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WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

Wordsworth and
Coleridge
The Radical Years
Second Edition
NICHOLAS ROE
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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Originally published in the Oxford English Monographs series
To the memory of
JOHN THELWALL
Citizen, Poet, Prophet
1764–1834
‘And please what’s Hulks?’ said I.

‘That’s the way with this boy!’ exclaimed my sister, pointing me out
with her needle and thread, and shaking her head at me. ‘Answer
him one question, and he’ll ask you a dozen directly. Hulks are
prison-ships, right ’cross th’ meshes.’ We always used that name for
marshes, in our country.
‘I wonder who’s put into prison-ships, and why they’re put there?’
said I, in a general way, and with quiet desperation.
It was too much for Mrs Joe, who immediately rose. ‘I tell you what,
young fellow,’ said she, ‘I didn’t bring you up by hand to badger
people’s lives out. People are put in the Hulks because they murder,
and because they rob, and forge, and do all sorts of bad; and they
always begin by asking questions.’
(Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ch. 2)
Preface, 1988–2018
On Tuesday 30 September 1794 the following advertisement appeared

on the front page of the Morning Chronicle:
Those Families whose Husbands and Fathers are now in Confinement under
a Charge of HIGH TREASON, and whose Trials will come on in a few Days
intreat the IMMEDIATE PECUNIARY ASSISTANCE of the REAL Friends to Liberty.
The husbands and fathers charged with treason were the leaders of the
London Corresponding Society and the Society for Constitutional Infor-
mation. They had been arrested in May and held in the Tower and
Newgate over the summer; not surprisingly, their dependents were in
need of support after four months—hence the subscription organized by
the Corresponding Society’s Committee of Correspondence.
The ‘REAL Friends to Liberty’ responded generously. On 19 November,
the committee announced that £314 19s. 3d. had been collected, and
published a list of subscribers. Among them were the Countess Dowager
of Stanhope, £20; Charles James Fox, £10; Thomas Walker of Manches-
ter, 3 guineas; and Francis Place, breeches-maker, 5s. But one contribu-
tion in particular leaps out of the list: ‘Citizen Wordsworth 1s.—0d.’ This
donation was received by John Smith, a bookseller in Portsmouth Street,
Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Smith was also a leader of the 29th Division of the
Corresponding Society, and a member of the committee that had organ-
ized the subscription. But who was ‘Citizen Wordsworth’, and was he in
fact William Wordsworth?
As it turns out, no. ‘Citizen Wordsworth’ was Henry Wordsworth of
Jewin Street, London, and a member of bookseller Smith’s 29th Division.
Still, the tantalizing possibility that William Wordsworth might be found
among the massed friends of liberty in the Corresponding Society was my
starting-point for the more extensive study of Wordsworth’s and Cole-
ridge’s radical years in this book. I have taken the years between 1789 and
the poets’ departure for Germany in September 1798 as my period, and
have looked back at religious dissent in Cambridge since 1770 to provide a
context for Coleridge’s politics, and forwards by way of incorporating The
Prelude, The Friend, Biographia Literaria, and other later writings.
This new edition of the book has been revised, updated, and slightly
expanded. I have taken account of the most significant work in the field over
the three decades since the book first appeared, drawn fresh material from
manuscripts, newspapers, and electronic sources, and given more attention
x Preface, 1988–2018
to the poetry. The bibliography has grown. The chapters are in a broadly
chronological sequence. Chapter 1 presents some of the difficulties in
Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s retrospective accounts of their radical years,
and is in effect a manifesto for the documentary and biographical research
that underpins the whole study. Chapter 2 looks at early responses to the
French Revolution during the years 1789–91; Chapter 3 explores Words-
worth’s visits to France in 1790 and 1792, and his intervening months at
London in spring 1791. Chapter 4 offers a retrospect on radical dissent at
Cambridge in the decades prior to 1789, focusing upon William Frend and
George Dyer as well as Coleridge’s political career from 1794 on. Taking
bearings from these different backgrounds, Chapter 5 treats both poets’
opposition to war after February 1793, arguing that contemporary literature
of protest encouraged Wordsworth’s imaginative encounters in ‘Salisbury
Plain’, The Borderers, ‘The Ruined Cottage’, and some of his poems in Lyrical
Ballads (1798). Chapter 6 reconsiders Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s con-
nections with the popular reform movement, and to John Thelwall and
William Godwin in particular. As with ‘Citizen Wordsworth’, I’m afraid
I cannot reveal that the poets joined the Corresponding Society; there were no
secret subscriptions, no furtive donations. That said, both of them were so
closely linked with the Society’s leadership that the matter of formal mem-
bership was of little significance. Chapter 7 presents Robespierre as a cau-
tionary but not unattractive figure for Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Thelwall,
arguing that the poets’ self-recognition in the Jacobin leader has much to tell
us about Wordsworth’s ‘crisis’ in the years 1795–6 and Coleridge’s role in
their early friendship. My final chapter uses the Spy Nozy incident as a way
into the poets’ lives of ‘philosophic amity’ at Nether Stowey and Alfoxden,
1797–8. Their experiences are presented alongside those of contemporaries
who also figure throughout the book, by way of complicating the rusty old
story in which radical commitment is inevitably succeeded by ‘apostasy’. In
all chapters I have tried to show how the radical years are integral to each
poet’s later creative life; to substantiate this, a short Epilogue offers close
readings of ‘Fears in Solitude’ and ‘Tintern Abbey’.
Throughout this book there are episodes, incidents, and individuals
I would like to know more about. Who did Wordsworth meet at Paris
and elsewhere in France during 1792? We know a few names, but these
comprise a tiny fraction of the people he encountered. All too often
the records are incomplete or missing. Thomas Carlyle’s anecdote that
Wordsworth said he had seen Gorsas guillotined at Paris in October 1793
seems to me to ring true: how or why would Carlyle—or Wordsworth—
have invented such a story? There is much more to be said about
Coleridge’s Watchman journal of 1796, and I suspect that the ‘Spy
Nozy’ episode of the following year may still be incompletely understood.
Preface, 1988–2018 xi
An early draft chapter on Southey was omitted, and subsequently pub-
lished in my book The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some
Contemporaries; Southey deserves more thorough consideration than proved
possible in this study.
I am grateful to the staff of the following institutions: Bath Public
Reference Library; the Bibliothèque Municipale, Blois; The Bodleian
Library; Bristol City Library and Bristol University Library; The British
Library; Cambridge University Library; Dove Cottage Library, Grasmere;
Dundee Public Reference Library; the libraries of Emmanuel College,
Cambridge, and Nuffield College, Oxford; the Public Record Offices at
Chancery Lane and Kew; St Andrews University Library; Tullie House
Library, Carlisle; and Queen’s University Library, Belfast. I would like to
thank the following for permission to quote from manuscripts and to
reproduce visual material: Lord Abinger, for the Abinger–Shelley Papers;
Viscount Knebworth, for the Lovelace–Byron Papers; the Librarian of
Bristol University Library, for the Pinney Papers; the Trustees of Dove
Cottage, for Basil Montagu’s ‘Narrative of the birth and upbringing of
his son’; the National Library of Wales; the National Portrait Gallery,
London; and the National Library of Scotland for the Blackwood Papers.
My original research for this book was materially helped by grants from
the President and Fellows of Trinity College, Oxford; from Queen’s
University, Belfast; and from the University of St Andrews.
In preparing this new edition I have made use of electronic databases
that give access in a few seconds to material that would formerly have
taken weeks to research; of particular help were British Library Newspapers;
The British Newspaper Archive; Ed Pope History: Lives of the Forgotten; Gale
Historical Newspapers; The Times Digital Archive 1785–2011; and The
Diary of William Godwin. Web addresses and access details for each are
given in the footnotes and the bibliography.
Part of Chapter 6 was delivered to the Wordsworth Summer Confer-
ence at Grasmere back in August 1982, and subsequently published as
‘Citizen Wordsworth’ in the Wordsworth Circle; earlier versions of
Chapters 2 and 8 have also appeared in the Wordsworth Circle, and I’m
grateful to the editor for permission to reproduce this material here.
Chapter 7 was presented as a lecture at the Wordsworth Summer Con-
ference in August 1984, and published the following year as an essay in
Coleridge’s Imagination: Essays in Memory of Peter Laver. Passages that refer
to George Dyer have been drawn from a lecture on ‘Radical George’ given
at a meeting of the Charles Lamb Society in April 1984, later published in
the Charles Lamb Bulletin. The New Introduction was presented as a
lecture on ‘The Radical Years Revisited’ at the ‘Politics of Romanticism’
international conference of the Gesellschaft für Englische Romantik
xii Preface, 1988–2018

