubla Khan and the fall of Jerusalem. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph (Abbé). 1789. Qu'est-ce que le tiers-état? Internet history sourcebooks project. N.p. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/sieyes. asp. Accessed 24 June 2020. Tannenbaum, Leslie. 1982. Biblical tradition in Blake’s early prophecies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Villalobos, John. 1990. William Blake’s ‘proverbs of hell’ and the tradition of wisdom literature. Studies in Philology 87 (2): 246–259. Viscomi, Joseph. 1993. Blake and the idea of the book. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zolo, D. 2010. The rule of law: A critical reappraisal. In The rule of law, ed. Pietro Costa and Danilo Zolo, 3–72. Dordrecht: Springer.

CHAPTER 6

The Gospel of Minute Particulars

The turning away from authority, context, and history which is best embodied in America plate 8 is the logical consequence of the fragmentation of meaning exemplified in Urizen. The “insanity” of Urizen makes it equally impossible for the text to champion an old ideology so  as to become implicated in the rise of a new sovereign and a new tyrannical state religion. By speaking in multiple voices and emphasizing the very faults of authority that Church of England biblical apologists sought to hide (and higher critics sought to reveal), Urizen denies its status as a rhetorical tool to legitimize an ancient or nascent regime. It cannot be set up as an authority nor targeted as an authority—the text is as inarticulate as the mad, prophetic howlings of Los. By speaking against its own authority, Urizen refuses to be set up as a new Moses, a new testament in the tradition of the old, and refuses to instigate a new Benthamite contract in which the people are duped into entering a corrupt and mystical legal regime. Like George III during the Regency Crisis, this text is unfit to rule. Like the body beneath the plate 8 figure, its meaning constantly decomposes and molders, to feed startlingly new and innovative readings as years pass. In thematizing and performing this opposition between insanity and legal authority, Urizen comes not only to represent a technique for avoiding the legal realm and the erection of another textual tyranny, but also to embody the status of text and state in 1790s England. Just as the force of law had fragmented the sovereign in 1788 into insane private individual © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. L. Barr, Romanticism and the Rule of Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74878-4_6

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and abstract public figure, it had compelled literary expression to fragment itself in the 1790s, when the threat of prosecution mandated a retreat into prophetic madness and textual obscurity. The pressure of law on the text widened the gap between inspired meaning and abstract sign to such an extent that, at least in Blake’s case, the text became virtually unreadable; the sign became too far divorced from political referent. This is the condition of Blake’s text and, to a lesser extent, the texts of all who sought to cloak radical expression from government censure: the poetic “safe haven” becomes an ineffective starting point for social change and what remains is an increasingly aestheticized “literature” that is easily sanitized in the process of Victorian canon formation. This separation of letter and spirit is equally emblematic of the condition of the state and its system of justice. As suggested by Richard Brothers’ call to George III to surrender the crown to God’s representative, a more broadly held opinion existed that the “power and authority” of the king was empty of divine inspiration—the sovereign and all the institutional manifestations of his power were empty bodies incapable of guiding a Christian nation to its ultimate spiritual fulfillment in the New Jerusalem. Legal and political institutions, themselves responsible for creating endemic literary schizophrenia, by their very action proved themselves to be institutions with abundant power and authority but no inspiration— embodiments of Urizen all. As Blake had complained in “The Argument” to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, institutionalization of corrupt biblical interpretation had forced the “just man” (2:4), had forced the divine original of justice itself, into exile in “barren climes” (2:16) from which Blake hoped to rescue it. The purpose of writing prophecies and positing a unique relationship between prophetic language and the select few who could read it was to create an institution with both inspiration and authority, one to supplant the empty and corrupt manifestations of political justice Blake had attacked all his life. Thus, in retrieving an old reading of Urizen as dramatizing psychic conflict, I would suggest that the poem’s referent is not so much Freudian as Georgian. It is certainly possible to align Urizen with superego, Los with ego, and Orc with id, or to take Paul Youngquist’s more nuanced approach and claim that Urizen dramatizes the birth of consciousness itself in which “Los embodies [the] artist, the creative power at odds with the authority of the ego” (1989, p. 98). Yet, it is equally plausible that Urizen embodies the mental fight of the prophetic artist writing within the world of Urizen, the world of George III, in which the force of law

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inevitably alters artistic expression. The struggle Blake depicts is not simply of the divided mind at war with itself, but of the tragic consequences of a world of Urizenic law that compels the artist into the fragmented agency of prophetic insanity and, in so doing, forces a disassociation between text and contemporary political reference, transforming poetry into a purely aesthetic object. In such a case, the author disappears as the “sovereign” of his work, just as Los and Enitharmon fade from sight in the midst of Urizen. In this authorial regicide, a vitiation of sovereignty the parliamentary mechanism proposed to and eventually did inflict on King George, Blake’s insulated prophetic expression is drained of all public efficacy. Although Blake might claim that “posterity” would be left to judge his work and any madness or inspiration it might contain, in the here and now of the 1790s and the following decades, Blake published only eight copies of Urizen. The difficulty with Blake’s production of a text so inspired as to appear insane is that it suffers the same fate as Richard Brothers. Just as Brothers was locked away and silenced for eleven years until his message was forgotten and the millenarian frenzy of the 1790s had faded, so Blake’s work remained locked in unfashionable obscurity, never reaching anything like a broad audience. Blake had tragically underestimated the pressure of law on literary production, retreating into a mode of expression fenced in by “fires of Prophecy” that began to look with each passing year less like the bulwarks of a safe haven and more like asylum walls. However, as ineffective a vehicle for political change as Blake’s prophetic mode may have seemed, there remained a legal manifestation of justice that could provide a model for how even extremely idiosyncratic and highly autonomous perspectives might combine into an amorphous but still unified concatenation that expressed justice. This model was the jury. In the public discourse surrounding the position and power of juries in the 1790s, Blake may have found a theoretical template for how each individual, caged within his or her own “asylum,” might nevertheless embody a fundamentally democratic vision of justice. The very mechanisms through which Blake grants agency to his readership virtually guarantee that his text is split into a multitude of outcomes, producing revolution without leadership or direction. Blake begins to investigate in Milton how such an emancipation in literary interpretation might contribute to a new paradigm for the rule of law. In fashioning a readership eager to break with precedent and context, Blake begins to see the possibility of a rule of law governed not by some monolithic, vast and unattainable ideal

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of sublime legality, but by the minute particulars of each perspective giving voice and combining into a form of justice to challenge anything that Dicey or Coleridge might endorse.

Jury Nullification and Radical Autonomy1 In his jury address at the conclusion to the 1795 Hardy trial, Thomas Erskine claimed to be arguing for the “universal condition of civil society throughout the world” (Howell 1809–1826, p.  24:900) and suggested the sole power to determine the freedom or despotism of that society was in the jury’s hands. He was not asking them to commit “perjury from compassion” in defence of free expression within the state, but in making this reference to the so-called “pious perjury” he did at least emphasize the absolute power the conglomerate jury body might exercise in defiance of government authority to shape society and the justice that enabled it. I wish to read William Blake’s 1804 prophetic epic, Milton, as a similar call to defiance in a time of political and legal crisis. Writing a decade after the victory of the Hardy trial and the supposed emancipation of radical expression, Blake had witnessed the long slow decline of 1795’s revolutionary promise. After the promulgation of the Two Acts, the Combination Act and the successful quashing of Irish rebellion and 1790s radicalism seemingly embodied in the execution of Colonel Edward Marcus Despard, 1804, like early 1795, seemed a moment in dire need of defiance against law and government. I would suggest that, potentially influenced by his own encounter with government legal suppression of revolutionary sentiment in an 1804 trial for seditious speech and nevertheless cognizant of the broader dynamics of that suppression and the struggle for power in the courtroom exhibited through the previous decade, Blake seeks in Milton not only to undermine the ideology of church, state, and art in England but also to model the paradigm through which he wishes to be read and judged and through which he prays his readership will read and judge the signs through which society constitutes justice. Picking up the strands from Urizen and America, the Blake of 1804 advocates through textual indeterminacy a revolt against the authority of his own letter that is structurally analogous to the notion of pious perjury, seeking to reinvigorate in the public sphere this well-known and time-­ honored practice of resistance to legal tyranny and tradition. In yoking together these analogous rebellions against textual authority, I suggest not merely an alternate genealogy of the antinomian aspects of Blake’s

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aesthetic (in legal practice rather than religious radicalism), but also claim that in Milton Blake attempts to supplant in art the legal institutionalization of mercy he (and many in public sphere in his day) saw as historically derelict. The process of eternal conflict and revolution which ends Urizen, with Fuzon (likely inspired by the fires of Orc) leading a new rebellion against his father, suggests an endless chain of rebellion after rebellion through the historical record. What Milton does is both exemplify and construct the kind of individual needed to negotiate that reality, perpetuate it, and perhaps transcend it—a radically autonomous individual who looks away from the body beneath, springs free of context and limitation, and approaches any interpretation of signs as an opportunity for imaginative action unrestricted by prior hermeneutic authority. The citizen Blake constructs through his poem must be like a jury member ready and able to exercise free will through acts of nullification—only that person is able to maintain autonomy in a world characterized by the Orc cycle. When Urizen’s children follow Fuzon like a Moses figure from a land of slavery, will they simply capitulate to another authority or rebel against it, in turn? Although, like that of the Wedding Guest, their final fate is undecided, they have at least the opportunity (and poetic encouragement) to take up the prophet’s staff and walk their own path, adding their imagination and desire to a common pool of human will which, as we will see in Jerusalem, might provide an alternate paradigm for the rule of law which overcomes Dicey’s dichotomy between authority and history. English courtrooms in 1804, to which Milton’s title page directly refers, became fields of conflict between private autonomy (embodied in the power of the jury) and government authority. Ten long years had passed since the trials of Hardy, Thelwall, and Tooke, and the raucous celebrations that had ensued on their acquittal may have seemed a dim memory. The jury then had been lionized as “JUDGES of LAW as well as FACT” (Barrell 2000, p. 428) and as the “palladium of the constitution” (pp. 383, 424) in the face of government tyranny. The most potent weapon for defending radical expression perhaps lay in “pious perjury.” This phenomenon of “jury nullification” is as controversial in modern courts as it was in Blake’s day. Traditionally, juries are empowered to decide issues of fact and judges issues of law—assisted by counsels’ arguments, judges iterate the legal framework within which facts are interpreted and applied. Although the jury renders the general verdict of “guilty” or “not guilty,” it is supposed to do so within this judicial paradigm. Although it can be difficult to distinguish between issues of fact and law, juries have (at times)

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ignored all such distinctions and taken it on themselves to decide issues of fact and law (often doing so by rendering a perverse finding of fact, e.g. by vastly devaluing a stolen item to fit it within a lesser offence). For the sake of a perceived “justice” in the cause of “piety,” the jury “perjures” itself. Blackstone makes an approving reference to this practice in his Commentaries, especially since legal statues had not kept pace with inflation, transforming what should have been petty theft into capital crimes (Green 1987, p.  295 citing Blackstone 1765, p.  4:239; see also King 2000, p. 238). Although pious perjury in cases of petty theft were fairly uncontroversial, juries also exercised this power to resist government authority. Fox’s Libel Act (1792) had been enacted to counter government attempts to restrict the jury only to a special verdict (regarding the fact of publication) in the often politically charged arena of libel cases. The Act worked to sustain the jury’s authority to render a general verdict and retain its nullification power. Pious perjury may also have played some role in the 1795 treason trials, which turned primarily on an interpretation of the law. Although the defence and prosecution both produced a great deal of evidence, the main controversy centered on the meaning of “imagining the king’s death,” the essence of high treason as defined in law. Sir John Scott (for the Crown) argued that such imagining occurred even through “remoter acts” (e.g., attempting to imprison, intimidate, or “overawe” the king or parliament), while Erskine (for the defence) argued such acts could not, by themselves, amount to treason. Scandalized by Erskine’s lack of deference to Scott’s and the judge’s framing of the law, John Bowles accused the defence of actively encouraging jury nullification, of attempting to violate the constitutionally mandated role separation between jury and judge (Barrell 2000, pp. 424–8). At the trial’s conclusion, many saw the accused as “acquitted felons” who had escaped the noose only through the jury’s obstinate invocation of a nullification power they should not have exercised. In reaction, the Two Acts of 1795, various suspensions of Habeas Corpus, the practice of jury packing, and the requirements of the Combination Act (which essentially required the registration and licensing of all public locations in which ideas might be circulated) did much to curtail the power of citizens and juries (Goodwin 1979, p. 368; Holdsworth 1956-1982, pp. 13:172–3). Perhaps one of the most notorious attacks on revolutionary sentiment was the trial and execution of Colonel Edward Marcus Despard, the one-­ time superintendent of Belize, seventeen-year British Army veteran, and

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member of the Irish gentry. His promising career had begun to unravel quickly after expensive legal conflicts with merchant interests in the Honduras Bay settlement and a vexatious suit arising from a seizure of certain American ships. In disgust and despondency, he turned to Irish radicalism and English democratic circles (Conner 2000, p. 144), including the London Corresponding Society (in 1796) and perhaps even the United Irish Society (in 1791). Anxiety at the Home Office led to his imprisonment (without trial) in 1798 on suspicion of sedition, but in 1803 he found himself accused of high treason, having been arrested at the Oakley Arms public house in Lambeth (an area familiar to Blake in the early 1790s) while conspiring with radical members of the working class (three of whom carried “unlawful oaths,” swearing allegiance to the Constitution) to assault the Tower of London, Parliament, and King. Although the trial’s notoriety equaled that of Hardy’s and garnered a great deal of attention in working-class, radical circles, the government had learned from its previous mistakes. Despard had no real chance for an acquittal. The prosecution packed the jury with members most likely to share conservative political biases and coached codefendants to testify favorably in exchange for criminal immunity. Despard was condemned despite several impressive character witnesses, including Sir Alured Clark (a former governor of Jamaica), Sir Evan Nepean (the undersecretary of state), and Lord Horatio Nelson, who stated: “In all that period of time [that we served together on “the Spanish Main”] no man could have shown more zealous attachment to his Sovereign and his country than Colonel Despard did.” The jury convicted in only twenty-five minutes, adding that “we earnestly recommend him to mercy, on account of his former good character, and the services he had rendered his country” (Conner 2000, pp. 224–38). Lord Ellenborough ignored this call for clemency (Conner 2000, pp.  238, 243–4). Despard was hanged and beheaded on February 21, 1804, a widely unpopular result. It was difficult to find anyone willing to build the scaffold, and all of Southwark’s constabulary were required to constrain the 20,000 spectators at the execution. His head in the noose, Despard reaffirmed his innocence and had these final words for his “fellow citizens”: His Majesty’s Ministers know as well as I do that I am not guilty, yet they avail themselves of a legal pretext to destroy a man, because he has been a friend to truth, to liberty, and to justice, because he has been a friend to the

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poor and to the oppressed. But, Citizens, I hope and trust, notwithstanding my fate … that the principles of freedom, of humanity, and of justice, will finally triumph over falsehood, tyranny, and delusion, and every principle inimical to the interests of the human race. (p. 257)

The government later tried to suppress newspaper accounts and handbills which widely disseminated these sentiments (pp.  251–67). Contrary to tradition, the heads were not put on display, but buried with their previous owners, publicly referred to as “poor men” who had been “murdered” (and who were later “proven” innocent by Whig historians—Wells 1983, p. 248). The general sentiment is perhaps best summed up in the words of John Wilkinson, who was later arrested for stating, “Damn the Jury that found Colonel Despard guilty. I wish they were all at hell and that Colonel Despard’s head was down the King’s throat.” The jury, which had been such a stout bulwark to Hardy and the cause of radical expression in 1795, had failed in 1804. Despard’s execution and the instigation of armed conflict with France inaugurated a period of “patriotic enthusiasm” in which jurors’ radical sympathies were denigrated as Jacobinical and France no longer regarded as “the apostle of liberty, equality and fraternity” (Wells 1983, p. 249).2 Blake likely commenced Milton’s composition in Felpham in the summer and fall of 1803, just before his return to London under a cloud of his own legal troubles: a fractious August 12 encounter with a soldier named John Scolfield led to an indictment for sedition. State weaponization of criminal proceedings to restrict free expression had quickly become very personal. According to Blake’s account, Scolfield3 was invited [into my garden] as an assistant by a Gardner at work therein, without my knowledge that he was so invited. I desired him as politely as was possible to go out of the Garden, he made me an impertinent answer I insisted on his leaving the Garden; he refused. I still persisted in desiring his departure; he then threatend to knock out my Eyes with many abominable imprecations & with some contempt for my Person. I therefore took him by the Elbows & pushed him before me till I had got him out, there I intended to have left him but he turning about put himself into a Posture of Defence threatening & swearing at me. I perhaps foolishly & perhaps not, stepped out at the Gate & putting aside his blows took him again by the Elbows & keeping his back to me pushed him forwards down the road about fifty yards, he all the while endeavoured to turn round & strike me & raging & cursing drew out several neighbours, at length when I had got him to where

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he was Quartered, which was very quickly done, we were met at the Gate by the Master of the house, The Fox Inn (who is the proprietor of my Cottage) & his wife & Daughter, & the Mans Comrade & several other people. My Landlord compelld the Soldiers to go in doors after many abusive threats against me & my wife from the two Soldiers.