(Society for English Romanticism) at the University of Bamberg, 5–8
October 2017.
I am much indebted to specific volumes in the Cornell Wordsworth
Series and the Bollingen Collected Coleridge, some of which have been
published since this book first appeared. Mary Thale’s Selections from the
Papers of the London Corresponding Society, 1792–1799 continues to be an
invaluable reference. Over the years distinguished scholars have inspired
my own efforts on the radical 1790s: John Barrell, David Bromwich,
David Erdman, Kelvin Everest, David Fairer, Stephen Gill, Albert Good-
win, Richard Holmes, Kenneth R. Johnston, Marjorie Levinson, Michael
O’Neill, Seamus Perry, E. P. Thompson, Richard Marggraf Turley, Jenny
Uglow, and Damian Walford Davies.
Friends and colleagues offered support and advice when I was writing
the first edition of this book: Michael Alexander, Robert Crawford, Ashley
Goodall, Julia Green, Lucy Newlyn, Neil Rhodes, Jane Stabler, and Jane
and Simon Taylor. Sadly, all too many are no longer here: Michael Allen,
John Beer, Dennis Burden, John Cronin, Michael Foot, Peter Laver,
Molly Lefebure, Thomas McFarland, Paul Magnuson, Bill Ruddick,
Sally Woodhead, Jonathan Wordsworth, and Richard Wordsworth.
Mary Taylor skilfully prepared the original typescript, and Kim Scott
Walwyn saw the first edition of this book through the press.
I am grateful to Jacqueline Norton at Oxford University Press for
commissioning this new edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Radical
Years, and to Aimee Wright and Helen Belgian for their editorial advice.
Jeff Cowton, John Coombe, and Melissa Mitchell at the Wordsworth
Trust helped with Wordsworth’s edition of Burke. Colin Harris at the
Bodleian Library clarified the renumbering of the Abinger–Shelley manu-
scripts, and entries in the bibliography have been updated. Frank Bowles
at Cambridge University Library has checked shelfmarks for the Frend
papers, and confirms that they are unchanged.
St Andrews 1988–2018
Contents
List of illustrations xv
Abbreviations xvii
A note on texts xxi
New Introduction 1
1. Voices from the Common Grave of Liberty 18
2. ‘Europe was Rejoiced’: Responses to Revolution, 1789–1791 31
3. ‘Pretty Hot in It’: Wordsworth and France, 1791–1792 51
4. ‘Mr. Frend’s Company’: Cambridge, Dissent, and Coleridge 88
5. ‘War is Again Broken Out’: Protest and Poetry, 1793–1798 118
6. ‘A Light Bequeathed’: Coleridge, Thelwall, Wordsworth,
Godwin 145
7. ‘A Sympathy with Power’: Imagining Robespierre 201
8. Inner Emigrants: Kindly Interchange, Rash Disdain 232
Epilogue: Daring to Hope 261
Appendix 1: Wordsworth and Daniel Isaac Eaton’s
Philanthropist 273
Appendix 2: Wordsworth’s Lost Satire 277
Bibliography 283
Index 305
List of illustrations
1. ‘I knew this man. W.W’: Wordsworth’s marginal note about Gorsas,
from Edmund Burke, The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund
Burke. A New Edition (16 vols; London, 1812–1815), vii. 305.
© The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. 54
2. The author of Peace and Union, William Frend, by Andrew Birrell,
after Silvester Harding; stipple engraving, published 1793.
© National Portrait Gallery, London. 98
3. ‘Un petit souper, a la Parisiènne;—or—a family of sans-culotts
refreshing, after the fatigues of the day’ by James Gillray, published
by Hannah Humphrey, hand-coloured etching, published
20 September 1792. © National Portrait Gallery, London. 120
4. ‘The plain fact is, Citizens . . . ’. ‘Copenhagen House’ by James
Gillray, published by Hannah Humphrey, hand-coloured
etching, published 16 November 1795. © National Portrait Gallery,
London. 147
5. ‘The Democrats are . . . sturdy in the support of me . . . ’. Samuel
Taylor Coleridge by Robert Hancock, black, red, and brown
chalk and pencil, 1796. © National Portrait Gallery, London. 149
6. ‘The most powerful and admired writers of their day . . . ’. Thomas
Holcroft and William Godwin by Sir Thomas Lawrence, pencil
with black and red chalk, 1794. © National Portrait Gallery,
London. Holcroft and Godwin are depicted in court during the
treason trials of 1794. 175
7. ‘We are shocked to hear that Mr. Thelwall has spent some time at
Stowey this week . . . ’. John Thelwall, attributed to John Hazlitt, oil
on canvas, circa 1800–1805. © National Portrait Gallery, London. 235
8. ‘I soon gained positive intelligence they had disembarked about 1200
men, but no cannon . . . ’. James Baker, ‘Goodwick Sands’, circa 1797.
By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National
Library of Wales. 251
9. ‘Wordsworth a Name I think known to Mr. Ford . . . ’. William
Wordsworth by Robert Hancock, black, red, and brown chalk
and pencil, 1798. © National Portrait Gallery, London. 256
Abbreviations
Account William Frend, An Account of the Proceedings in the University of
Cambridge against William Frend, M.A. (Cambridge, 1793).
A–S Dep. Abinger–Shelley papers, in the Bodleian Library.
BL S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Engell and
W. Jackson Bate, CC, vii. (2 vols; Princeton, NJ, 1983).
Bod. Bodleian Library, Oxford.
BUL Bristol University Library.
Butler William Wordsworth, ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘The Pedlar’, ed.
J. Butler (Cornell Wordsworth Series; Ithaca, NY, 1979).
BV Jonathan Wordsworth, The Borders of Vision (Oxford, 1982).
BWS Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth
(Ithaca and London, 1970).
CC Collected Coleridge (Bollingen Series 75; Princeton, NJ,
1969–2002).
CL The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs
(6 vols; Oxford, 1956–71).
CPW S. T. Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays, CC, xvi.
(3 vols in 6; Princeton, NJ, 2001).
CUL Cambridge University Library.
Curry New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. K. Curry (2 vols; New York and
London, 1965).
DC Dove Cottage.
ET S. T. Coleridge, Essays on his Times, ed. D. V. Erdman, CC, iii.
(3 vols; Princeton, NJ, 1978).
EY The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de
Selincourt, 2nd edn, The Early Years, 1787–1805, rev.
C. L. Shaver (Oxford, 1967).
Friend S. T. Coleridge, The Friend, ed. B. Rooke, CC, iv. (2 vols;
Princeton, NJ, 1969).
GD The Diary of William Godwin, eds. Victoria Myers, David O’
Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford Digital Library, 2010),
online at http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/index2.html
References will give an electronic link to the entry quoted
or cited.
Gill William Wordsworth, The Salisbury Plain Poems, ed. S. Gill
(Cornell Wordsworth Series; Ithaca, NY, 1975).
Goodwin A. Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic
Reform Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London,
1979).
xviii Abbreviations
Gunning Henry Gunning, Reminiscences of the University, Town and
County of Cambridge, from the Year 1780 (2 vols; London, 1854).
HO Home Office files at the Public Record Office, London.
Howe The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (21 vols;
London, 1930–4).
ITT Jenny Uglow, In these Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon’s
Wars, 1793–1815 (London, 2014).
L–B Dep. Lovelace–Byron papers, in the Bodleian Library.
LD James Losh’s MS Diary, at Tullie House Library, Carlisle.
Lects 1795 S. T. Coleridge, Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, ed.
L. Patton and P. Mann, CC, i. (Princeton, NJ, 1971).
Lefebvre, i, ii G. Lefebvre, The French Revolution, i. From its Origins to 1793,
trans. E. M. Evanson (London and New York, 1962); ii. From
1793 to 1799, trans. J. S. Hall and J. Friguglietti (London and
New York, 1964).
Marrs The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. E. W. Marrs, Jr.
(3 vols; Ithaca, NY, 1975–8).
MH Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity (London, 1969).
Moniteur Réimpression de l’Ancien Moniteur depuis la Réunion des États-
Généraux jusqu’au Consulat (Mai 1789–Novembre 1799)
(31 vols; Paris, 1840–7).
Moorman Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth, A Biography: The Early
Years, 1770–1803 (Oxford, 1957).
MWC E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
(Harmondsworth, 1968).
N&Q Notes & Queries.
Osborn William Wordsworth, The Borderers, ed. R. Osborn (Cornell
Wordsworth Series; Ithaca, NY, 1982).
P&U William Frend, Peace and Union, Recommended to the Associated
Bodies of Republicans and Anti-Republicans (St Ives, 1793).
Parl Hist Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England. From the Norman
Conquest, in 1066, to the Year, 1803 (36 vols; London,
1806–20).
PJ William Godwin, Political Justice (2 vols; London, 1793).
PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association of America.
PrW The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen
and J. W. Smyser (3 vols; Oxford, 1974).
PV MS minutes of Les Amis de la Constitution at Blois, Procès
Verbaux des Sociétés Populaires, Bibliothèque Muncipale de
Blois, France.
PW The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt
and H. Darbishire (5 vols; Oxford, 1940–9).
R Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the
Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event,
ed. C. C. O’Brien (Harmondsworth, 1968).
Abbreviations xix
Reed M. L. Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Early Years,
1770–1799 (Cambridge, MA, 1967).
RM, i. ii. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, Part One and Part Two, ed.
H. Collins (Harmondsworth, 1969).
Sequel William Frend, A Sequel to the Account of the Proceedings in the
University of Cambridge (London, 1795).
State Trials Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials . . . from the Earliest
Period to the Present Time (33 vols; London, 1809–28).
Thale Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society,
1792–1799, ed. M. Thale (Cambridge, 1983).
TLS Times Literary Supplement.
Tribune John Thelwall, The Tribune (3 vols; London, 1795–6).
TS Treasury Solicitor files at the Public Record Office, London.
TWC The Wordsworth Circle.
Watchman S. T. Coleridge, The Watchman, ed. L. Patton, CC, ii.
(Princeton, NJ, 1970).
A note on texts
Unless indicated otherwise, quotations from Wordsworth’s poetry are

from William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill, 21st-Century Oxford
Authors Series (Oxford, 2010); quotations from the 1799 and 1805
versions of The Prelude are designated thus. Quotations from the 1850
version of The Prelude are from The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed.
J. Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and S. Gill (New York, 1979), and
designated 1850.
Quotations from Coleridge’s poetry and plays are from the reading texts
in Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays (6 vols; Princeton, NJ, 2001), unless
indicated otherwise.
Quotations from Chaucer’s poetry are from The Complete Works of
Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (2nd edn; Oxford, 1974); quota-
tions from Milton are from Paradise Lost, ed. A. Fowler (London, 1968)
and Complete Shorter Poems, ed. J. Carey (London, 1968); quotations
from Shakespeare are from Complete Works, ed. P. Alexander (London and
Glasgow, 1951); quotations from Spenser are from Poetical Works, ed.
J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1970).
Throughout this book square brackets are editorial.
New Introduction
When Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Radical Years was written there were
no electronic research resources, no laptop computers, and no e-mail.
Accessing libraries and archives entailed correspondence with specialist
librarians—often a matter of weeks—followed by on-site searches in page
or card catalogues. Much of my material came from holdings in the
Bodleian Library and the British Library, and from the old Public Record
Office at Chancery Lane. I also drew on Jacobin Society records held at
Blois. For Coleridge, I traced materials across networks that connected the
nationwide culture of dissent—networks that in the mid-1790s the poet
navigated with particular dexterity, as his Watchman tour in the north of
England shows us.
My aim was to ask and answer questions about Wordsworth’s and
Coleridge’s careers in the 1790s, and to trace their involvement in English
radical and reformist groups. There were book-length studies of the
Romantic poets and politics by Crane Brinton (1926), David Erdman
(1954), F. M. Todd (1957), Carl Woodring (1961, 1970), and Leslie
Chard (1972), but almost nothing about their possible connections with
the 1790s reform movement embodied by the Society for Constitutional
Information (SCI) and the London Corresponding Society (LCS). That
the first generation of English Romantic poets was enthusiastic about the
French Revolution was largely taken for granted, although E. P. Thompson’s
Making of the English Working Class (1963) and ‘Disenchantment or
Default? A Lay Sermon’ (1969), alongside Kelvin Everest’s Coleridge’s Secret
Ministry: The Context of the Conversation Poems 1795–1798 (1979), signalled
that more might be done to place Wordsworth and Coleridge among
democratic ‘oppositionists’ of the day.
Several new editions were crucial to my work, principally Stephen Gill’s
Salisbury Plain Poems of William Wordsworth in the Cornell Wordsworth
Series (1975) and, in the Bollingen Collected Coleridge Series, The
Watchman edited by Lewis Patton (1970), and Lectures 1795 on Politics
and Religion edited by Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (1971). Two then-
recent books were particularly inspiring: Albert Goodwin’s The Friends of
Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French
2 Wordsworth and Coleridge