With supporting evidence from a friendly witness, Private Cock, Scolfield swore out an information, stating that Blake had “Wickedly and Seditiously intend[ed] to bring our said Lord the King into great Hatred and Contempt and Scandal,” by uttering such sentiments as “damn the King,” that his “Soldiers are sold for Slaves,” and that “[when Bonapart invades] it would be put to every Englishman’s choice for to either fight for the French or to have his throat cut” (all from Bentley 2004, pp. 158–61). Although indicted by the grand jury at the Michaelmas Quarter Sessions at Petworth, Blake was competently defended by William Hayley’s barrister, Samuel Rose, and acquitted on all counts. The courtroom was “thrown into an uproar” on the verdict’s reading, according to the Sussex Weekly Advertiser (2004, p. 186). Although it is difficult to gauge this reaction, it is perhaps plausible to read it as an expression of popular relief that personal freedom might at times triumph over government force (most immediately expressed in the ubiquitous presence of Dragoons in the village to guard against French invasion): despite Despard’s fate, the English jury could at times still defend the individual against oppressive law. Certainly Blake began to see it this way. To him, the acquittal became “an event of national and cosmic significance” in which the jury had defeated a conspiracy instigated by a government agent (Scolfield), executed by a tyrannical magistrate, and motivated by a fallen ideal of artistic expression (embodied rather uncharitably in William Haley; see Bentley 2004, p. 186; see also Bentley 2001, pp. 250–64 and 313).

The Bard’s Song Commenced in the shadow of these legal difficulties, Blake’s Milton and the so-called “Bard’s Song,” which dominates its initial plates, draw elusive and allegorical parallels with the authoritarian government oppression under which Blake felt he labored. In the preface to this work, Blake argues that “Shakspeare & Milton were both curbd by the general malady & infection from the silly Greek & Latin slaves of the Sword” and then

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calls on painters, sculptors, and architects to oppose “Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, & the University: who would, if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War” (E 95): political, ideological conflict registers in artistic production. It is only through inspiration that the Royal Academy’s repression of true artistic expression and spirit (and the damage that causes in public space) might be countered (Eaves 1992, pp. xvii, 109 and 266).4 According to Blake, the government had hired the academy’s head, Sir Joshua Reynolds, “to Depress Art,” to suppress radical sentiment, to “Mankind degrade,” and to “Divide … all the English World” (E 635–6; see also Johnson 2002, pp. 234–5). At times working in the English Revolutionary tradition, invoking religious discourse to express political radicalism, Blake seeks to elevate himself to the status of Moses, to spread enthusiasm through the nation (Mee 1992, pp. 20–74). For Blake, Milton’s artistic and religious extravagance amounts to revolutionary incitement: the resurrection of John Milton, fellow prophet, author, and republican, the Devil’s ally from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, is the return of inspiration and radical political power to an otherwise-­ dead nation (see E 701 and E 35). Insofar as it is the Bard’s Song which calls Milton’s spirit back the Earth, it is with this poem within a poem that Blake seeks to energize artistic and political radicalism and to model the ideal performance of his own work in public space: planting a Milton-like seed of genius in even a few of his readers could produce powerful counters to accepted authority and tradition while also bracing the individual to enter actively and autonomously the cyclic conflict of this world, just as Blake’s Milton does. The Bard’s Song is notoriously difficult. Some readers see it as biographical allegory or as disguised religious or political iconoclasm.5 However, that its central plot point appears to be a legal conflict and trial between Palamabron and Satan suggests that the Song is at least somewhat implicated in Blake’s legal critique of state religion, Urizen’s “One King, one God, [and] one Law” (The [First] Book of Urizen, 4:40; my emphasis). Although the details are elusive, it appears that Palamabron and Satan each agree to do the tasks which Los (as a great creator at the beginning of time) had assigned to the other. Los had commanded Satan to turn the mills of eternity (perhaps a metaphor for time) and ordered Palamabron to drive the fiery harrow (the sun) across the sky and, Apollo-­ like, energize the soil for the purposes of generation. In breaking this mandated arrangement, Palamabron and Satan threaten the cosmic order itself, a radical and even revolutionary undermining of the Eternals’

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regime. The result is chaos: Satan’s mill workers refuse to labor under their new master and Palamabron’s horses revolt against Satan (7:43–7), who is barely able to constrain the fiery Harrow to travel within the “labyrinthine forms” of letters. This allusion to Blake’s etching process (11:16–18) suggests that he may see personal and political action as having a literary expression (Viscomi 1993, pp. 57–60 and 78–88). As in Paradise Lost, this failed rebellion leads to divinely mandated punishment. In the ensuing trial of the two participants, agency and blame become very difficult to determine: Just who is the “Author” (as Leutha asks at 11:35) of this crime? The determinations are various and contradictory. Los blames his own pity (8:19–20). Palamabron places more emphasis on Satan’s regimentation (8:19–20) and rule following. However, the jury-­ like Great Assembly astonishingly condemns Rintrah, heretofore a complete alien to the dispute! The text seems to equivocate regarding Rintrah’s status. He may be both a character in his own right and one of Satan’s emotions: Then rose Two Witnesses, Rintrah & Palamabron: And Palamabron appeal’d to all Eden, and receivd Judgment: and Lo! it fell on Rintrah and his rage: Which now flam’d high & furious in Satan against Palamabron. (9:8–11)

Illustrations of the scene (in three copies of Milton) show Satan in a kind of prisoner’s dock from which he rages against trial spectators. Blake complicates this discussion of agency even further when, in conclusion, Leutha intrudes and proclaims her own guilt, arguing that Satan worked “by [her] suggestion” (11:35) as she “enter[ed] the doors of [his] brain night after night” (12:4) and instigated rebellion. Although she calls for her own punishment, Los condemns Rintrah in an apparent miscarriage of justice wherein “the Innocent [are] condemn’d for the Guilty” (11:16). Perhaps Palamabron, having asked for (9:4–6) and received “the Divine Mercy” (9:42), is immunized from the proceedings—only Satan/Rintrah are available for judgment. Satan’s rage at being excluded from such mercy (9:41–2) spawns a merciless world of law: Satan rag’d amidst the Assembly! and his bosom grew Opake against the Divine Vision; the paved terraces of His bosom inwards shone with fires, but the stones becoming opake! Hid him from sight. in an extreme blackness and darkness,

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And there a World of deeper Ulro was open’d, in the midst Of the Assembly. In Satans bosom a vast unfathomable Abyss. (7:30–5)

This bodying forth of a merciless, nightmarish legal regime is the foundation of Satan’s power as monarch and god: For Satan flaming with Rintrahs fury hidden beneath his own mildness Accus’d Palamabron before the Assembly of ingratitude! of malice: He created Seven deadly Sins drawing out his infernal scroll, Of Moral laws and cruel punishments upon the clouds of Jehovah To pervert the Divine voice in its entrance to the earth With thunder of war & trumpets sound, with armies of disease Punishments & deaths musterd & number’d; Saying I am God alone There is no other! let all obey my principles of moral individuality I have brought them from the uppermost innermost recesses Of my Eternal Mind, transgressors I will rend off for ever, As I now rend this accursed Family from my covering. (9:19–29)

This is a world in which Divine Mercy has no place. Satan’s law is made of “Virtues & Cruel Goodnesses” of Satan’s law (13:33–4), and his reality exists as a “dark, Satanic world” (23:50) that keeps out the “Universal Brotherhood & Mercy” of Los’ regime wherein beings “live not by wrath. [but] by mercy alone …!” (23:34). The conclusion to Milton suggests that Albion (England) can only redeem itself by embracing “Divine Mercy” and hurling the Satanic “Reasoning Spectre” into the “Lake /Of Los, that ever burneth with fire” (39:10–12). To reclaim a lost justice, the England of 1804 must somehow undo the mythic separation of law and mercy allegorized in the Bard’s Song. Desiring a return to a merciful gospel currently repressed by the Old Testament spirit of the “Bloody Code,” Blake derides English legal institutions (and perhaps specifically the Old Bailey, surmounted by a statue of Lady Justice) by depicting Satan with a balance and sword: I am God the judge of all, the living & the dead Fall therefore down & worship me. submit thy supreme Dictate, to my eternal Will & to my dictate bow I hold the Balances of Right & Just & mine the Sword Seven Angels bear my Name & in those Seven I appear But I alone am God & I alone Heavn & Earth Of all that live dare utter this, others tremble & bow

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Till All Things become One Great Satan, in Holiness Oppos’d to Mercy, and the Divine Delusion Jesus be no more. (38:51–39:2)

This unmerciful, Satanic law was well known in Blake’s day: the Bard’s Song that records its genesis could just as easily be named “Despard’s Song.” Jeane Moskal’s exploration of the Song’s antinomian resonances emphasize Blake’s concern there with reviving mercy and justice. During the English Civil War, antinomian ideals were often invoked to conflate political and religious struggle: challenging law led to political and spiritual freedom. For Moskal, when Blake places the origin of the dispute between Satan and Palamabron in Los’ “pity,” this potentially signals Satanic Law might embody a fallen earthly legal regime which entraps and warps social action (Moskal 1994, pp. 12–20; see also Thompson 1993, pp. 129–73). If pity in Milton “divides the soul/And man, unmans” (8:19–20), in A Vision of the Daughters of Albion (argues Moskal) its presence entails a complete inability to reach true reconciliation and communion between individuals: pity implies adversarial social hierarchy and legal division which cannot be overcome. Moskal sees The [First] Book of Urizen as arguing that “the institutions of law compromise and defeat any attempts at forgiveness”; Satanic Law creates an unbridgeable gap between those caught within its institutions and ideological manifestations (Moskal 1994, pp. 26–30). Blake was a strong antinomian (Makdisi 2003, p. 70) who expressed in the Bard’s Song a causal relationship between an ancient, mythical conflict and the English legal regime of 1804: both had unsupportable theories of agency and criminality and actively got in the way of community and reconciliation. Both must be resisted. This resistance starts with radical artistic expression which can, itself, become the subject of censorial attack. The negation of mercy at the heart of Satanic Law soon spreads into the eternals’ judgment regarding the Song itself. After Satan’s fall into Ulro, his peers gather like a panel at the Royal Academy to utter this critique of the Bard’s work6: All consider’d and a loud resounding murmur Continu’d round the Halls; and much they questiond the immortal Loud voicd Bard. And many condemn’d the high tone’d Song Saying Pity and Love are too venerable for the imputation Of Guilt. Others said. If it is true! if the acts have been perform’d Let the Bard himself witness. (13:45–50)

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The court calls for a “witness,” and “condemn[s]” the Bard’s “imputation of Guilt,” evidently trying the Bard’s poetic trial and, in accusing him of impropriety, defending some sort of conservative, state ideology. Although this depiction of literary criticism is brief, the judgment appears no more justified than that of Rintrah. As a prophet inspire[ed]” by “poetic Genius” (14:1), the Bard engages in the act of quotation—as one in a line of artists ultimately influenced by the Divine, he is responsible for his utterance only in a complex fashion, a complexity perhaps embodied in the Rintrah/Satan relationship. In an action which echoes that of the Great Assembly in the Song, the eternals ignore these problems of agency to simplistically condemn the Bard and Song. Like Palamabron, the Bard’s reaction is to retreat from the legal realm. His refuge becomes Milton’s breast—the heart of a prophetic poet (and the heart of a poem) that will descend to Earth and redeem from a dearth of inspiration all those caught within (inter alia) a crushing legal regime. Radical sentiment needed to hide away from persecution and prosecution, in a place cloaked in the “fires of prophecy” or secreted in some “cottag’d vale,” but could still find its way to the reader, the politician, or the juror to inspire redemption. As Mary Lynn Johnson argues, Milton is intensely engaged with this motivation, to reclaim England from state ideology and to “rekindle, through Blake, the spirit of prophecy in Britain.” Spreading throughout public space in acts of interpretation and judgment, this inspiration would assist the antinomian goal of resisting and reconfiguring legal tradition, thereby enhancing the autonomy of the individual and protecting artistic expression (and the artist) from state tyranny. As Johnson claims, “Whatever else this Song means, it means that art matters; poems have consequences”: even such a disguised attack on legal ideology must work for its own protection as well as bravely advocate for revolution (Johnson 2002, pp. 234, 233, 241).

Self-Annihilation as Legal Aesthetic “Self-annihilation” is the answer Blake proposes to the oppression of Satanic law. In Milton’s final conflict with Satan at the poem’s close, he chooses to recombine with Ololon, his “emanation,” and reject the divided notion of self he had previously embraced in this fallen world: I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour

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To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albions covering To cast off his filthy garments, & clothe him with Imagination To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration. (41:2–7)

Ian Balfour sees in this passage an intensity of biblical quotation that amounts to a discursive self-annihilation. Blake here becomes a prophet whose authority (and responsibility) dissolves to combine with that of other prophets in a long line of succession (2002, pp. 170–2). Like his ideal readership, Blake can produce an imaginative utterance untrammeled by tradition and yet remain submerged within a welter of competing voices that vitiates the power of his own authority. In a fundamental sense, the author ceases to be and can no longer exert a putative control over the textual meaning. As Makdisi argues, readers encounter Blake’s works “not as finite texts, contained within a closed circuit of interpretation as defined by some cage of mutually illustrative … words and images, but rather as virtual texts, constituted by, even suspended in, the indefinite and expansive gap between words and images—a gap kept resolutely alive by the open nature of Blake’s work” (2002, p.  111): not only does the reader struggle to stabilize meaning when caught between image and word, within a dissolving narrative structure that eschews literary and mythological convention, but equally the author performs such dissolution through a prophetic mode of writing. A single perspective, whether arising from the reader or authorial tyranny, cannot be maintained, nor can any ideological position derived from such a text sustain any kind of stable foundation. Certainly this intentional indeterminacy levies a religious critique against biblical orthodoxy (McGann 1986, pp. 303–24; Mee 1992, pp. 14–19 and 163), but it is equally an attack against the moral law and legal regime that arises from such orthodoxy. Revolutionary art under Satan’s law must elevate the individual reader into a Milton, into his own prophet with a freedom to read and choose unlimited by prior authority. Resistance to the stability of the poetic letter is resistance to the letter of the law. For Blake, the promulgation of the Ten Commandments was an artistic, religious, and legal act that simply replaced the worship of one idol (the Golden Calf under Aaron) with another (the legal regime under Moses—Eaves 1992, p.  115; see also Mitchell 1978, p.  129). As Blake suggests in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The [First] Book of Urizen, “poetic tales” (pl. 11) inevitably solidify into meaning under a

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priesthood and ultimately become laws that enslave. The “Argument” of the Marriage allegorizes a mythical injustice that must be corrected: the “villain” has driven the “just man” to “barren climes” where he now “rages” like a madman against the assumed “mild humility” of those who have supplanted him (2:3–20). Priesthood has subverted the value of “energy” and created an ethical framework that valorizes passive reason as “good” (pl. 4). Blake’s old testament God, Urizen, creates a “Book/Of eternal brass” (4:32–3), promulgating “One King, one God, one Law” (4:40) in a move that replicates the simultaneous birth of art (specifically Blake’s own art of engraving), writing, and law. The method of “infernal reading” which Blake announces in the concluding portions of The Marriage is the technique he almost necessitates and inculcates in the reading of his work, a method to emancipate the “just man,” his readership, from the death grip of authority and convention, to rouse the faculties to act and perpetuate rebellion upon rebellion to undo the inversion of values instigated so long ago. Here is Blake’s attempt to revive the ethic of the Ancient Constitution, to reconstitute his reader into the kind of unfettered actor who has been oppressed and all but lost under current legal institutions: resisting textual authority in art can lead to resisting the legal letter and the ideological authority encoded therein. In Milton, the prominence of “mercy” as an alternative to Satanic law connects that poem to the well-known phenomenon of “pious perjury,” the dominant embodiment of resistance to legal tyranny in 1804 England. Pious perjury and “mercy” were almost seen as synonymous terms. As the author of A Treatise on the Right of Juries (1771) stated: Mercy is the characteristic and leading feature of an English jury. They are apt now and then to err upon the favourable side: but let us consult the gentle spirit of our law, and we shall find it would rather dispense with the punishment of a hundred guilty persons, than permit a single innocent man to suffer.