Revolution (1979) and Mary Thale’s Selections from the Papers of the
London Corresponding Society, 1792–1799 (1983). Tracing the English
democratic movement from the mid-eighteenth century to 1799, Goodwin’s
book drew in provincial centres of radicalism as well as French, Irish, and
Scottish dimensions; Thale’s edition of the Corresponding Society papers
assembled minutes of meetings and spy reports documenting the origin,
progress, and suppression of the popular reform movement. Both books
became constant companions. Folded inside my copy of The Friends of
Liberty is a letter I received from Goodwin, speculating on the where-
abouts of John Thelwall’s lost papers that were, and still are, awaiting
discovery.¹ My copy of Mary Thale’s Selections likewise preserves a letter
from David Erdman about the Anglo-Jacobin John Oswald and ‘The
English Press’ at Paris, later treated at full length in Erdman’s wonderful
book Commerce des Lumières: John Oswald and the British in Paris,
1790–1793 (1986). Aware that in 1792 ‘the British Club people’ at
Paris ‘were spied upon’, Erdman explained that they were ‘reported to
be planning a publishing campaign to spread Democracy . . . What they
were printing was John Oswald’s Review of the British Constitution. And,
probably that early, talking at least of French and English versions of his
Government of the People.’² The ‘British Club people’—that is, The
British Club, or Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man—met at
White’s Hotel in the centre of Paris, close to the Place des Victoires. Its
members included the Scots physician William Maxwell; the Unitarian
printer John Hurford Stone; Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the Irish patriot;
Francis Tweddell, brother of Wordsworth’s friend John Tweddell; Samp-
son Perry, surgeon and editor of The Argus newspaper; the Della-Cruscan
poet Robert Merry; the lawyer John Frost; and the Scottish poet, pamph-
leteer, and pedestrian, John Oswald. Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria
Williams, and Mary Wollstonecraft were linked with the club, which was
a well-known gathering place for Anglo-Jacobins in Paris. The first meet-
ing took place on Sunday 18 November 1792, four days before the procla-
mation of the French Republic, when Wordsworth is known to have been
in the city. If he was not at White’s Hotel in person, in Erdman’s view,
¹ I reconstructed the likely contents of Thelwall’s lost papers in ‘The Lives of John
Thelwall’, John Thelwall. Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, ed. Steve Poole (London,
2009), 17–19.
² Erdman refers to Oswald’s two pamphlets: Review of the Constitution of Great-Britain
(London, 1791; 3rd edn 1792) and The Government of the People: Or, a Sketch of a
Constitution for the Universal Commonwealth (Paris, Printed at the English Press . . . First
Year of the French Republic). Both of these scarce pamphlets are reproduced in Political
Writings of the 1790s, ed. Greg Claeys (7 vols; London, 2002), iii. 411–46; iv. 95–124.
New Introduction 3
he was present ‘in spirit’.³ As I suggest in Chapter 3, Wordsworth’s ‘high
and lonely’ room at Paris, ‘near the roof / Of a large Mansion or Hotel’
(1805, x. 57–8), was almost certainly at White’s.
These were restless times in Britain, too, when Edmund Burke thought
that ‘[t]here were Jacobin Societies established in different parts of this
kingdom, corresponding with each other, and combined with the Jacobin
Societies of France, to league together and overturn all the States of
Europe’.⁴ Wordsworth and Coleridge were frequently in company or
correspondence with the most controversial thinkers and activists in
Paris, London, Bristol, and elsewhere. I wanted to find out whether they
could have been more closely involved, although few records have sur-
vived. In Wordsworth’s case, apart from a dozen letters and the cryptically
brief entries in William Godwin’s diary, there is scant evidence for the
years 1793 to 1795 when, from time to time, he was in London. As a
result, his ‘Godwinian phase’ had usually been recounted in terms of his
enthusiasm for the ‘false philosophy’ of Political Justice—that is, with
hindsight rather than through his lived experience of an argumentative
urban world in which Godwin’s book was circulated, read, discussed, and
quarrelled about. Perhaps we catch an echo of those disputes in Hazlitt’s
memory of ‘a metaphysical argument with Wordsworth, while Coleridge
was explaining the different notes of the nightingale to his sister, in which
we neither of us succeeded in making ourselves perfectly clear and
intelligible’.⁵
University education put young intellectuals like Wordsworth and
Coleridge at a distance from tradesmen in the popular reform movement,
yet they might still have visited divisions of the LCS and listened to
proceedings. Their acquaintances Anna Letitia Barbauld, George Dyer,
William Frend, William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, Joseph Johnson,
James Losh, Samuel Nicholson, Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, Robert
Southey, John Tweddell, Felix Vaughan, James Watt, and Helen Maria
Williams were all associated with intellectual and popular reformist circles
in London and Paris and so, perhaps, were the poets themselves. Cole-
ridge’s Cambridge tutor William Frend took a leading role, appearing on
7 December 1795 as a speaker alongside John Thelwall at a mass gathering
³ See David V. Erdman, Commerce des Lumières: John Oswald and the British in Paris,
1790–1793 (Columbia, MO, 1986), 226–8, 305–7; see also Rachel Rogers, ‘White’s Hotel:
A Junction of British Radical Culture in Early 1790s Paris’, Caliban: French Journal of
English Studies, 33 (2013), 153–72.
⁴ Edmund Burke in the House of Commons, Friday 4 March 1793, The Times
(5 March 1793).
⁵ ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, Howe, xvii. 119.