Moreover, in acting mercifully, the jury superseded human institutions to apply God’s law: If therefore, the power of judging of the law as well as the fact, were annihilated, the very intention of the legislature would be defeated; because courts, and not the jury, would then be the sole judges …. [In cases that warrant it,] the jury have not only a right, but they are bound, by the spirit

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of their oaths, and by the laws of God and man, to find the [accused] Not Guilty of the crime.

This right to jury autonomy, going back to at least the trial of John Lilburne, enshrined antinomian doctrine into legal practice (Green 1987, pp. 347–8; see also 307, 311, 336, and 382). Convicted of slander against Sir Arthur Haselrig and the Committee of Haberdashers’ Hall, Lilburne had been statutorily banished, subject to execution on return to England. Nevertheless, he did return and was put on trial, his jury given only one question to consider: was the accused in fact the John Lilburne named in the statute? Based on this factual “special verdict,” the judge would then (potentially) pronounce death as a matter of law. However, the jury refused to have its discretion limited in this way—although Lilburne had intentionally never put his identity at issue, the jury acquitted on their supposed uncertainty regarding the identity of the accused. Here was “mercy” and jury nullification, perhaps influenced by Lilburne’s own propaganda offensive during the trial (published anonymously, of course). In various pamphlets, he argued that death for the (minor) crime of slander was inherently unjust and that those who executed such a judgment would be guilty of murder. Unless the jury acted according to their own consciences, despite what the law may mandate, they would also be subject to judgment: For what shall it profit us, either to please the malice or opinions of men, for to lose our own souls, rather let it be our choice not to fear those that can kill these bodies of ours, but to fear him who is able to cast both our bodies and our souls into hell fire …. [T]he justness of our proceedings is that which will bear us out in the great and terrible day of the Lord.

There is a higher law, suggested Lilburne, that all people must follow: the law of God as manifested in the conscience. To ignore that in some slavish application of earthly law was to damn yourself on judgment day, “the terrible day of the Lord.” Leveller antinomian rhetoric (disseminated by their leader, John Lilburne) became an essential part of a tradition of jury resistance to legal authority (Green 1987, pp. 152–99). The apocalyptic resonances of legal decision-making also reverberate in Blake’s assessment of the ideal encounter between reader and artistic text. In “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” Blake states:

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If the Spectator could Enter into these Images in his Imagination approaching them on the Fiery Chariot of his Contemplative Thought if he could Enter into Noahs Rainbow or into his bosom or could make a Friend & Companion of one of the Images of wonder which always intreats him to leave mortal things as he must know then would he arise from his Grave then would he meet the Lord in the Air & then he would be happy. (E 560)

The reader, like the jury member, must choose either to remain separate and subject to conventional notions of art and self or to embrace the promptings of some higher power. Although the ideas are developed more fully in Jerusalem (Eaves 1982, pp. 26, 187 and 201), Milton’s conclusion depicts The Revelation of Saint John as a “Litteral expression,” as a garment written in blood which causes a textual last judgment to fall upon the poem’s Blake character (41:7–28). Confronted by this most inspired and iconoclastic of texts, Blake as reader is transformed and becomes capable of writing a text like Milton which instigates a chain of inspiration to resist the dead letter of poetry and law alike. As Blake loses consciousness (a self-annihilation), he comes to advocate for a broader self-annihilation in his readership in which the authority of writers and interpreters is alike guided not by reason or convention but by a conscience aligned with a divine ethical framework. Although the poem’s final movement is certainly an expression of religious enthusiasm (as Moskal and Thompson suggest), it equally has a legal relevance. Given the context of Blake’s own trial and the broader legal controversies of the day, the “mercy” he opposes to Satanic law must find expression in the “self-annihilation” of textual indeterminacy and in the concomitant revival of resistance to textual poetic and legal authority. Blake must not only build a haven in which to avoid the fate of Paine, Despard, and the Bard, but must also spread the inspiration of resistance to textual tyranny so that the injustice of their condemnation might be avoided in future. In Milton is one attempt to rejuvenate an autonomous imagination that can both continue and perhaps even rise above Orc’s cycle of conflict and revolution. Although Milton allegorizes many biographical elements of Blake’s time at Felpham with Hayley, it also rouses the faculties to act and teaches the reader Milton’s prophetic radicalism, arming Blake’s audience against the ideological control expressed through artistic and legal text and convention. Encoded in Milton (and much of Blake’s work) is a mercy and ideal of self-annihilation in opposition to Satanic law, which undermines not only the conflated ideology of art and state religion, but also expresses the ethic

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of pious perjury, an antinomian resistance to all authority but that of God. The Blakean reader infused with these principles could never calmly capitulate to some priestly interpretation of earthly text but, in reading infernally, comes to enact their own version of jury nullification, disseminating in the face of defunct legal institutions the almost-lost mercy of God on earth.

Reading Jerusalem: Revelations Beyond the Rule of Law Yet, in advocating an annihilation of the self, a supposed breakdown of the line bounding the individual and separating him or her from the other, Blake promulgates a paradoxical stance regarding the political effect of his aesthetic theory. Blake’s obliteration of the conventional expectations of plot, character, and image appears to be the textual analogue to his theory of the minute particular (e.g., see Joosten 2008 for a comparison of Blake’s visual and textual sublime). As he states in his “A Vision of the Last Judgment”: If the Spectator could Enter into these Images in his Imagination approaching them on the Fiery Chariot of his Contemplative Thought … then would he arise from his Grave then he would meet the Lord in the Air & then he would be happy. General Knowledge is Remote Knowledge it is in Particulars that Wisdom consists & Happiness too. Both in Art & in Life General Masses are as Much Art as a Pasteboard … he who enters into & discriminates most minutely the Manners & Intentions the [Expression] Characters in all their branches is the alone Wise or Sensible Man & on this discrimination all Art is founded … as Poetry admits not a Letter that is Insignificant so Painting admits not a Grain of Sand or a Blade of Grass. (E 550)

Much like his painting “The Last Judgment,” the text of Milton is characterized by a series of scenes or vignettes that have an ambiguous relationship to each other: each is drawn with a distinct and “bounding line,” but the relationship of each to the whole is difficult to categorize, just as the meaning of each particular is difficult to grasp. As Blake suggests from the start, his is merely A vision, not The vision: “I have presented it [the Last Judgment] as I saw it to different people it appears differently as everything else does” (E 544). Character motivations may shift, personalities merge, and images transmogrify in a confusing mosaic with which each

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reader must wrestle and then assemble into meaning. In the 1790s, the sublime was the dominant paradigm through which the effect of art on the “Spectator” was theorized and the relationship of art to political discourse was negotiated. Critics have elaborated on a number of such resonances. Peter de Bolla connects the Blakean sublime to notions of debt during the Seven Years’ War, while Daniel Schierenbeck and Kurt Heinzelman link Blake’s theory to political economy and concerns surrounding middle-class authenticity (De Bolla 1989, p.  6; Schierenbeck 2007, p. 23; Heinzelman 1980, pp. 112 and 114; cf. Pfau 1997). Blake’s notion that sublimity arises from minute particulars is, in the estimation of Nicholas Williams and Leonard Deen, the embodiment of an essentially democratic ideal in contradistinction to the monarchical thrust of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (Williams 1998, p. 193; Deen 1983, p. 204; noted in Schierenbeck 2007, pp. 39–40). Indebted to Longinus, who felt the sublime moment was not one of transcendence so much as intimidation and domination (Ryan 2001, p. 267), Burke’s characterization of the sublime frames it as a Hobbesian physiological process that increased awe and minimized the power of the individual by suppressing reason’s autonomy (Ryan 2001, pp. 269 and 271). Blake’s angry response to the Burkean underpinnings of Reynolds’ Discourses is well documented (Schierenbeck 2007, p. 24) and Blake’s reaction to Burke’s magisterial and sublime depiction of the French Royal Family in the Reflections may have been similar. To a writer whose primary purpose was to “rouse the faculties to act” and awaken the imaginative and interpretive autonomy of his reader, this Burkean aesthetic may have appeared almost sacrilegious and certainly would have seemed part of a larger artistic plot to suppress radical political thought and expression (as Blake complains in the preface to Milton). However, in both Blake’s artistic theory and Milton, the end result of the sublime artistic encounter is effacement of the individual, variously depicted as the reader “entering” the artistic piece on the “Fiery Chariot of his Contemplative Thought” or as the “self-annihilation” of the prophet/author. Schierenbeck detects in this a contradiction: How can Blake simultaneously advocate for a distinct, autonomous, politically radical reader and for a reader who submerges himself or herself into a larger whole, whether the “Divine Humanity” or Revelations’ “great winepress of the nations”?

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In providing his aesthetic ideal of multeity in unity, Blake also participates in defining an ideal public, which as Barrell argues, is an integral, political function of eighteenth-century aesthetics. Barrell relates this function of aesthetics to a redefinition of civic humanism which was “related to the belief that in a complex, modern, commercial society, a society divided by the division of labour and united only in the pursuit of wealth, the opportunities for the exercise of public virtue were much diminished.” He thus describes the “concern in civic humanist theories of painting” as “a concern with the integrity of the personality of the citizen, achieved by a subordination of private to general interests, and with the order of society, maintained by a submission of inferiors to their natural rulers” and relates in particular to how it is evidenced in the aesthetics of Joshua Reynolds, James Barry, and Blake (Barrell 33). Blake’s aesthetics, and in particular his definition of the imagination, attempt to provide this very integrity of the personality, but they do so by creating a myth of society’s wholeness. Such a model may provide a radical critique in that this divine Body figures an ideal of a society that is not deeply fissured, but it also reflects ideology’s task of refiguring subjecthood in a manner that enforces political unity. (Schierenbeck 2007, pp. 36–7)

In Shierenbeck’s opinion, individuality is subsumed into polity: “The members of the Divine Body surrender their self-interest for the overall good, for in order for the body to function properly, all its members must work together in harmony, directed by an overriding will” (2007, p. 37). Blake’s myth, then, is that the individual can retain autonomy within this larger collective, and it is a myth, moreover, mandated by the ideological impetus of “political unity.” Although I feel Blake was unconcerned with logical contradiction, I would add to Shierenbeck’s cogent critique the observation that Blake had been forced to negotiate this paradox since the moment he embraced prophecy as his artistic mode: to the extent that an author is a prophet, he is both an individual speaking to others and an unsevered part of a prophetic collective stretching back to a divine source. Prophets live simultaneously in two states—as individuals and as members of a conglomerate voice. In the quest to avoid legal responsibility for radical sentiment, this paradox, ambiguity or duality was the whole point (or at least an important one). I would suggest that, in Jerusalem, his last great work, Blake is not so much interested in reconciling this apparent dichotomy between the individual and the collective as exploiting it and finding in it an answer: only by preserving the integrity and autonomy of each citizen can a collective arise which both expresses and moves beyond normative conceptions of justice and the rule of law.

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Commenced in the aftermath of the same traumatic legal and personal events that led to Milton, Jerusalem is a text Blake developed over perhaps sixteen years (Paley p. 12), returning to it periodically as his ideas developed and shifted. The multiple perspectives articulated within the poem are perhaps a by-product of this lengthy composition: as an author returns to the act of creation, he can never be the same author as the one who began the work, but is a continually shifting persona with differing impulses, readings, and interpretations of his own text. Blake may be interested in both foregrounding and thematizing this experience. Regarding the poem’s structure, Doskow notes: all the poem’s parts fall into place as pieces of a kaleidoscopic whole complementing and reinforcing one another. Each chapter then turns the kaleidoscope to view the theme in a new way. The pieces recompose themselves in new patterns and seems to reveal new appearances of the whole but are only actualizing those patterns potentially present all along. After the first glimpse, no new element is added to the picture. Further turns and glimpses simply rearrange existing pieces to examine the theme from all sides, going, in turn, through all the possible combinations. (1982, p. 15)

In Doskow’s estimation, the poem is fundamentally about a splitting of subjectivity and the necessity to choose by experiencing and then overcoming that multiplicity: “Time is transcended as one action is consecutively revealed in all its multiple meanings from many perspectives, and the single moment of Albion’s choice is exploded to cover the entire poem” (p.  15). The singular, individuated subject experience is “necessary to awaken … consciousness” and enable the imaginative apprehension of truth in unity (pp.  18–19): Blake embraces Shierenbeck’s paradox and demands both individuality and unity. Although Doskow frames the poem as a revelation and last judgment in which Albion, the English nation, and everyone in it might awake from the “Sleep of Ulro” to “Eternal Life” (p. 15), I would carve out a subset of that grand design and suggest the poem’s multiple perspectives not only embody the voice of democracy, the “vox populi” (as Coleridge put it) of a democratic ideal (c.f. Williams and Deen), but also disrupt in their polyphony various literary conventions that bear a close analogue to the construction of a unitary subjecthood in author and reader. In this companion piece to Milton, Blake creates a text which attempts to enact on its readers the discursive annihilation with which Milton concludes and, in so doing, seeks to explode notions of the

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monolithic text and author, the unified self, and the consolidated polity on which the rule of law depends. Jerusalem moves to the ultimate recognition that not only can legal institutions never manifest God’s mercy on earth, they constitute an absolute obstacle to the realization of that mercy: only the dissolution of legal (and textual) conventions, ultimately including the rule of law, will enable the freedom of the subject from its subjectivity under the modern administrative state. In enacting this “wine press” of the nations promised at the end of Milton, Jerusalem seeks to break down barriers between individuals and erase subjectivity itself: insofar as it obliterates its own conventions of (inter alia) character, voice, and perspective, it mirrors the breakdown of the individual promised in The Revelation of Saint John. Although, as Costas Douzinas and Adam Gearey argue, the ultimate promise of literature in the face of law may well be to teach a “respect for the singularity of the other” (2005, pp.  75–6) and fundamentally reconfigure notions of justice at the heart of human legal institutions, Jerusalem works to realize the logical extreme of that ideal, that the self is the other, a revelation that aspires to an extralegal regime embodying Richard Rorty’s radical promise of a “larger loyalty” to supplant conventional notions of justice extant both in the modern era and Blake’s day. Critical conceptions of Blake’s last poem have developed substantially since its inception. Robert Southey’s initial assessment of it as “perfectly mad” (see Paley p. 12) was essentially unchallenged by Ellis and Yeats (in 1893), Sloss and Wallace (in 1926), and Stevenson (in 1959) (see Doskow 1982, pp. 22–3, n.1). However, S. Foster Damon’s thematic perspective, Northrop Frye’s biblical framework, and Hazard Adams’ process-­ oriented view all proved seminal advances in critical understanding, forging a set of conventional notions through which to control the poem’s wild utterance. Although Paul Yoder argues with Doskow’s asynchronous understanding of the poem (Yoder 2010, pp. 1, 7–8), hers too is one more (perhaps even more comprehensive) frame through which to view the work. As Doskow writes, the critical consensus regarding the poem’s impenetrability has now “so far reversed itself that, with rare exceptions, Blake’s critics now see the poem as a brilliant exposition of Blake’s visionary mode and message, and they acknowledge only minor murky lapses along the way” (1982, p. 13). Although this range of interpretations is perhaps no greater than for other major works, I would suggest that Jerusalem poses a particularly serious problem for the reader. Blake’s prophetic texts as a rule tend to challenge conventional norms of character, voice, narrative, and setting.

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Even the early marriage of Heaven and Hell can be bewildering in its range of reference, interweaving of prose, poetry, image and personal, visionary biography. However, in my experience, Jerusalem is a text beyond the pale in the confusion and dismay it produces. Southey’s reaction may have been myopic, but it does capture at least a superficial, initial perspective on the work. Largely in response to the confusion produced by the apparent chaos of the poem, critics have often deployed what might be loosely termed an “archeological method” in understanding the text, in which a word, a series of words, or an image is first related to its immediate context and then to other parts of the poem (which often merely leads to a deeper confusion) and then to other similar instances of the sign in other Blakean texts. Finally, connections are often made to parallel instances outside Blake’s canon, usually to biblical passages, philosophical works, or pieces of classical art (or even further afield.) It is “archeological” in the sense that each artifact (sign or image) is carefully brushed off and considered within a web of other references erected by the desires, interests, and knowledge of the critic and the broader, established conventions of Blake criticism. Morton Paley’s commentary to plate 11 is a prime example: We are meant to see this plate as a single scene, a cross-section of the marine world with the text superimposed between the depths and the surface. The swan-woman at the top has eluded definitive interpretation. Damon (Philosophy and Symbols 469) takes her to be the Female Will and compares the swan-headed Spectre on 71. Stevenson (656) suggests a connection with alchemical symbolism in which the swan would represent ‘arsenic not as a poison, but as a substance “mediating” between alchemical stages and thus valuable in the process.’ John Beer (Blake’s Visionary Universe 198) sees the swan as Leda and as representing ‘the cruel force of the natural swan.’ Erdman (Il. Bl., 290) compares an illustration to Ovid’s Metamorphoses showing Cygnus as a swan with human legs and thighs. Yet none of these explanations or others that have been advanced shows why Blake chose a dejected-looking, perhaps dying swan with a woman’s breasts and body here. (Paley, p. 146)

This procedure is perhaps best embodied in S.  Foster Damon’s Blake Dictionary (1988), in which references to Blake’s idiosyncratic concepts and mythology are collated and cross-referenced to provide some kind of matrix within which to understand his otherwise seemingly impenetrable conceptions. In structure, this method is similar to any act of reading, the essential insight of post-structuralism being that words can only mean

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anything with reference to other words from (necessarily) other contexts. With Blake, however, it seems that such efforts are particularly vexed due to the poet’s idiosyncratic and unconventional frames of reference: he seems interested in neologisms, in using common words in uncommon ways, and in mystifying his reader with references to invented mythologies or the mythologized versions of individuals and events from his personal biography. It could perhaps be said that, more than any writer of the Romantic period, Blake (especially in Jerusalem) anticipates the postmodern text, the text that thematizes the process of its own creation and dissolution under the eye of the engaged reader. As much as Jerusalem is a poem about multiple perspectives on a single moment (Doskow), profoundly references The Book of Revelation (Paley), or expresses an “imaginative vision of human life” (Frye 1972, p. 357), it seems to be first and foremost about the act of reading and interpreting. Blake more than any other poet and Jerusalem more than any other poem confronts the critic with the question of how one assigns meaning to signs etched on the Blakean plate. There’s a great deal at stake in the answer to this question. As Blake argues in plate 11 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, writing (and reading) instigates the inevitable fall into law. Once genius and inspiration are written in signs, their range of signification easily becomes controlled by priests who can interpret, solidify meaning and use it to enslave through the promulgation of laws that have both religious and civic manifestations. This is the point Paul Yoder makes in his introduction to The Narrative Structure of William Blake’s Poem Jerusalem. Critical interpretive communities spontaneously arise when adherents coalesce around rhetorically powerful positions advanced by critics. Much like a strong legal decision, the critical position receives “uptake” and sets a kind of precedent that closes down interpretive possibility and requires an Orc-like revolution to gainsay (the express purpose of Yoder’s iconoclastic argument: 2010, pp. 11–12). This fall into law is equally the story of Moses, in which the (supposedly) first instance of writing is a prophetic reception of divine utterance immediately transcribed into the Decalogue that then becomes binding on a nation. This is the story of Urizen, in which the self-created being (fashioned through a spontaneous moment of naming) commits as his first act the writing of a book promulgating “one King, one God, one Law.” As much as Yoder seeks to counter the asynchronous interpretations of Doskow and Youngquist, he can at best only acquiesce to the latter’s assertion that each reader conjures into reality a new interpretation each

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time he encounters the text. By his own admission, Yoder can only seek to gather to himself an interpretive community to rival the one he seeks to challenge. Blake has every critic participating in an Orc cycle which necessarily asks us to question the nature of meaning-making and which, consequently, problematizes the textual creation of the legal subject. It is through the language of the law that the political and social subject can be identified, hailed, disciplined, and punished by the state: Los writes a book that is Urizen. It is equally legal language that inscribes the free space of the legal subject and breathes life into the rule of law. Keenly aware of the legal interpretive battle for radical speech in the 1790s, traumatized by his own experience of the linguistically constructed reality of the courtroom in 1804, Blake is rightly concerned about the slavery that can occur through any act of interpretation and imagination constrained by convention: through the caging of desire comes the fall into subjectivity and law. It is crucial, then, to question and challenge the legal configuration of the subject through text. Blake’s Jerusalem does just that. Although most of Blake’s texts vigorously call into question the act of interpretation, Jerusalem seems to make a theme of this from its very first sequence of plates. Plate 3 of the poem, addressed “To the Public,” preserves both an initial impression of the whole text (a “reading” of it) and a rereading of that impression and text. As Paley points out (pp. 11 and 133), Blake initially wrote a relatively lively and positive depiction of his relationship to his readers, including the words “love,” “friendship,” and “blessed” (p. 11). At this early stage, Blake seems to hope his work might be eagerly received by a public open to his unique message and style. However, over the years of Jerusalem’s composition history, this optimism seems to have faded. Although it is unclear when he returned to plate 3 to alter it, the emotion he brought to the act is palpable. As Paley suggests, it appears Blake attacked the plate, violently excoriating the previously positive language. Although this violence potentially evidences many things including numerous personal and professional disappointments Blake experienced in the early 1800s, it most essentially performs and exhibits an act of reading and rereading, the dynamics of which Blake appears to wish to preserve in the final copy of the poem. He makes no effort to smooth over or elide the deletions. Blake seems indifferent to the fact that the elimination and gouging of the words from the plate make the text nonsensical:

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After my three years slumber on the banks of the Ocean, I again display my Giant forms to the Public: My former Giants & Fairies having receiv’d the highest reward possible: the [deleted] and [deleted] of those with whom to be connected, is to be [deleted] I cannot doubt that this more consolidated & extended Work. will be as kindly recieved [deleted] The Enthusiasm of the following Poem, the Author hopes [several lines deleted] I also hope the Reader will be with me, wholly One in Jesus our Lord, who is the God [deleted] and Lord [deleted] to whom the Ancients look’d and saw his day afar off, with trembling & amazement.

Passion, unbridled by any aesthetic concerns or other conventional constraints, makes for an unreadable narrative. Blake wanted us to see this act of rage and desire obliterating text, an act that could be synecdoche for the process of the whole work. The motif of multiple perspectives, the asynchronous interpretations of Youngquist and Doskow, even Yoder’s rebellion against convention, all thematize the various points of view brought by different readers, by the same reader at differing times, and by the author during the act of creation, rereading, and recreation. Plate 3 may be broadly addressed “To the Public” but is also directed to a very specific reading public, the “reader … of books … of heaven”: And of the God whom … Who in mysterious Sinais awful cave To Man the wonderous art of writing gave.

In the poem’s opening, Blake foregrounds the activity of the individual reading books, heaven and God, who created both law and writing in the same moment. The text then quickly echoes the process of Marriage plate 11. In an act that replicates that primal moment of lawgiving and writing, God now “again speaks in thunder and in fire”—the author/speaker is now a prophet hearing (“his voice I hear”) and inscribing (“Therefore I print”) the wild words transmitted from a divine source. As previously in Urizen and Milton, Blake participates in a process of prophetic quotation, both claiming and not claiming the words of his poem and, in so doing, enormously complicating the process of interpretation. How does one generate a “meaning” in a case such as this? The speaker puts himself in the position of both a reader (listener) and writer. If he writes only what he hears, can he be said to mean anything or is his writing simply an act of reportage? Assuming one denies the actual divine origin of Blake’s

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Jerusalem, is the “proper” interpretive strategy to engage in the archeological process, to sift through his other works and interplay of references to generate a matrix in which to understand the lines that follow? It certainly could be, depending on the critical restraints and disciplinary assumptions brought to interpretation, but equally viable is to assert that one of Blake’s fundamental points is to dramatize and problematize the act of interpretation itself. We are all readers and (potentially, Blake hopes) prophets—we receive the text of Jerusalem in a fashion analogous to how the speaker receives it. There is a gap, a chasm, between this world and the divine realm which can be bridged only by the imagination. This process of interpretation can be systematized through a trial by ordeal, or the rules of evidence and legal interpretation (or one of many hermeneutic strategies such as Marxism or New Historicism), but the reader must ultimately engage in some act of autonomous will to leap that gap and posit (create) a meaning from the text, that is, if one wishes to read at all. From the very start of Jerusalem, Blake wishes us to be conscious of this process and recognize the role of our own imagination in generating that meaning. The chain of prophecy is once again activated, during which linguistic meaning is not so much communicated as (re)created. Picking up from the discursive annihilation of Milton and continuing the authorial regicide of Urizen, this text wishes not only to hand the reader the ultimate in creative and imaginative autonomy, but to focus the reader on what that act means and implies: Jerusalem is a text that is generated and obliterated as we read it. More than perhaps any other text in the Blakean canon, Jerusalem is like the law—it is a rebus that focuses on the act of interpretation itself (Douzinas and Gearey 2005, p. 352). In challenging its own status as a text that is readable and obtains an identity through adherence to literary convention, the poem calls into question both subjectivity and law. To be fair, Blake may have intended very specific things as he wrote Jerusalem. As countless critics have discovered, there are potent resonances inside and outside the text that can be used to generate a (more?) stable meaning from the signs inscribed in the poem. This is an incredibly useful exercise. But to do this in the face of Blake’s destabilization of meaning in the poem seems to generate a meaning at odds (at least) with the prophetic tradition Blake invokes from the very start. I do feel that Blake meant specific things much of the time which scholarship has uncovered, but I am not so sure this can be said to be the “meaning” of the text. In the prophetic tradition, meaning is in the reader—the words come and we are to be inspired. The meaning of the text is not even therefore the

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meaning that is inspired in the reader. The meaning is the inspiration itself—the rising up of the imagination to make or at least try to make something from the text. This a poem about the process of generating meaning: do we wish to be guided by the critical Priests or do we wish to generate something new? This is the choice Blake gives us at the top of plate 3: do we wish to be among the sheep or goats? You can choose to dismiss these as insane ravings or enter into them on the chariot of your imagination and (potentially) contact some eternal realm. The frontispiece to the poem, an image of (apparently) Blake moving through a door of text, could indeed embody the movement of the Blake/reader into the text and the imaginative space it inspires. That, I submit, is the “meaning” of Jerusalem—not an allegory or equation of signs, but the dramatization of the process to produce such signs. It is about making meaning from text, and therefore, profoundly about the rule of law and the legal subjectivity that results from adherence to and belief in a rule of law that is and can only be generated through signs. I would argue that Jerusalem is, in fact, much more than simply a final exclamation regarding the autonomy and responsibility of the individual to engage forcefully and imaginatively with text, to break beyond conventional reading strategies. I would suggest that Jerusalem looks for a pathway beyond text and, by extension, beyond the rule of law. This capacity of text to question the stability and import of its own medium might be at least a partial answer to the claim that affect (e.g., emotion and pain) has displaced literature’s primacy in critiquing law (Olson 2016, pp. 338–9). The fact that affective states must be enclosed in signs to discuss and analyze them and that literature and law both work entirely through linguistic exchange suggests they are uniquely (although not exclusively) suited to critiquing each other. We can’t talk about affective states without reducing them to that which is not affect. Blake was acutely aware of what this inevitable fall into the sign entailed and ultimately pointed to a space beyond language as the only possible location for justice. Although Jerusalem does its best to defy interpretation within conventional norms, there are some indications the poem is concerned with issues of moral law, legal subjectivity, and the necessity to restrain imagination and desire in order to fit within any legal regime or textual interpretation. As Francesca Cauchi argues, much of the poem seems concerned with “the most cataclysmic event in the history of man,” the “moral perversion of the will” (2015, p. 4) produced by the false dichotomy of good and evil promulgated by the Judeo-Christian moral law. Framing Blake’s

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unsystematic theory through the later work of Fredrich Nietzsche, Cauchi suggests this process is central to Jerusalem, in its pervasive rejection of all and any absolutes (such as “good” and “evil,” “purity” and “sin”) that lie in direct contrast or contradiction (2015, p. 6). Leading to such physical ideological manifestations of punishment and sacrifice as “Druid altars” and “Oaken Groves,” this ethical fantasy is an “internalized moral law that entraps, tortures and murders” those held in the ideological vice of “Albion’s [Fatal] Tree,” which comprises the moral and (I would suggest) criminal law of Blake’s England (2015, p.  7). Blake had been occupied with this disastrous fall into law since at least The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Although “moral law” and “judicial law” are not identical, they are intimately connected. Much more than today when administrative regulation has flooded our experience of law and divorced it partially from moral considerations (e.g., few people would think most parking violations are morally wrong), in Blake’s time legal transgression was associated with sin, with breaching “natural law” which arose from divine fiat and was (supposedly) revealed through a process of reasoning, institutionalized as common law precedent and guaranteed through a developing legal interpretive practice (Blackstone 1765, pp. 1:42–3). Even early in his career, Blake could confidently assert that “prisons are built on bricks of law, brothels on bricks of religion”: legal and religious institutions preserve and perpetuate this false dichotomy of good and evil, saint, and sinner. References to “moral law” and “justice” abound in Jerusalem, rarely gaining mention in a positive light. On plate 23, moral justice is associated with sexuality and law, a connection Doskow suggests is an effect of Vala’s “moral law,” which perverts and inappropriately restricts gendered sexuality (63)—perhaps laws of marriage and adultery seek to restrain desire and energy wrongly. As Blake later asserts at plate 94:23, Britannia’s dreams of chastity and moral law have slain Albion. Law is a cage that has frozen around Albion’s sons and daughters (48:60–1; see also 49:24–30). The more pervasive legal theme, however, appears to revolve around Albion’s fall into a legal regime through the dominance of reason and rationality over desire, which has shut the world off from imagination and vision. In his opening address to part 3, “To the Deists,” the speaker claims: He never can be a Friend to the Human Race who is the Preacher of Natural Morality or Natural Religion. he is a flatterer who means to betray. to perpetuate Tyrant Pride & the Laws of that Babylon which he foresees shall shortly be destroyed. with the Spiritual and not the Natural Sword. (pl. 52)