of the LCS at Mary-le-Bone Fields. Addressing the crowd on the Treasonable
Practices and Seditious Meetings Bills (the ‘Gagging Acts’) then before
parliament, Frend explained that ‘these Bills attack the Liberties of the
nation, and the foundation upon which the right of the present Monarch
has been erected’ (that is, the 1689 Bill of Rights).⁶ A Times reporter heard
Frend’s speech, dashed back to his office, and filed this copy:
The rostrum was filled by Citizen Thelwall, accompanied by Mr. Frend . . .
Libels of every kind were retailed in profusion, as well as sin; there were
Pennyworths of Treason, and Food for the Swinish Multitude. Never was
seen such a motley groupe, composed of all the blackguards and bunters in
town . . . ⁷
While Thelwall and Frend hazarded their liberty in reminding people of
their rights, Wordsworth was at Racedown in Dorset—mired in ‘specu-
lations . . . / and . . . reasonings false’ (1805, x. 877, 883),
now believing,
Now disbelieving, endlessly perplexed
With impulse, motive, right and wrong,
(1805, x. 892–4)
—until, he admits, a crisis of despair overwhelmed him. The precise time
and nature of this depression is difficult to ascertain and, for obvious
reasons, its progress resists chronological ordering. There is no trace of it in
letters and poems from 1795–6, and Wordsworth’s account in The
Prelude is vague—‘then it was / . . . about this time’ (1805, x. 904–5)—
reflecting the poem’s purpose to trace how the poet’s imagination was
impaired and restored. Was Wordsworth’s crisis exaggerated, or even
invented, to fit the narrative of The Prelude? I return to this question at
several points in this book, as it is in many ways crucial to Wordsworth’s
development as a writer between 1795 and 1797.⁸
⁶ Frend’s speech appears in ‘London Corresponding Society. Meeting in Mary-le-Bone

Fields’, The London Corresponding Society 1792–1799, ed. Michael T. Davis (6 vols;
London, 2002), ii. 60–1. It is worth pointing out that although Thelwall and Frend
occupied the ‘grand rostrum’, neither was at that moment a member of the
LCS. Thelwall had resigned following his trial for treason in December 1794, and Frend
probably never joined. See Chapter 6.
⁷ The Times (8 Dec. 1795).
⁸ See Reed, 120 n. In ‘Wordsworth’s Crisis’, a review of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The
Radical Years, E. P. Thompson claimed that Wordsworth’s ‘climactic crisis with “false
philosophy” ’ was missing from the book; it was and is dealt with in Chapters 5 and 6, and
cited numerous times elsewhere. See London Review of Books, 10. 22 (8 Dec. 1988), rpt. in
The Romantics. England in a Revolutionary Age (Woodbridge, 1997), 84–5.
New Introduction 5
Coleridge, by contrast, recently married and dividing his time between
Bristol and Clevedon, was waging his ‘bloodless fight’ in poems, lectures,
and The Watchman. In tracing his career as a Unitarian, I became aware of
connections from Cambridge University to London reformist circles, the
Unitarian community at Bristol, and (I later realized) the school at Enfield
attended by John Keats from 1803 to 1810. John Clarke, Keats’s school-
master, was a former colleague of George Dyer—author of Complaints of
the Poor People of England (1793), member of the SCI, and, by 1794, in
contact with Coleridge and ‘enraptured’ by his scheme for Pantisocracy.⁹
Clarke was also on familiar terms with Joseph Priestley and Major John
Cartwright, who had founded the SCI back in 1780 and was a near
neighbour at Enfield: ‘The Firm, Consistent, & Persevering Advocate of
UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE, Equal Representation, Vote by Ballot, and
ANNUAL PARLIAMENTS . . . the First English Writer who openly
maintained the Independence of the United States of America’.¹⁰ No
wonder the Clarkes were aware that Coleridge ‘was one of the marked
men in the early period of the French Revolution’.¹¹ Here, in 1790s
Enfield, was a suburban nest of independent-minded liberals and dissenters
that prefigured by twenty years Leigh Hunt’s circle at the Vale of Health,
Hampstead, to which Keats, Percy and Mary Shelley, Benjamin Haydon,
John Hamilton Reynolds, and William Hazlitt were drawn.
Like Frend, Coleridge migrated from Cambridge and invented himself
as a political-poetical firebrand whose Unitarian sermons ‘spread a sort of
sanctity over [his] Sedition’.¹² Sermons of a ‘political tendency’ were not
without risk: while the seditious aspect of Coleridge’s biblical quotations
was obvious to at least one ‘Aristocrat’, he was fortunate in escaping
prosecution.¹³ In this radical milieu Wordsworth and Coleridge eventu-
ally encountered John Thelwall, the courageous figurehead of the popular
reform movement. He became a presiding presence in my narrative and
this book was, and is, dedicated to his memory. In the 1980s Thelwall
was still largely unknown—‘sold short by the critics’.¹⁴ My narrative
placed him prominently at the centre of the Wordsworth–Coleridge
⁹ CL, i. 98.
¹⁰ Inscription on Cartwright’s monument in Cartwright Gardens, London WC1.
¹¹ Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers (1878; Fontwell, 1969),
5, 34.
¹² CL, i. 179.
¹³ See the anecdote in Coleridge’s letter to Rev. John Edwards, 29 January 1796, CL,
i. 179–80; the episode is treated as a joke (like the ‘Spy Nozy’ story in Biographia Literaria,
BL, i. 193–7), but it could have had unfunny consequences.
¹⁴ E. P. Thompson, ‘Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon’ in C. C. O’Brien and
W. D. Vanech (eds.), Power and Consciousness (London and New York, 1969), rpt. in The
Romantics. England in a Revolutionary Age, 45.