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Their “Greek Philosophy” is a “remnant of Druidism” (pl. 52) and closes off access to the worship of God, instead mandating faith in all things of this world alone, the worship of Satan. This mindset leads to empiricist thinkers like Hume, Bacon, and Locke, it leads to Blackstonian “natural laws” and the systematization of the universe under Newton’s schema (e.g., on pl. 58), but it equally leads to “natural morality” and the laws of Babylon which arise from the common law process of reason supposedly “discovering” the natural rules of conduct set down by God and inherent in His clockwork universe. The state of separation and individuality, which Doskow sees as Albion’s starting point in part 1, is fashioned primarily from this intellectual creed: on plate 52, Satan, “the archer God of Albion’s Jewish and Deistic error attempts to destroy imagination by separating moral law from inspiration” (Doskow 1982, p. 37). It has many consequences, but one of them is to sever the individual irrevocably from the divine will and divine justice: reason can never leap the gap between the sign and godly mercy. Near the end of part 1, Albion seems to understand his error—in turning his back on Jerusalem, he has entered in to “wastes of moral law” (24:24). Albion’s son is Scholfield, the accuser at Blake’s own trial (11:21–3). Plate 54 emphasizes the role of rationality in opposing political and spiritual “Liberty,” its screed against imagination and fantasy itself forming into “Druid Rocks” (54:26) circumscribing and caging in the lands and rulers of the Old Testament such as “Cannan Agag & Aram & Pharoh.” As Jesus asserts, on this side of the “limits of possibility” (62:19) we live in a world of “prison & judgment” (62:24). Here, “every Act [is] a Crime, and Albion the punisher & judge” (28:4). In this spiritual and psychological state, Albion produces an ideology of justice that closes us off from the divine mercy. As he states at the start of Chap. 3:                All These hills & valleys are accursed witnesses of Sin I therefore condense them into solid rocks. stedfast! A foundation of certainty and demonstrative truth: That Man be separate from Man, & here I plant my seat. Cold snows drifted round him: ice covered his loins around He sat by Tyburn’s brook, and underneath his heel, shot up: A deadly Tree, he nam’d it Moral Virtue, and the Law Of God who dwells in Chaos hidden from the human sight. (28:8–16)

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The rule of law (signified by Tyburn’s brook and “deadly Tree”) inscribes a space that is not a place of freedom, but a trap. Even those who might later rebel against the despotic Albion simply replicate this intellectual prison:       Albion began to erect twelve Altars, Of rough, unhewn rocks. before the Potters Furnace He nam’d them Justice. and Truth. And Albions Sons Must have become the first Victims, being the first transgressors But they fled to mountains to seek ransom: building A Strong Fortification against the Divine Humanity and Mercy, In Shame & Jealousy to annihilate Jerusalem! (28:21–27)

All are barred from God’s mercy. Blake depicts these rational, intellectual restraints not as “mind forged manacles” but as the great trilithons of Stonehenge (his “Druid Rocks”), a concatenation and petrific embodiment of rational empiricism, natural religion, natural morality, and law. On plates 65 and 66, as the “spectre sons of Albion” put Luvah to torture and trial in the “Giant dance” of Salisbury (65:68 and 67), the jeering multitude suddenly erects        a stupendous Building on the Plains of Salisbury; with chains Of rocks round London Stone: of Reasonings: of unhewn Demonstrations In labyrinthine arches. (Mighty Urizen the Architect.) thro which The Heavens might revolve & Eternity be bound in their chain (66:2–5)

Stonehenge and its “Druid Altars” (65:63) embody the materialist scientific empiricism of experiment, of Newton and Locke, while equally embodying “Natural Religion & its Altars Natural Morality” (65:8), all of which is sufficient to create the limited, physical universe which exists in the tension between Reason and Desire, Wrath, and Pity (as diagrammed on pl. 54). As Doskow puts it: By subjecting man to existence within natural laws and moral codes based on reason, Albion’s sons set Deism’s conditions for the natural world and man’s actions within it, which turn into the bloody story of history unaffected by imagination. (1982, p. 130)

Reason and desire (associated with the imagination) form one pole of our world, but wrath and pity, which manifest in the legal and political realm,

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form the other. At the margins of plates 65 and 66 writhe chains and a female figure brandishing a sacrificial knife over a struggling victim. Current existence fits within the sphere defined by these opposites, a sphere that must be dissolved or exploded before we may move beyond the current limited institutions of this world. The textual and legal implications of Albion’s turning away from imaginative vision are perhaps best embodied in plate 41. In limiting himself to reason, to reading Urizen’s book of laws, Albion is effectively blinded (his face is buried in the book on his lap) and incapable of even noticing the scroll of mirror writing (perhaps indicative of Blake’s own visionary work) that lies nearby (see Doskow 1982, pp. 81–2; also referencing Erdman 1954, p. 316). Albion is smothered in text and incapable of reading anything; he and his children are forced to “build Babylon because they have forsaken Jerusalem” (24:30). Yet, if living in this material world, a space circumscribed by the rule of law, is to acquiesce to a cage and bar oneself even from the capacity to escape, how might one bring about the necessary apocalypse? If, as Doskow suggests, Albion’s mistake at the start of the poem is to reject unity by embracing the dictates of reason and its assertion of empirical separation and solipsism, then the trajectory the poem must take is to progress toward a vision of justice based on unity, on a melting of divisions that leads to a justice of love and mercy over that of law. The dominant image of the trilithon on plate 70 embodies the Tower of Babel-like immensity of Blake’s conception of Stonehenge (at 65 and 66), but also frames an archway through which people might pass, analogous to the doorway of plate 1, perhaps even inscribed with faded writing. We must somehow rend the veil, pierce it through the power of imagination, which allows us to transcend “natural law” and reach a just society (Doskow 1982, p. 115). The final plates of the poem give some indication of how this might be done. Blake’s work is directed to instigating this change. Past explorations of Blake’s syncretic mythology, theory of printing, and textual indeterminacy have already revealed the hopes he may have had for the revolutionary efficacy of his prophetic works. If the textually suffocated Albion of plate 41 has turned away from a scroll of mirror writing, then the mirror writing of Blakean prophecy might be the catalyst required to return to visionary unity. Early in Chap. 3, Los (so often a figure of creative energy) is indeed associated with an opposition to earthly law. He explores the fallen realm of Albion and understands that the route to salvation is not through vengeance but pity (31:29–38): the Gospel must supersede the Law. More

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elaborate conceptions develop as the text moves to its conclusion. The full-page illustration on plate 76 seems to suggest that empathy with Christ’s sacrifice may be key: as Albion stands before the Crucifix and imitates Christ’s position, he breaks down the separation between the two and engages in a visual quotation of his God. Just as Blake’s text is supposedly derived from a divine source, so the reader (and Albion) must engage in an act of inspiration and imitation that blurs the lines of separation between individuals. On plate 92, the previously monolithic Stonehenge appears diminished before the rising Jerusalem, its contrary. This alteration heralds the possibility of moving beyond the restrictions of law to an ethic of love: Wouldest thou love me who never died For thee or ever die for one who had not died for thee And if God dieth not for Man & giveth not himself Eternally for Man Man could not exist. for Man is Love: As God is Love: every kindness to another is a little Death In the Divine Image nor can Man exist but by Brotherhood. (96:23–28)

Imitating Christ’s sacrifice through “kindness” erodes the distinctions between individuals (they become brothers): “Albion stood in terror: not for himself but for his Friend/ Divine, & Self was lost in the contemplation of faith.” (96:30–31). Each kindness is a step toward self-annihilation (“a little Death”) and the creation of a fourfold burning bow (97:5ff) that will destroy the “Druid-Spectre” (98:6) of reason and unleash a new world arising from the imagination rather than reason (98:28ff). Gone are the “Covenant of Priam” and the “Moral Virtues of the Heathen,” the “Tree of Good & Evil,” and the specter of the “Patriarch Druid” (98:46–8). The ultimate result is a loss of individuality: “All Human Forms identified” (99:1), for which the legal implications are extreme. With no separation between individuals, there can be no law, no accused or accuser, no sinner or criminal. We would all be part of the “larger loyalty” Richard Rorty posits as his reconception of legal responsibility in a modern age. If justice and mercy are things we want for those near to us, those we love, then perhaps the most powerful way to reform modern law is to extend that loyalty, to increase and expand the circle of those we love and empathize with to include those from other walks of life, other cultures, widely divergent perspectives—to collapse distinctions between

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individuals. Engaging in this intellectual and spiritual exercise might be the closest we can come to the Blakean ideal. The transformation of the Stonehenge image in plate 100 (partially depicted on the front cover) perhaps best exemplifies the alteration Blake hopes for. What was previously a symbol of rationality, intellectual entrapment, and petrified, monolithic ideology has shifted, in the final plate, to a “bow of burning gold,” “a bow of mercy and loving kindness” (pl. 97). Law is no longer a (textual or lithic) cage, but a springboard for “arrows of desire” and imagination that stretches beyond and above the text. Certainly Blake’s elongated henge could be a “serpent temple” associated with a primal fall (Paley p. 297), could depict the text of plate 66 (which describes Stonehenge and Vala with her spindle), or could embody the “triple female tabernacle” of the moral law (88:16ff), woven by the female figure on the right. However, the henge of plate 100 could equally echo the form of a bow (the central circular stone arrangement being the “belly,” the line of uprights to the left and right comprising the “limbs”) which points to the top of the page away from and beyond the text and the reader, ending the poem in an image that gestures beyond textual signification. The previously monumental trilithons of the oppressive moral law are now shrunk to footling size: we leave the textual and legal world behind to a new dispensation beyond all dispensations. Yet the Jerusalem text remains aloof. As Doskow says of all interpretations before hers, they are “partial,” apprehending only a fragment of the whole, an accusation that Yoder in effect successfully levies against Doskow. As much as I feel Jerusalem has something to say about law, mercy, and justice, my account is even more partial than these: there is an enormous lack of clarity in what the poem might exactly mean or intend about legal reform. I’ve engaged in this intellectual exercise because it is mandated by the expectations of my profession: “law” in a sense has constrained my desire and caused me to produce a reading of Jerusalem to prove the point I want it to prove. Following Yoder, I am participating in the Orc cycle of criticism surrounding this poem: for a brief while and in various places, it becomes what I behold. Yet the text resists. Vast expanses of the poem remain unexplained and unexplainable within my interpretive rubric—the poem positively vibrates with an energy resisting my will, my reasoned attempt to tame it and force it into sense. I am just another priest trying to cage inspired words in order to lay down another law (or limit of interpretation) to recruit others to my cause. I am the separate and individual Albion. Critical desire demands that Jerusalem “make sense”—permeated

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with lavish illustrations, suffused with a recondite narrative, even (in certain incarnations) loaded with precious metals, the text is the “Gate of Los” (38:55–39:3) that can provide a visionary escape from “Tyburns deathful shades,” but can equally become a golden calf, an object of worship, desire, and veneration to cage its reader. My interpretation of the poem is simply a performance of what I feel is the poem’s central dynamic. Images of textual oppression abound. The cacophonous narrative leaves little room for Los’ creativity in plate 73. At the bottom of plate 64, Urizen reclines reading, calmly noting the soporific effect of text on the female figure at the top of the page, an effect she seems to desire to escape through an act of imagination and dreaming. Unremitting walls of text push figures to the edges or seemingly crush them out of existence. Plate after plate, image after image replicates a similar dynamic (see, e.g., plates 9, 15, 21, 31, 33, 36, 42, 58, 59, 74, and 91). On plate 23, figures are constrained into positions reminiscent of the letters that surround them: their subjecthood molded and formed by text. On plate 62, Albion’s body is composed almost entirely of text: the center and core of his being is textual, evidently to his great consternation. Words coil around us (pl. 63), they chain us (pl. 65), and they bind us into religious ideology (66). The great trilithon of plate 70 is covered in faded runes. Plate 67 seems the perfect embodiment of this motif. The figure at the bottom of the page is chained to a rack and veritably crushed by the dense linguistic material above. This seems a replication of the old legal practice of pressing, of forcing an accused criminal to attorn to the jurisdiction of the common law—in this case, to submit to the oppressive authority of text. On the next page, the chained figure is gone—obliterated from existence and totally absorbed into language. It might be possible to assert, therefore, that, in the end, the 100 plates of Jerusalem form the 100 (?) monumental trilithons depicted in the Stonehenge of plate 100. Each can be an object of worship, an expression of textual oppression that acts to reign in imagination and desire in order to express a stable and reasoned interpretation, a law promulgated to enslave the imaginations of others, or each can be seen as an act of resistance, as text which continually escapes interpretation in an effort to undermine the authenticity of any and all interpretation. The text has a bounding energy that defies our need to make it make sense—it reveals and embodies a latent energy in all text to defy restraint. As the image of plate 1 hints from the very start, the text of Jerusalem provides no answers—it is simply a doorway through which we might gain access to a truth unavailable here. Yes, Jerusalem means what hundreds of

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insightful and brilliant interpreters have found in it over the last 200 years, but, most importantly, it is a document that forces you beyond text, because the meaning is not there. Like Christ’s tomb, it is a cenotaph— there is a place and a structure (a trilithic binding with two covers), but the spirit has already fled. We yearn for meaning and wrestle with Blake’s words to force them into a distinct shape or form. This meaning-making is a sublimation of the traumatic notion that perhaps there is no meaning, in this or any text and, for all its mentions of law and justice, all its discussions of love and empathy, this is the location of Jerusalem’s most trenchant commentary on the rule of law. If the meaning of text is a matter of desire and will, the rule of law is an illusion to the extent that it relies on the supposed capacity to stabilize the meaning of text regardless of will: there can be no justice in our textual reality. The rule of law, which can itself be seen as a sublimation of this traumatic fact, is here called to task by Blake’s wild poem of multiple perspectives and untamable narratives. What the poem (and its critical reception) shows is that there is no safe space described and circumscribed by the legal text—there are only competing interpretations and perspectives, competing struggles for power and authority. Law, legal rights, and legal subjectivity are all in constant revolution. The sign cannot be read to access a truth or God’s law—we have only what is here. However, if we are indeed creatures of text, like Albion on plate 62, if at least our political subjecthood is defined by the rule of law Blake’s textual instability so effectively undermines, then the denial of literary convention in Jerusalem amounts to a denial of its own status as a recognizable text. This self-denial can stand in for the dissolution of (legal) subjectivity I suggest it emulates: when words fail, the law fails, and there can be no legal self—no self as defined by and subjected to legal regulation. In the aftermath of law’s collapse, Blake advocates for a Gospel of love and community; it is what he feels might greet us on the other side of his textual door, in the space beyond the poem’s final plate and the space beyond legal precedent, interpretive rule, and professional convention. That way lies Jerusalem.

Notes 1. The following discussion of Milton is largely taken from Barr 2007. 2. Glover (1973, p. 44) (noted in Wells 1983) suggests that radical expression continued in secrecy, which may still have signaled to Blake a defeat of

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r­ evolutionary sentiment. See also Green 1987, pp. 267–355, and Hostettler 2004, pp. 82–108, for a general discussion of the antiauthoritarian dimensions of jury nullification in the period. 3. Despite the “1804” etched on Milton’s title page, it is difficult to settle the exact period of the poem’s composition. Erdman suggests Blake started its development as early as 1800, while Viscomi states it was “not in draft or in production before 1804.” However, both agree that the plates (besides the title page) were probably executed in 1809–10 (Viscomi opting for later in this period). See E 806 and Viscomi 1993, p. 315. However, regardless of the long development and late printing of Milton, I take Blake’s foregrounding of the “1804” date as some indication that the poem engages with issues in the public sphere as it existed in that year. 4. From this point on, poetic references will be given in the form of plate followed by line number (e.g., 20:1) using Erdman’s plate numbering; references to Blake’s prose will be abbreviated as E followed by page number. 5. For a range of such interpretations, see Harold Bloom’s commentary at E 911; Erdman 1954; Balfour 2002, pp.  127–72; and Johnson 2002, pp. 231–250. 6. For a depiction of such Royal Academy acts of judgment, see Eaves 1992, p. 16, for a reproduction of C. Bestland’s The Royal Academicians Assembled in Their Council Chamber [1793], to Adjudge the Medals to the Successful Students in Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and Drawing.

References Adams, Hazard. 1975. Blake, Jerusalem and symbolic form. Blake studies 7 (2): 146–166. Balfour, Ian. 2002. The rhetoric of romantic prophecy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Barr, Mark L. 2007. Practicing resistance: Blake, Milton and the English jury. ERR 18 (3): 361–379. Barrell, Jon. 2000. Imagining the king’s death. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bentley, G.E. 2001. The stranger from paradise. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2004. Blake records. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Blackstone, Sir. William. 1765. Commentaries on the laws of England. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30802/30802-­ h/30802-­h.htm. Accessed 29 January 2021. Blake, William. 1982. The complete poetry and prose of William Blake. Ed. David V.  Erdman. Comm. Harold Bloom. Berkeley: University of California Press. (Abbreviated “E”).

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———. 1998. The illuminated books of William Blake, volume 1: Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion. Ed. Morton Paley. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Abbreviated “Paley”). Bolla, De, and Peter. 1989. The discourse of the sublime: Readings in history, aesthetics, and the subject. Oxford: Blackwell. Cauchi, Francesca. 2015. Blake and Nietzsche on self-slaughter and the moral law: A reading of Jerusalem. Journal of European Studies 45 (1): 3–20. Conner, Clifford D. 2000. Colonel Despard: The life and times of an Anglo-Irish rebel. Conshohocken, PA: Combined Press. Damon, S. Foster. 1988. A Blake dictionary. Revised Ed. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England. Deen, Leonard. 1983. Conversing in paradise: Poetic genius and identity-as-­ community in Blake’s Los. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Doskow, Minna. 1982. William Blake’s Jerusalem: Structure and meaning in poetry and picture. Toronto: Associated University Presses. Douzinas, Costas, and Adam Gearey. 2005. Critical jurisprudence. Portland: Hart Publishing. Eaves, Morris. 1982. William Blake’s theory of art. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1992. Blake and the counter-arts conspiracy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Erdman, David. 1954. Blake: prophet against empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Frye, Northrop. 1972. Fearful symmetry: A study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Glover, R. 1973. Britain at bay: Defence against Bonaparte. New  York: Allen & Unwin. Goodwin, Albert. 1979. The friends of liberty. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Green, Thomas Andrew. 1987. Verdict according to conscience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heinzelman, Kurt. 1980. The economics of the imagination. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Holdsworth, Sir William. 1956–1982. A history of English law. Vol. 17. London: Methuen. Hostettler, John. 2004. The criminal jury old and new. Winchester: Waterside Press. Howell, Thomas Bayley, Ed. 1809–1826. State trials. Vol. 33. London: R. Bagshot. Johnson, Mary Lynn. 2002. Milton and its contexts. In The Cambridge companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves, 231–250. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Joosten, Julie. 2008. “Minute particulars” and the visionary labour of words. European Romantic Review 19 (2): 113–118. King, Peter. 2000. Crime, justice and discretion in England 1740–1820. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Makdisi, Saree. 2002. The political aesthetic of Blake’s images. In The Cambridge companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves, 110–132. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2003. William Blake and the impossible history of the 1790s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marsh, Joss. 1998. Word crimes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McGann, Jerome. 1986. The idea of an indeterminate text: Blake’s bible of hell and Dr. Alexander Geddes. Studies in Romanticism 25 (3): 303–324. Mee, Jon. 1992. Dangerous enthusiasm. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1978. Blake’s composite art. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Moskal, Jeanne. 1994. Blake, ethics and forgiveness. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press. Olson, Greta. 2016. The turn to passion: Has law and literature become law and affect? Law and literature 28 (3): 335–353. Pfau, Thomas. 1997. Wordsworth’s profession: Form, class, and the logic of early romantic cultural production. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rorty, R. 2007. Justice as a larger loyalty. In Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers. Ed. R.  Rorty, 42–55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ryan, Vanessa L. 2001. The physiological sublime Burke’s critique of reason. Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2): 265–279. Schierenbeck, Daniel. 2007. “Sublime labours”: Aesthetics and political economy in Blake’s Jerusalem. Studies in Romanticism 46 (1): 21–42. Thompson, E.P. 1993. Witness against the beast. New York: The New Press. Viscomi, Joseph. 1993. Blake and the idea of the book. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wells, Roger. 1983. Insurrection. Gloucester: Alan Sutton. Williams, Nicholas. 1998. Ideology and utopia in the poetry of William Blake. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yoder, Paul. 2010. The narrative structure of William Blake’s poem Jerusalem: A revisionist interpretation. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. Youngquist, Paul. 1989. Madness and Blake’s myth. University Park: Penn. State University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Epilogue: Law at the Limits of Imagination

If Romantic reading is an “ordeal” through which the subject is actualized into autonomy and judgment—made capable of participating in a robust rule of law that supplants the flagging justice of the 1790s—it is equally an experience that can obliterate the possibility of any legal rule conditioned on the stability of interpretive practice. While both Coleridge and Blake found in poetry a haven for free thought and action, they differed in their attitudes regarding the consequences that should flow from such freedom. Confronted in his own work with the malleability of language and the capacity of meaning making to slip the bonds of historical or ideological context, Coleridge nevertheless dedicated himself to the project of fashioning a national constitution that would entrust such intellectual continuity to a specially conditioned collective to train a nation in reading, living, and judging. Coleridge knew the rule of law requires belief and did his best to supply the philosophical basis for that belief in a form more equitable than evinced by 1790’s legal practice. Rather than as pure reactionary Burkeanism, these efforts could be seen as rhetorical moves to bolster and spread belief in a rule of law that would indeed bequeath potent rights upon individuals who would otherwise have none: poetry might not merely express a justice seemingly lost in political reality, it might actually help promulgate that justice through rhetorical affect, framing an ideal notion of the subject and the free range it inhabits that law might attempt to emulate. Although Blake equally saw the potential of poetry to fend off and counter legal oppression, he found in the ideal © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. L. Barr, Romanticism and the Rule of Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74878-4_7

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autonomy promulgated in his wild lines an apocalyptic possibility: if all the Lord’s people were indeed prophets, could not their radical autonomy go unchecked, spontaneously assembling into a kaleidoscopic collective of clashing perspectives, opinions, and ideas that would itself produce justice? Each would be distinct and individual, surrounded by the bounding line of intellect and form, but each would also participate in a communal conversation as old as time. Autonomy would define its own limits; the rule of law, as Dicey and Coleridge knew it, would cease to exist. According to Costas Douzinas and Adam Gearey, literature encounters law as a destabilization (2005, pp. 342–6). I am suggesting that Romantic literature at least in part attempts the opposite—to stabilize and extend the rule of law in ways that should not necessarily be decried. To dwell only on destabilization and the ways literature opposes law is to fall into the trap of “poethics,” to uncritically absorb Romanticism’s self-­evaluation as a literature of rebellion against conservative, normative, state values. Nevertheless, this study has suggested that, even within the work of the canonical Coleridge, literature very much has the capacity to foment rebellion, to question and explore the gilded cage within which the rule of law might place us. The commentary can indeed conspire against the text, and there is very little that can be done to stop any reader or wedding guest from the free exercise of conscience and imagination. This realization is particularly prominent in Blake’s work. As much as the modern state and its rule of law may seem to help the individual and create a space in which he or she may operate free of molestation, this space remains a prison. To emulate that space within poetry is to lose one’s voice, to separate oneself from the realm of political work (Urizen). Resistance to law and text is the key to starting the rebellion (Milton), which is only complete once notions of text and self are exploded (Jerusalem). With the end of text comes the end of law and the legal subject. Like many of Blake’s most radical suggestions, this is a frightening possibility, entertained at many points in history but perhaps most recently during the world wars that dominated the first half of the twentieth century. By the time of this second great crisis faced by the rule of law, Blake’s expression of artistic and political oscillation had languished in relative obscurity for 150  years until literary critic Northrop Frye inaugurated modern Blake studies with 1946’s Fearful Symmetry, wherein he sought to construct a symbolic grammar to expound a “moral allegory” across the entirety of the poet’s oeuvre. From the wild enthusiasm of Blake’s

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mystic ravings, Frye sought to both emancipate and systematize the Blakean imagination, a process he implicitly opposed to Nazi tyranny: Tyranny is the co-operation of parasite and host; no tyrant maintains himself by force, but by trading on his victims’ fears. So although “A tyrant is the worst disease, and the cause of all others,” the tyrant can at any rate be seen, and the imagination can handle anything that can be seen. It is the sense of the indefinite unseen, acquired by turning away from perception, which is capable of restraining imagination … [a king] would soon be destroyed if there were no sense of a mysterious power lurking behind him. (Frye 1972, pp. 65–6, quoted in Halmi 2005, p. 167)

Blake’s hatred of state religion is therefore cure (thinks Frye) to the disease of modern despotism, a cure which can only be administered through a comprehensive structuring or chaining of the Orc-like symbolism (and imaginative potential) of the Blakean text. Seeing in Blake a representative of the archetypal structures of all literature, in the soon-to-follow Anatomy of Criticism, Frye expounded a theory that was to have a strong voice in literary criticism for the next thirty years. Like Blake’s Urizen, Frye fashions a “Book of Brass” to declare a system of belief that came to dominate not only Blake studies but literary criticism more broadly, promulgating a system of interpretation that expressed in literary discourse a need to control interpretation and the expression of imagination and desire in the political realm. In its emphasis on a scientific method leading to a firm connection between literature, human psychology, and a moral life, Frye’s theory attempted to extend the optimism of F.R.  Leavis beyond the counter-­evidence of World War II savagery. In the 1920s, Leavis had championed literature and culture as a concrete guide to morality, only to face the inescapable fact of highly cultured, highly literate individuals committing unthinkable crimes in the 1940s (Eagleton 1994, pp.  54–6). Herman Goring would later argue for the supposed Nazi right to unilaterally declare and deal with any and all enemies of the Reich—this is the traumatic revelation of sovereign power and legal positivism at its worst. In reading Frye’s structured canonization of Blake as evincing a kind of literary legal formalism, a stabilization of language and a containment of imagination implying that Jerusalem and legal precedents can mean something and support a robust rule of law, I am suggesting that the Romantic discussion of imagination, interpretation, and law perhaps extends into modern times. In her preface to Orietta Ombrosi’s The Twilight of Reason,

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Catherine Chalier theorizes the human reaction to a trauma as great as the holocaust. In trying to find coherence and meaning in the aftermath of such horror (she suggests), we must look not only to testimony but also to poetry and language, to the attempts of those caught in the midst of such horror to express and preserve scraps of culture and humanity to elevate them beyond their circumstances (2012, p. xiv). Frye’s Fearful Symmetry is just such a reaction: a turn to poetry and a structuring of chaos both. So too was the legal reaction to Nazi atrocity, the contemporaneous trial of the major war criminals at Nuremburg. In his opening address for the United States, Robert H. Jackson argued that the Nuremburg Tribunal had come into existence because “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated” (Marrus 1997, p.  79). In the words of Shoshana Felman, the Tribunal’s role was to resolve the historical trauma of Nazi atrocity, “to restore the world’s balance by re-establishing the law’s monopoly on violence” (Felman 2002, p. 1). While Jackson admitted that the tribunal itself was “novel and experimental,” he denied its genesis lay in pure speculation (Marrus 1997, p. 80). Hartley Shawcross, opening for the United Kingdom, was less certain, however, saying: There must be acknowledgement not only, as in the Charter of the United Nations, fundamental human rights, but also, as in the Charter of this Tribunal, fundamental human duties [including] … the duty not to vex the peace of nations … If this be an innovation, it is an innovation which we are prepared to defend and to justify. (Marrus 1997, p. 87)

In the face of chaos, Urizen must come, in this case to contain the political expression of an urge Shawcross connected with a Romantic (i.e., Blakean) spirit of “youthful primitiveness” (1997, p. 91). Yet, in justifying his innovation, Shawcross turned briefly to poetry, claiming that for the past fifty years “the people of the world” had sought to “create an operative system of rules to avoid war,” perhaps “in pursuit of the ideal of which the poet speaks: When the war drums throb no longer And the battle flags are furled, In the parliament of man, The federation of the world.” (1997, p. 126)

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These lines, from Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” (116–17), were presented as the ideal toward which international law was striving. For this one brief moment, poetry stood as a fundamental basis of the Tribunal’s jurisdiction. Literature and (in Frye’s case) the systematization and canonization of literature are expressly conceived as supports to the rule of law. If the Romantic imagination (as Richard Posner alleges) can lead to Nazism, it can also lead to its cure (Posner 1988, pp. 146–8). This allegiance between literature and law has also been recognized by modern scholars of jurisprudence who, writing in reaction to the challenge of critical legal studies, have often echoed Romantic-era ideas to posit a stability to linguistic interpretation necessary to support the rule of law. In Law’s Empire (1986), Ronald Dworkin attempts a description of law as it is practiced, suggesting that judges interpret prior cases and principles and write new decisions in the same way a chain novelist picks up on and incorporates the elements of previous chapters into any continuation of the narrative. Ostensibly, this is a case of interpretation limiting choice, closing down the possibilities of the imagination and creating a coherence to the narrative (to law) that leads to predictability, to a free space in which individuals can live surrounded by legal protection. Legal decisions are not simply determined by “what the judge had for breakfast.” Although John Finnis (1987) rightly questions the validity of this legal aesthetic, it nevertheless remains as a bona fide attempt to import literary generic constraints into considerations of legal precedent and reasoning. There is a certain way to write a novel (it is assumed), a basis on which we may judge the propriety or impropriety of any new addition to the chain. Coleridge’s notion of “organic unity” is one parallel Romantic attempt to promulgate that same propriety. In his analysis of Shakespeare, Coleridge suggests that the form of an ideal literary work is “innate; it shapes as it develops itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form” (Raysor 1930, p.  1:224, cited at Benziger 1951, p. 24). The writer’s medium (and its conventional and generic constraints) must always inform the ideas expressed in that medium: chain novelists should write chain novels. No justification is ever made as to why this set of artistic ideals is necessarily more important than any other. Blake’s response would be (and was) to write an absurdist poem that questioned the basis of all such generic conventions, revealing that Organic Unity, like Dworkin’s “Law as Integrity,” can no more control imaginative freedom than Coleridge’s clerisy. In calling his judge “Hercules,” Dworkin is not merely alluding to the truly heroic labors that