story for the first time, tracking the path that took him from leadership
of the LCS to his acquaintance with Coleridge and arrival at Nether
Stowey. In recent years new editions and studies of Thelwall’s writings
have appeared, and there is now a John Thelwall Society to promote
public knowledge, understanding and enjoyment of Thelwall’s life, ideals,
and accomplishments.¹⁵
Over the last thirty years the 1790s has proved an extraordinarily
rewarding decade for scholars, critics, and biographers: the bibliography
in this new edition has been updated to incorporate recent work in the
field. Stephen Gill’s William Wordsworth. A Life (1989, and shortly to
appear in a second edition) gives close attention to the poet’s political
activities and writings from the 1790s, and Richard Holmes’s biographies
of Coleridge (1989, 1998) are likewise attentive to the revolutionary and
dissenting contexts of Coleridge’s early visions. My chapter in Gill’s
Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth (2003) explored an episode that
I now regard as probably the most momentous for Wordsworth during the
difficult and dangerous year 1793–4; it informed his Godwinian phase,
the murderous action of The Borderers, and surfaced again, as we’ll see, in
‘Tintern Abbey’. He seems to have been introduced to royalist circles at
Orléans by Jean-Henri Gellet-Duvivier, his landlord, and possibly by Paul
Vallon, the brother of his lover Annette. On 16 March 1793 both of
these men, and probably others known to Wordsworth, were involved in
attacking a Commissioner from the National Convention at Paris, Léonard
Bourdon.¹⁶ ‘At Orléans’, The Times reported, ‘the Commissioners of the
Convention have been treated as criminals, and received with the but-ends of
muskets [sic]. One of them, Léonard Bourdon, was attempted to be murdered
in the Hotel de Ville’.¹⁷ News of this journée and its aftermath was widely
reported in British newspapers, and Wordsworth would have been alert to its
implications: Paul Vallon’s involvement might ensnare Annette and, with her,
their three-month-old daughter, Caroline. Add to this Wordsworth’s anger
at Britain’s war with France and we can appreciate his desperation as he
looked on, unable to help or intervene. Many of the conspirators, including
Gellet-Duvivier, were arrested and taken to Paris, where in July 1793 they
¹⁵ See, for example, Michael Scrivener, Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin
Writing (University Park, 2001); John Thelwall. Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, ed.
Poole; Judith Thompson, John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle; The Silenced Partner
(New York, 2012); Yasmin Solomonescu, John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination
(Basingstoke, 2014). For John Thelwall’s poetry, see in particular David Fairer, ‘A Matter of
Emphasis: Coleridge and Thelwall, 1796–7’ in Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle,
1790–1798 (Oxford and New York, 2009), 236–59. For the John Thelwall Society, go to
http://www.johnthelwall.org/ [date accessed: 25 Jan. 2018].
¹⁶ For Wordsworth and royalists at Orléans, see Chapter 3, pp. 59–61.
¹⁷ The Times (25 Mar. 1793).
New Introduction 7
were tried and sentenced for the murder of Bourdon—who was alive and
present in the courtroom:
The Revolutionary Tribunal has pronounced sentence of death upon the
following nine persons, accused of having attempted to take away the life of
Leonard Bourdon, at Orleans, on the 15th of March, viz.
Benoit Couet, Stock-broker aged 50 years.
J. H. Gellet, Hosier, 39
Adrian Buissort, Merchant, 25
N. Jacquet, jun. Gent. 25
J. Baptist Poussot, Recruiting Officer, 42
J. Baptist Quesnel, Musician, 38
James de la Salle, Wax-bleacher, 43
C. P. Nonneville, Gent. 30
C. Tassin, Freeholder, 33
On 13 July all nine men were led out and guillotined, whereupon the
‘greatest part of the spectators murmured aloud, cursing both the Con-
vention and the Revolutionary Tribunal’.¹⁸ The date was exactly five years
before Wordsworth alluded to this dreadful summer in the title and first
line of ‘Tintern Abbey’: ‘ . . . July 13, 1798 // Five years have passed . . . ’.¹⁹
Wordsworth’s proximity to the Bourdon episode does much to sub-
stantiate David Bromwich’s speculation that Wordsworth had been close
to, if not quite in the thick of a conspiracy, and had seen, from a distance
perhaps, ‘someone badly hurt or killed on information from himself ’.²⁰
Had his casual comment about ‘les royalistes d’Orléans’ led to the arrests,
unjust tribunal, and murderous executions? Wordsworth’s own visibility
to spies and informers is evident from the ‘Spy Nozy’ episode of August
1797, explored in this book’s final chapter. When spy James Walsh was
sent to investigate the poets, he reported that ‘Wordsworth’ was a name
already known to his supervisor, magistrate Richard Ford, in London. As
members of the LCS knew, Ford was one of the ‘persons who received
communication from spies’.²¹ Either Wordsworth was a marked man like
¹⁸ Diary or Woodfall’s Register (24 July 1793). This report was widely reprinted in
provincial newspapers available to Wordsworth, such as The Kentish Gazette (26 July
1793) and The Hampshire Chronicle (29 July 1793).
¹⁹ For a detailed account of the Bourdon ‘assassination’, see Michael J. Sydenham,
Léonard Bourdon: The Career of a Revolutionary, 1754–1807 (Waterloo, Ontario, 1999),
115–66, and for the July 1793 trial especially, 163–5.
²⁰ David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago
and London, 1998), 17. See also Richard Gravil’s conjecture about Wordsworth’s ‘engage-
ment in atrocious historical guilts’: Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842 (Basingstoke
and New York, 2003), 129.
²¹ ‘A Letter, &c. to the Members of the London Corresponding Society’, The London
Corresponding Society 1792–1799, ii. 10.