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one of his ideal judges undertakes when deciding a “hard case.” As half human and half god, Hercules straddles the line between the human and the divine—only such an (imaginary) being could hope to pierce the veil between this world and the next to fathom the nature of divine justice. In Blakean terms, only the prophet has the hope of seeing past signs to truth. In naming his ideal judge after the son of Zeus, Dworkin suggests that no mere human or human-built institution can manifest justice: his inherent criticism of his own method is Blake’s criticism of Coleridge’s constitutional theory and the rule of law more generally. The economic analysis of law or Law and Economics Theory is an equally potent modern attempt to exclude bias and personal predilection (i.e., “imagination”) from the legal decision-making process. Although in its descriptive form it merely analyzes the economic impact of various laws and predicts which laws might be adopted based on a microeconomic assessment of potential outcomes, a more extreme version of this theoretical stance is proscriptive, claiming that legislation and legal decisions should actually be guided by the economic efficiency of their outcomes: the favored outcome in any case should be the one which maximizes wealth. Although the origins of this theory have their wellsprings in Adam Smith’s work in the late eighteenth century, it is equally beholden to the thought of Jeremy Bentham, another of Coleridge’s contemporaries. In his own effort to provide a rational, philosophical replacement for the common law which he famously described as an “imaginary thing,” Bentham suggested that moral decisions are those which maximize happiness for the greatest number. The benefit of both theories is that each depends on a supposedly calculable result: wealth even more than “happiness” can be counted or at least estimated through the increasingly robust science of economic analysis. Legal decisions guided by such principles as “efficient breach” ostensibly severely curtail, if not eliminate, the bias, interpretive freedom, and imagination of a judge who might otherwise play fast and loose with precedent. Through the certainty of mathematics, we can arrive at a true and “just” result, so long as one agrees with the initial premise that the highest good is to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people and that maximizing wealth is either a reasonable measure of that happiness or an equally compelling replacement for it. For all its sophistication and nuance, however, Law and Economics Theory suffers from the same flaw as Dworkin’s Law as Integrity: each works through an assumed universally acceptable criterion of evaluation

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(either the aesthetic propriety of a decision or its maximization of capital) that itself has no justification. This is the basis of every legal system in human history; how could it be otherwise? When modern scholars of jurisprudence invoke Romantic-era theories about the nature of law, and legal decision-making and its justification, this reveals how little progress has been made in the last 200 years about finding some justification for why we should and must obey—and why the pronouncements of judges and legislators should be heeded as something more than merely personal bias couched in ideologically determined and rhetorically charged language. These scholars invoke Romantic-era notions used to stabilize interpretation because we still struggle with the same fundamental issues and problems with the rule of law as a concept. Insofar as it relies on law’s supposed capacity to convey a stable meaning through time through the medium of linguistic signs, it is bound to fail. This was the issue the Romantics wrestled with, being some of the first individuals who were public authors, disseminating ideas in a new print medium to a mass audience with whom they could not negotiate and correct misunderstanding (c.f. Ferguson 1977). I do not wish to suggest that those who participate in the many rituals supporting rule of law ideology (either in the Romantic period or today) necessarily do so naively. In “The Sublime Object of Ideology,” Slavoj Žižek points out that we engage in rituals all the time, fully knowing they are rituals: we constantly play at the game of ideology. The various participants in the constellation of practices that comprise our rule of law do not have a naive consciousness that misses the fantastical nature of the ideological constructs that support their conduct in society: “They know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they didn’t know” (2004, p. 721). Put another way, “They are fetishists in practice, not in theory” (p. 720). Their work: consists in overlooking the illusion which is structuring our real, effective relationship to reality. And this overlooked, unconscious illusion is what may be called the ideological fantasy. (p. 721)

We live very much as the Romantics lived—in a collective fantasy, fully (sometimes cynically) conscious of its fragility. The specter of mass revolt and revolution, should the fantasy break down completely, is perhaps the specter that encourages all to engage in the ideological fantasy of the rule

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of law—better that than suffer chaos and anarchy. Balbus’ concept of “legal fetishism” seems relevant: The most sublime is probably the formalist theory of law itself, insofar as this theory conceptualizes the law as “independent”, “autonomous” reality to be explained according to its own dynamics … All these instances and many others are simply variations on the common theme of legal fetishism in which individuals affirm that they owe their existence to the Law, rather than the reverse, inverting the real causal relationship between themselves and their product. (Balbus 1977, pp. 582–4, cited at Merritt 1980, p. 208)

A direct consequence of this fetish is that law becomes unassailable, transcendent beyond the material aspects of society and the legal system—as does the rule of law and such abstract concepts as “equity” and “justice.” Modern discourses of legal interpretation are nothing less than self-­ conscious ritualistic practices designed to bolster the rhetoric of the rule. These become idols to fall down before and worship—and never question. Literary criticism (like this book), Romanticism, and the rule of law all arise to fulfill a need: they are the products of our yearning, our legal imagination, and our critical desire. Urizen comes. Over a span of two centuries since the Romantic period, the desires, motivations, and expressions of those who would protect the rule of law have changed very little. This is equally the case for those who would critique it. Those who carry Blake’s mantle are now members of the Critical Legal Studies Movement, individuals like Roberto Unger and Richard Rorty who posit theories of law and justice Blake would have recognized. Unger’s notions of “deviationist doctrine” and “destabilization rights” wherein legal analysis “stand[s] in unashamed communication with its underlying theoretical assumptions” (1986, p. 53), in order to break up hierarchies that lead to inequality, bear some resemblance to the multiplicity of perspectives Blake presents in Jerusalem, in his efforts to undermine legal assumptions about interpretive coherence. Both see the rule of law as a system of entrapment designed to perpetuate rather than alleviate inequality. Destabilization rights in particular, as they work to produce conflict in the legal and social sphere to illuminate and then break down hierarchies, seem like Unger’s own version of the “Orc Cycle” in which rebellion and reaction work in dialectical opposition. As discussed previously, Rorty’s idea of justice as a “larger loyalty” also has strong echoes in Jerusalem, although neither theory escapes the fundamental critique

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levied against Dworkin and Law and Economics Theory. All these theories wrestle with the same difficulties surrounding the nature of justice and the capacity and methodology whereby human institutions might embody it that faced the Romantics. Yet, as Žižek suggests, “The only way to break the power of our ideological dream is to confront our desire which announces itself in this dream” (2004, p. 723). Romantic poetry announces that desire and my hope in this book has been to (at least in part) confront that desire in a fashion that leads neither to a naïve utopianism nor a cynical nihilism. I have hoped to contribute a marginally more clear-eyed conception of the rule of law, of justice, that breaks the cycle of radicalism and formalism repeated in (e.g.) the putative “death” of critical legal studies during the current ascendancy of Law and Economics Theory. My conclusions remain speculative. Insofar as the modern administrative state depends on belief in the rule of law, law and legal reading strategies will continue to (purport to) structure and circumscribe the exercise of autonomy in the judge and the private individual. We must continue to believe we are ruled by law and not the whims of men and women. We will also continue to see radicalism (the so-called “activist judge”) break free of these restraints from time to time and perpetuate Blake’s Orc Cycle, law and interpretive restraint inevitably rising up to curtail such radicalism. However, in the face of a “third crisis” in the rule of law, the symptoms of which are corporations “too big to fail,” increasing income inequality, the creep of administrative law into all aspects of life, the existence of supranational corporations that operate in the gaps between jurisdictions, government by an increasingly politicized judiciary, and the continued struggle in legal theory to find a ground for legal interpretation and judgment, I greatly desire to take some faltering steps on a path beyond the same endless round. Although I have been skeptical of the English common law system’s ability to constrain imagination in acts of interpretation, Unger (in What Should Legal Analysis Become? (1996)) perhaps indicates the most balanced path forward. To apply the principles of Blakean self-annihilation to the legal text, to advocate the construction of law through parody or self-conscious improvisation or through various other techniques that undermine textual authority is tempting, but may ultimately be fruitless, given the incontrovertible fact that legal pronouncements require and must at all times project authority. However, taking Blakean self-annihilation to its logical end, we should regard law and any singular attempt to define the rule of law as

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always doomed to failure: only through the demolition of the monolithic authority, of subjectivity, and of the concept of individuality (suggests Blake) can we ultimately move into the realm of eternal truth, the place where justice has always been seen to reside. According to this understanding then, law and legal judgment are always only at best approximations of justice. Theorists can merely create anchor points of belief in the rule of law more or less convincing to different people, but the rule of law is always something “evermore about to be.” The attempt to articulate the rule of law and find a solid ground for legal decision-­making could then begin to look like the Blakean text, in which a multitude of voices continually talking against and rewriting themselves move in an eternal process of becoming. To the extent that Unger advocates for such a position, he both acknowledges the reality of law and suggests a way to negotiate that reality. The legal subjectivity that arises in such an environment begins to look like a strange blend of the Blakean and Coleridgean positions: although the individual must continually struggle to define the boundaries of the self (e.g., asserting privacy in an information age) and project desire into the public sphere in an endless effort to assert rights, this is inevitably done in an ever-increasing range of intellectual contexts that might, to some extent, limit violence (often pilloried as “class warfare”) in the transition away from plutocracy to a more robust rule by law, conjured into being by the rhetorical efforts of literary and legal writers, and (most importantly) assertive of substantive rights and freedoms. Arising would be a justice discovered and defined not by reason but by the limits of imagination.

References Balbus, Isaac D. 1977. Commodity form and legal form: An essay on the “relative autonomy” of the law. Law and Society Review 11: 582–584. Benziger, James. 1951. Organic unity: Leibniz to Coleridge. PMLA 66 (2): 24–48. Chalier, Catherine. 2012. Preface to Orietta Ombrosi’s The twilight of reason. Boston: Academic Studies Press. Douzinas, Costas, and Adam Gearey. 2005. Critical jurisprudence. Portland: Hart Publishing. Dworkin, Ronald. 1986. Law’s empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Eagleton, Terry. 1994. The rise of English. In Falling into theory, ed. David H. Richter, 49–59. Boston: Bedford. Felman, Shoshana. 2002. The juridical unconscious. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Ferguson, Frances. 1977. Wordsworth: Language as counter-spirit. New Haven: Yale University Press. Frye, Northrop. 1972. Fearful symmetry: A study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Halmi, Nicholas. 2005. Northrop Frye’s Fearful symmetry. Essays in Criticism 55 (2): 159–172. John Finnis, John. 1987. On reason and authority in Law’s Empire. Law and Philosophy 6 (3): 357–380. Marrus, Michael R. 1997. The Nuremburg war crimes trial 1945–46: A documentary history. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins. Merritt, Adrian. 1980. The nature and function of law: A criticism of E.P.  Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters. British Journal of Law and Society 7 (2): 194–214. Posner, Richard. 1988. Law and literature: A misunderstood relation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Raysor, Thomas Middleton, ed. 1930. Coleridge’s Shakespearean criticism. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Unger, Roberto. 1986. The critical legal studies movement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1996. What should legal analysis become? London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2004. The sublime object of ideology. In Literary theory: An anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 712–724. Oxford: Blackwell.

Index1

A Abrams, M.H., 4–6, 20, 49 Adams, Hazard, 207 Alber, Jan, 83 Althusser, L., 5, 6 Antinomian, 156, 178, 188, 197, 198, 201, 203 Authority, 3, 4, 7, 23, 26, 27, 29–35, 37, 41–44, 52, 58, 60, 62–74, 78, 79, 81, 82, 90, 96, 105, 111, 113, 116, 124, 125, 129, 130, 132, 133, 138, 140, 142, 146, 153, 155, 159–163, 165, 167–171, 173–175, 177, 180, 185, 186, 188–190, 194, 199–203, 220, 221, 233, 234 Autonomy, 2, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 22, 38, 39, 53, 60, 63, 64, 72, 74–82, 100, 160, 163, 176, 179, 188–193, 198, 201, 204, 205, 212, 213, 225, 226, 233

B Baker, J.H., 39–41, 44, 45, 54n8, 82, 90, 104, 105, 124 Balbus, Isaac D., 8, 232 Balfour, Ian, 167, 170, 171, 199 Barrell, John, 25, 27, 33, 35, 62, 80, 81, 84, 107n13, 129, 165, 189, 190, 205 Bastille, 24, 84 Bentham, Jeremy, 48, 83–85, 105, 128, 130, 144, 168, 169, 230 Bentley, G.E., 181n6, 193 Benziger, James, 229 Bible of Hell, 154, 155, 160 Bickham, Troy, 89, 106n10 Binns, John, 36, 37 Blackstone, Sir William, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 15, 15n1, 29, 32, 43, 46, 47, 59, 60, 63, 81, 82, 86, 89, 96, 100, 130, 138–141, 144, 168, 175, 190, 214

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. L. Barr, Romanticism and the Rule of Law, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74878-4

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238 

INDEX

Blake, William, 5, 12–14, 37, 149, 153–180, 186–189, 191–219, 221, 221n2, 222n3, 222n4, 225–227, 229, 230, 232–234 works; America: A Prophecy, 176, 178–180, 185, 188; Descriptive Catalogue, 166; The First Book of Urizen, 160, 161, 176, 178, 179, 194, 197, 199; Jerusalem, 156, 189, 202, 205–210, 212–214, 219–221, 226, 227, 232; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 154, 156, 162, 167, 179, 186, 194, 199, 209, 214; Milton, 156, 187–189, 192–198, 200, 202–204, 206, 207, 211, 212, 221n1, 222n3, 226; A Vision of the Last Judgment, 201, 203 Blenkinsopp, Joseph, 157–159 Bloody Code, 82, 83, 90, 124, 159 Bower, 14, 23–38, 104 Boyron, Sophie, 153 Brewer, John, 86, 88 Bricker, Andrew Benjamin, 104 British Critic, 114 Brown, Huntington, 123 Burke, Edmund, 7, 24, 33, 34, 81, 119, 120, 132, 153, 172, 204 works; Reflections on the Revolution in France, 24 Burns, Robert, 48 Butler, Marilyn, 24 C Calvin’s Case, 3 Campbell, John, 145, 146, 173 Canon formation, 186 Carretta, Vincent, 181n7

Cauchi, Francesca, 213, 214 Cave, Edward, 115 Chalier, Catherine, 228 Chancellor, 44, 45, 125, 147, 172 Chancery, 6, 44–48, 54n8, 100, 105, 126 Chatterton, Thomas, 48, 157 Clark, J.C.D., 63 Clerisy, 131–133, 135–142, 144, 147, 229 Cobbett, William, 7 Coke, Sir Edward, 3, 27, 38, 40, 172 institutes, 3 Coldbath Fields, 84 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 5, 12, 13, 37, 52, 57, 111, 112, 115–133, 135–144, 147–149, 153, 159, 160, 175, 176, 178, 180, 188, 206, 225, 226, 229, 230 works; Biographia Literaria, 115; Consciones ad Populum, 65; “The Devil’s Thoughts,” 85; “The Dungeon,” 83–85, 87, 89, 103; “Effusion XXXV,”/ Eolian Harp, 60, 62, 64, 74–82, 92, 99; The Fall of Robespierre, 64, 68–75, 81, 85; “Fears in Solitude,” 92, 95; The Foster Mother’s Tale, 83, 88, 89, 103; Frost at Midnight, 60; Kubla Khan, 60, 70, 129; Lectures on Revealed Religion, 61, 64, 71, 79; Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 136; The Lyrical Ballads, 60, 82, 83, 86, 88, 90, 92, 95, 106n8; Moral and Political Lecture(s), 137; On the Constitution of the Church and State, 130, 131, 133, 136,

 INDEX 

137, 139–142, 144, 147, 148; Osorio, 83, 88; The Plot Discovered, 58, 120; Poems on Various Subjects, 73, 75; “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement,” 92, 98; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 82, 111, 112, 121, 123–127, 129; “This Lime Tree Bower, My Prison,” 101; “To the Honourable Mr Erskine,” 57; The Watchman, 133 Combination Act, 8, 36, 188, 190 Common law, 1–3, 6, 9, 13, 15, 15n1, 27, 30, 31, 35, 38–41, 44–49, 54n7, 54n8, 59, 95, 100, 104, 105, 117, 124, 125, 134, 136, 138, 139, 142, 144, 147–149, 168, 175, 178, 214, 215, 220, 230, 233 Common law writs, 44, 125 Compurgators, 39 Condos, Mark, 15n3 Conner, Clifford D., 191 Conscience, 23, 24, 27, 35, 43–45, 71, 119, 125, 135, 136, 201, 202, 226 Constitution, 2, 8, 9, 14, 28, 30, 32, 35, 52, 64–66, 81, 84, 88, 89, 111–149, 153, 167, 168, 189, 191, 200, 225 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 4 Cormack, Bradin, 3, 4 Corn Laws, 11 Costa, Pietro, 11, 180 Cottag’d Vale, 68–75, 79, 81, 92, 93, 95, 98, 100, 105, 148, 175, 180, 198 Cowper, William, 160, 165, 174

239

Critical Legal Studies Movement, 13, 128, 232 Curia Regis, 43, 44 D Damon, S. Foster, 207, 208 De Bolla, Peter, 204 Deen, Leonard, 204, 206 Despard, Edward Marcus, 188, 190–193, 197, 202 Devereaux, Simon, 91 Dicey, Albert Venn, 1, 2, 4, 9, 12, 13, 15, 15n2, 31, 38–41, 135, 139, 153, 179, 180, 188, 189, 226 works; Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, 31 Discretion, 3, 22, 23, 26, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 43–49, 77, 104, 111, 116, 125, 126, 136–138, 147, 148, 201 Dissent/ers/ing, 25, 34, 35, 99, 111, 162, 163, 171 Doskow, Minna, 206, 207, 209, 211, 214–217, 219 Douzinas, Costas, 1, 207, 212, 226 Dworkin, Ronald, 52, 229, 230, 233 E Eagleton, Terry, 5, 9, 227 Eaves, Morris, 181n4, 194, 199, 202 Edinburgh Review, 112 Edwards, John, 133, 158, 159 Eigen, Joel Peter, 171–174 Eilenberg, Susan, 127 Empson, William, 123, 127 English Civil War, 3, 7, 156, 197 English Constitution, 1, 13, 26, 29, 34, 100, 116

240 

INDEX

Equity, 6, 10, 22, 32, 41, 44–49, 105, 124, 147, 157, 232 Erskine, Thomas, 23, 25, 27, 30–35, 37, 57, 59, 74, 80–82, 125, 133, 188, 190 Esterhammer, Angela, 168, 169 Eugenia, Sister, 87 Everest, Kelvin, 92, 98, 99, 107n12 Eyre, Sir James (Chief Justice of the Common Pleas), 26, 28–31, 35, 43, 81, 119, 120, 125, 128, 148, 164, 171 F Fairchild, Hoxie Neale, 87 Felman, Shoshana, 228 Ferguson, Frances, 231 Finnis, John, 229 Fletcher, Justice William, 116–119, 125, 128 Fogle, Richard Harter, 143 Folk assembly, 39 Folk right, 41, 43 Fourth Lateran Council, 40 Fox, Charles James, 25, 61 French Revolution, 7, 23, 37, 48, 88, 114, 124, 153, 171, 176, 177 Frye, Northrop, 207, 209, 226–229 G Gagging Acts, 8, 23, 124 Garrett, Clarke, 61, 62 Gearey, Adam, 1, 207, 212, 226 Geddes, Alexander, 60, 158 Gentleman’s Magazine, 115 George III, King, 144, 167, 170, 177, 178, 181n7, 185, 186 Gerrald, Joseph, 24, 59, 68, 106n3 Gibbs, Vicary, 33, 163

Glorious Revolution, 7, 24, 33, 163 Glover, R., 221n2 Godwin, William, 7, 24, 28–30, 35, 130, 164 works; Political Justice, 28 Goodwin, Albert, 28, 35, 36, 53n2, 190 Gordon, Lord George, 25, 63, 89, 163, 172, 174 Goring, Herman, 227 Gospel, 90, 185–221 Graham, Jenny, 171 Great Seal, 44, 125 Green, Thomas Andrew, 37, 42, 43, 140, 190, 201 Guest, Harriet, 80 Gurney, Joseph, 53n5 H Habeus Corpus, 8, 23, 84, 100 Hale, Sir Matthew, 30, 38, 172 Halmi, Nicholas, 227 Harrington, James, 4, 65 Harvie, C., 8 Hayley, William, 193, 202 Heinzelman, Kurt, 204 Herrup, Cynthia, 107n11 Hess, Scott, 121, 122 Hickey, Allison, 69 The Higher Criticism, 60 High treason, 23, 27, 28, 30–33, 36, 53, 62, 80, 84, 139, 163–165, 190, 191 Hillier, Russell M., 124 Holcroft, Thomas, 67 Holdsworth, Sir William, 15n2, 36, 41, 42, 44–46, 48, 104, 105, 125, 126, 190 Holstein, Michael E., 156 Hone, William, 8

 INDEX 

Hostettler, John, 222n2 Howell, Thomas Bayle, 23, 25, 27–30, 32–34, 36, 164, 181n5, 188 Hudson, Nicholas, 53n1 Hulsebosch, Daniel J., 3 Hume, David, 29, 215 Hussein, Amal Ragaa Bassyouni, 90 Hyams, Paul R., 40 I Ignatieff, Michael, 84 Imaginary, 11, 48, 49, 128, 147, 168, 230 Imagination, 5, 9, 13–15, 19–53, 60, 63–65, 69, 77, 78, 81, 82, 91, 93, 96, 104, 105, 111–149, 153, 154, 160, 164, 165, 175, 176, 178–180, 189, 199, 202, 203, 205, 210, 212–220 Infernal reading, 154, 200 J Jackson, Robert H., 228 Jacobin, 113, 116 Jeffrey, Sir Francis, 112 Johnson, Mary Lynn, 143, 194, 198 Jury, 1, 3, 7, 8, 15, 23, 27–29, 33–38, 41–43, 49, 52, 53, 60, 80, 116, 119, 120, 124, 140, 163, 164, 187–193, 200–202 Jury nullification/ pious perjury, 23, 27, 188–193, 200, 201, 203, 222n2 Justice, 2, 4–7, 9–13, 15, 21, 22, 29, 37–53, 63, 70, 75, 90–92, 100, 107n11, 114, 119, 120, 124–126, 128, 130, 138, 144,

241

147–149, 154–160, 175, 180, 186–188, 190–192, 195–197, 205, 207, 213–219, 221, 225, 226, 230, 232–234 K Katz, Stanley N., 139 Keane, Patrick, 123, 124 Kerr, Margaret H., 40 Kitson, Peter, 123, 124 Klancher, Jon, 90 Klein, L., 4 Kohler, Michael, 46 Kolsky, Elizabeth, 15n3 L Lake School, 112, 113 Lamb, Charles, 103, 104, 111 Lamb, Mary Anne, 103, 104 Langbein, John H., 53n4 Law and Economics Theory, 230, 233 Law as Integrity, 229, 230 Law of God, 43, 60, 78, 82, 201, 215 Law of the land, 2–4, 95, 138 Leavis, F.R., 227 Lee, Richard “Citizen,” 7 Legal interpretive practice, 1, 214 Leiberman, D., 46 Libel Act (Fox’s Libel Act), 25, 42, 190 Liberal, 21, 22, 24, 60, 63, 90, 163 Lilburne, John, 42, 43, 140, 201 Literature, 5, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 21–23, 37, 87, 105, 114, 115, 121, 129, 135, 144, 156–159, 165, 173, 186, 207, 213, 226, 227, 229 Lloyd, Henry Martyn, 87 Lobban, Michael, 3, 41, 48, 49

242 

INDEX

London Corresponding Society (LCS), 24, 25, 28, 30, 36, 80, 84, 117, 191 Love, 20–22, 68, 73, 76, 96, 102, 197, 210, 217, 218, 221 M Macalpine, Ida, 171, 173 Maconochie, Alexander, 103 Madness/insanity, 144, 145, 154, 156, 160, 161, 165–167, 169, 171–175, 181n4, 185–187 Magna Carta, 1, 2, 43, 54n8, 82 Makdisi, Saree, 160, 197, 199 Manning, Peter J., 50 Mansfield, Lord, 46–48, 126 Marginal gloss, 121 Marrus, Michael R., 228 Marsh, Joss, 37 Matthews, Ronald, 61, 62 McCalman, Iain, 63, 163, 172 McGann, Jerome J., 122, 162, 199 Mee, Jon, 160–162, 169, 194, 199 Merritt, Adrian, 8, 10, 11, 232 Minute particulars, 1, 185–221 Mitchell, W.J.T., 199 Monarchy (British), 28 Morality, 20–22, 51, 59, 86, 88, 124, 130, 137, 138, 148, 155, 156, 158, 215, 216, 227 Morris, Marilyn, 40, 63, 160, 162, 163 Mosaic law/dispensation, 33, 57–105, 124, 138, 156, 219 Moses, 61, 67, 137, 157, 167, 169, 185, 189, 194, 209 Moskal, Jeanne, 156, 197, 202 Mulvihill, James, 177 Murphy, Michael, 122–124 Musgrave, Sir Richard, 116, 118, 119 Myers, Victoria, 58, 87

N Nationalty, 133, 135, 142 Natural law, 2, 64, 87, 214–217 Nudelman, Bryan C., 177, 179 Nuremburg, war crime trials, 228 Nussbaum, Martha, 9, 21, 22 O Old Testament, 78, 156–158, 170, 196, 200, 215 Olson, Greta, 213 Ombrosi, Orietta, 227 Organic unity, 143, 144, 229 Orr, B., 87 P Paine, Thomas, 7, 8, 24–27, 30, 61, 66, 67, 88, 106n2, 112, 113, 148, 160, 161, 177, 178, 181n3, 181n7, 202 works; The Rights of Man, 24, 26, 113, 119 Pantisocratic/pantisocracy, 83, 87, 102 Pascal, Blaise, 6 Peine forte et dure, 124 Perceval, Spencer, 36 Perkins, David, 121, 122, 124 Personalty, 132, 133, 135 Pfau, Thomas, 5, 6, 204 Phelps, Edward, 3 Pious perjury, 188–190, 200, 203 Pirie, David, 123, 127 Pitt, William, 24, 25, 36, 57, 63, 171, 172 Plucknett, Theodore F.T., 40 Pocock, J.G.A., 4 Poethics, 226 Poole, Steve, 172, 174 Porter, Roy, 165, 174

 INDEX 

Portinaro, Pier Palo, 153 Precedent, 3, 22, 29, 30, 34, 45, 46, 48, 51, 52, 81, 100, 104, 105, 121, 124–127, 130, 135, 138, 141, 142, 144, 146–148, 158, 173, 187, 209, 214, 221, 227, 229, 230 Pressing, 220 Price, Richard, 7, 24 Prophecy/prophet/prophetic, 2, 4, 14, 37, 57, 60–68, 73, 74, 77–79, 81, 82, 84, 92–94, 96, 100, 129, 130, 147, 160–177, 179, 180, 185–188, 194, 198, 199, 202, 204, 205, 207, 209, 211, 212, 217, 226, 230 Proverbs, 154–160 Pyle, Forest, 49, 175 Pythagorus, 136 Q Quotation, 33–35, 53n5, 79–81, 120, 130, 144, 170, 171, 175, 198, 199, 211, 218 R Ratio decidendi, 124 Regency, 173 Remer, Gary, 65 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 165, 166, 194, 204, 205 Richard Brothers, 61, 78, 161, 162, 186 Rights, 1, 4, 7–11, 13, 22–26, 34, 36, 37, 41, 43, 44, 54n7, 58, 59, 63, 64, 84, 88, 100, 112, 114, 119, 125, 132–134, 138–140, 154, 166, 168, 174, 177, 178, 195, 200, 201, 219, 221, 225, 227, 232, 234 Roe, Nicholas, 58

243

Romanticism, 4–6, 10, 12–14, 49, 53, 129, 226, 232 Rorty, R., 21, 207, 218, 232 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 51, 87, 89, 100, 113 Rule of law, 1–4, 6–15, 15n2, 15n3, 22–25, 27, 29, 30, 32, 34–42, 45, 48, 49, 52, 53, 57, 58, 60, 74, 75, 82, 86, 91, 92, 100, 105, 111, 117, 119, 124, 128, 131, 135, 139, 142, 147–149, 153, 159, 160, 163, 175, 176, 179, 180, 187, 189, 203–221, 225–227, 229–234 Ryan, Vanessa L, 204 S Santoro, Emilio, 1, 3, 4, 7–9, 27, 31, 38, 39, 148 Schierenbeck, Daniel, 204, 205 Scholfield, John, 215 Scott, Sir John /Lord Eldon, 25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 35, 80, 81, 105, 117–120, 128, 144–148, 173, 190 Sedition, 8, 23, 24, 34, 36, 58, 63, 116, 162, 163, 165, 167, 171, 191, 192 Self annihilation, 198–204, 218, 233 Shakespeare, William, 4, 70, 130, 131, 133, 142–144, 229 Shawcross, Hartley, 228 Sheats, Paul, 90 Shelley, Percy, 5, 20–22, 46, 49 works; “A Defence of Poetry,” 20 Shields, Juliet, 50, 52 Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph (Abbé), 153 Simpson, AWB, 48 Smith, Adam, 21, 22, 85, 87, 230 works; Theory of Moral Sentiments, 21, 85

244 

INDEX

Society for Constitutional Information (SCI), 24, 25, 30, 117 Southey, Robert, 68, 69, 87, 101, 106n10, 112, 113, 207, 208 Spence, Thomas, 7, 148 Spring, Eileen, 92, 134, 176 Stafford, Fiona, 51, 52 Star Chamber, 45 Statute of Edward (25 Edward III), 27, 29, 30, 33 Stillinger, Jack, 106n4, 123 Strict settlement, 134, 135 Sublime/sublimity, 2–4, 39, 41, 50–52, 112, 136, 188, 203, 204, 232 T Tamanaha, Brian Z., 1, 2, 4, 11, 12, 15n2 Tannenbaum, Leslie, 167 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 229 Thelwall, John, 25, 36, 69, 112, 113, 124, 148, 167, 175, 189 Thomas Hardy trial, 53, 80, 164 Thompson, E.P., 8, 10, 148, 154, 197, 202 Thomson, James, 33, 79–81, 106n5, 106n6, 107n13 Tooke, John Horne, 25, 37, 147, 189 Trial by ordeal, 15, 39, 124, 212 Trust/trustee, 47, 133–136, 141, 147, 148, 192 21 Richard II (statute of), 30 The Two Acts 1795, 36, 58, 65, 82, 188, 190 Tyburn, 10, 11, 215, 216, 220 U Unger, Roberto, 232–234

V Villalobos, John, 156, 157 Viscomi, Joseph, 164, 170, 195, 222n3 W Wager of battle, 49, 53n6 Waites, Ian, 4 Wall, Wendy, 126, 127 Waterford alehouse conspirator, 118 Watson, Robert, 160, 163 Wells, Roger, 192, 221n2 Wexford, 116, 118, 119 White, Daniel E., 98, 99 Wilkinson, Thomas, 50–52 Williams, Ian, 104 Williams, Nicholas, 204, 206 Willis, James, 84, 85 Wind, Astrid, 90 Winterbotham, William, 162, 163, 175, 181n5 Withers, George, 140, 144 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 7, 24 Wordsworth, William, 4, 5, 12, 19–22, 37, 38, 48, 50–52, 78, 82, 86, 87, 89 works; Lyrical Ballads, 60, 82, 83, 86, 88, 90, 92, 95; The Solitary Reaper, 19, 50–52 Y Yoder, Paul, 207, 209–211, 219 Youngquist, Paul, 186, 209, 211 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 231, 233 Zolo, D., 27, 82, 95, 148, 153