Coleridge, or by 1797 he had become (unwittingly perhaps?) an informer
himself. Then again, I recall David Erdman, deep surveillant of the 1790s
Anglo–Parisian underground, saying that he believed that Wordsworth,
who spent more time in revolutionary Paris than is generally realized, may
have been working as a double agent.
Literary research can often depend on chance finds and unexpected
insights. At one stage of my investigations I had been reading records of
subscription payments to the SCI and the LCS in the hope of finding
donations from the poets. These lists initially appeared unpromising, yet
mining them yielded all kinds of information—names, affiliations,
locations—amounting to a directory guide to the reformist community.
One such list, an LCS pamphlet from November 1794 that Mary Thale
had noted, records a shilling donation from ‘Citizen Wordsworth’ along-
side some of the foremost English Friends of Liberty—Charles James Fox,
Richard Price, Thomas Walker, Olaudah Equiano (‘Gustavus Vassa’), the
Countess Dowager of Stanhope, and other less well-known philanthrop-
ists: ‘Amicus Populi’, ‘an old Soldier’, ‘A reduced captain’, ‘A friend to the
persecuted patriots’.²² Could William Wordsworth, so assiduous in cover-
ing up his 1790s activities, now be identified as a partisan alongside
Citizen Thelwall and Mr Frend? If the answer was ‘yes’, his journey
from Cambridge University (1787–91) through revolutionary Paris
(1791–2, 1793) to radical London and Bristol (1793, 1795) would
make sense as a trajectory of deepening commitment to reform. Citizen
William Wordsworth would join with Thelwall and Coleridge in ‘pursu-
ing the same end by the same means’.²³
This book was originally an Oxford doctoral thesis, ‘Wordsworth,
Coleridge and the French Revolution, 1789–1795’, and was written at
Queen’s University, Belfast, where I was lecturing from 1982–5. Those
years marked the aftermath of the hunger strike by Irish republican
prisoners: ‘shoot to kill’, the ‘Droppin Well’ bombing, and the murder
of law faculty lecturer Edgar Graham outside the University Library. Amid
that brutal conflict, poets from Northern Ireland proved disarmingly
resourceful, none more so than Paul Muldoon, whose lyrical genius in
Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), and Meeting the British (1987)
told a way through those bitterly riven times much as poets of the mid-
1790s had done in theirs. Like the disaffected Wordsworth ‘displaced
²² The pamphlet containing the name ‘Citizen Wordsworth’ is London Corresponding

Society, Nov. 19th. 1794 (London, 1794), 5; a facsimile appears in The London Correspond-
ing Society 1792–1799, i. 279–86.
²³ CL, i. 204–5.
New Introduction 9
from his own affections by a vision of the good . . . located elsewhere’,
contemporary writers were ‘taking the strain of being in two places at
once, of needing to accommodate two opposing conditions of truthfulness
simultaneously’.²⁴ Capable of being in many minds, Keats’s ‘negative
capability’ was an exemplary accommodation of opposing truths, as
Seamus Heaney noted. And while Keats did not associate Coleridge
or Wordsworth with negative capability, both of those poets relished
chanciness, mysteries, and doubts: ‘idle flitting phantasies’ and ‘random
gales’, ‘uncertain notice’, ‘half-extinguish’d thought’, ‘unremembered
pleasure’, ‘And what if . . . ?’. Combining a narrative of checks and losses
and failures with dreamy moods, shadows, and surmises, Coleridge’s lyrics
of the mid-1790s are in many places at once, simultaneously engaging
with and detaching from a context of repression, intimidation, and
prosecution.²⁵
All of which might appear to suggest that both poets were retreating
into themselves, less humanly engaged and responsive, cultivating nature
and solitude rather than society, by turns quizzical and cryptic: ‘Oh!
what’s the matter? what’s the matter?’, ‘I cannot tell; I wish I could . . . ’,
‘I cannot tell, I do not know . . . ’, ‘The frost performs its secret ministry . . . ’.²⁶
For New Historicist critics of the 1980s and ’90s such lyrical labyrinths,
elisions, and silences were tokens of political default, although these
poems of mid-decade speak as much of and to their moment as the protest
of ‘Salisbury Plain’, Coleridge’s polemical lectures, or, indeed, ‘Tintern
Abbey’.²⁷
The first edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Radical Years con-
cluded that the failure of the French Revolution had ‘made Wordsworth
a poet’, but did not say what kind of poet I thought he had become.
I speculated about ‘implied recollections’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’—those
points in the text where memories seem to murmur, albeit not distinctly
²⁴ Seamus Heaney, ‘Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland’

(Grasmere, 1985), 4. See also Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones. Interviews with Seamus
Heaney (London, 2008), 123, and Fiona Stafford, Local Attachments. The Province of Poetry
(Oxford, 2010), 103.
²⁵ Fairer, Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–1798, 169. On Wordsworth,
Coleridge, and the repressive 1790s, see in particular John Bugg’s excellent study Five Long
Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford, 2014) and Kenneth R. Johnston, Unusual
Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s (Oxford, 2013).
²⁶ ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill, A True Story’, 1; ‘Anecdote for Fathers’, 39; ‘The
Thorn’, 89; ‘Frost at Midnight’, 1.
²⁷ Four key texts are: Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation
(Chicago, 1983); Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge,
1986); Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford, 1989); and Kenneth Johnston,
The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York and London, 1998).

so. Here are the title and opening lines of Wordsworth’s poem as they
appeared in Lyrical Ballads (1798):
LINES
WRITTEN A FEW MILES ABOVE
TINTERN ABBEY,
ON REVISITING THE BANKS OF THE WYE DURING
A TOUR,
July 13, 1798.
Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
Which on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Among the woods and copses lose themselves,
Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb
The wild green landscape. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms
Green to the very door; and wreathes of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees,
And the low copses—coming from the trees
With some uncertain notice, as might seem,
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some hermit’s cave, where by his fire
The hermit sits alone.
(1–24)²⁸
This opening paragraph contains four sentences, beginning with an
exclamation over one and a half lines, forming part of a longer sentence
of four lines. The second sentence has a little over four lines, the next six
and a half, and the final sentence nine lines, as if each line and each
sentence calls for more to be said. Rhymes are located within lines,
ensuring that the half- or consonantal rhyme ‘winters / waters’ and the
²⁸ Quoted from Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (London, 1798). The errata to
this volume instructs that ‘And the low copses—coming from the trees’ should be omitted.
New Introduction 11
full rhyme ‘steep / deep’ contribute to the paragraph’s connective progress;
while only nine lines are end-stopped, punctuation inside seventeen of the
lines provides a less obtrusive network of counterpoints. Repetition also
contributes to this process of regulation: ‘Five . . . five . . . five’; ‘secluded . . .
seclusion’; ‘These . . . these . . . these’; ‘green . . . green . . . Green’; ‘hedge-rows,
hardly hedge-rows’; ‘wild . . . wild’; ‘from among the trees . . . from the trees’;
‘hermits . . . hermit’. Working together, these complex intersections of
rhythm, pause, and repetition are guardians of measure, helping to ensure
that the verse does not register thoughts or feelings of more disruptive
tendency. For Wordsworth, as for Tennyson, carefully measured language
enfolds memories that are insinuated, ‘as might seem’, rather than declared
explicitly.²⁹
Evidently drawn more and more to his earlier life, intellectually and
creatively Wordsworth was moving on from the collaborative year of
Lyrical Ballads. As the final poem of that year (and of the 1798 volume),
‘Tintern Abbey’ marks a moment of transition at which the phrase
‘I would believe’ seems to have held peculiar and poignant emphasis.
The mood of the poem is accordingly cautious and, as Keats understood,
content with its moment: when Wordsworth began composing on the
banks of the Wye, he had no idea whether his poem would extend to 160
lines, 1,600, or 16,000. To call this a post-revolutionary poetic might
sound portentous, yet the phrase is appropriate to the blank verse of
‘Tintern Abbey’—on a cusp between an earlier outspoken manner and a
more chastened, unhurried, and reflective voice. Behind lay Wordsworth’s
years of radical republicanism, Political Justice, and hopes for democratic
reform. Ahead lay—what? His practical intentions are perhaps most
readily outlined: as he returned to Chepstow and took the ferry across
the Severn his immediate intention, presumably, was to conclude ‘Tintern
Abbey’ so that Joseph Cottle could have it published in Lyrical Ballads.
And then, preparations to leave for Germany. But beyond that?
Poised between ‘then’ and ‘future years’, with Lyrical Ballads in the
press, Wordsworth fell silent: there would be no further poetry until
October. The coming months and years would eventually bring Michael
and Hart-Leap Well, The Prelude, Poems in Two Volumes, and The Excur-
sion, but for Wordsworth in July 1798 all of that was unknown. I mention
this because readers (myself included) often claim that this poem antici-
pates that poem, and so on, when no such foresight was available to the
poet. What one can say, perhaps, is that ‘Tintern Abbey’ quietly distances
²⁹ In Memoriam A. H. H. Obiit MDCCCXXXIII, stanza 5 lines 5–6: ‘for the unquiet

heart and brain, / A use in measured language lies’. The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher
Ricks (2nd edn, 3 vols; Harlow, 1987), ii. 322.

itself from the aggressive voice of a poem Wordsworth had composed five
years earlier, Salisbury Plain:
Heroes of Truth pursue your march, uptear
Th’Oppressor’s dungeon from its deepest base;
High o’er the towers of Pride undaunted rear
Resistless in your might the herculean mace
Of Reason; let foul Error’s monster race
Dragged from their dens start at the light with pain
And die . . . ³⁰
By July 1798 this rhetoric has been subdued to a more reticent mani-
festo—‘hear’, ‘behold’, ‘think’, ‘connect’.³¹ Instead of ‘uptearing’, the
invitation in ‘Tintern Abbey’ is to discern roots and relationships, to
establish links between past, present, and future. Such was Wordsworth’s
‘second nature’, James Chandler has argued, in that it seems to represent a
traditional, conservative Burkeanism ‘implicit in Wordsworth’s major
poetry’ and overlaying an earlier Rousseauvian phase.³² Some of these
Burkean echoes are persuasive, although often Burke’s presence is said
to be ‘disguised’, ‘displaced’, ‘concealed’, ‘veiled’, and ‘camouflaged’.
Equally, when The Prelude tells us that Wordsworth’s early life inclined
him to favour ‘the government of equal rights / And individual worth’
(1805, ix. 248–9), readers are cautioned not to be ‘misled . . . by Wordsworth’s
claim to egalitarian sentiment’—even though Hazlitt had recognized a
‘principle of equality’ in Lyrical Ballads ‘with the authority of a seasoned
observer of the age’s politics and literature’.³³ One difficulty with the
Burkean Wordsworth is that rights, customs, and traditions were not
exclusively Burke’s territory; the same issues were debated in other polit-
ical and intellectual spheres of which Wordsworth was aware—for
instance, in Britain’s culture of dissent. Equally, poetry—even ‘Burkean’
poetry—is necessarily progressive, oriented to the future, in that each
poem grows from what has already been said and creates a verbal world
that had not existed before. The title of ‘Tintern Abbey’ tells us that it,
too, is in two minds as it looks back in order to move on; written ‘during a
tour’, it forms part of a continuity—literally, for Wordsworth in 1798, an
onward creative footstepping.
³⁰ ‘Salisbury Plain 1793–4 Reading Text’, Gill, 38, lines 541–7.

³¹ See Stafford, Local Attachments. The Province of Poetry, 104–5, for Wordsworth’s
‘need to be connected’.
³² See Wordsworth’s Second Nature: a Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago and
London, 1984), 74, and for Rousseau and ‘Salisbury Plain’ (1793), 130–1.
³³ Wordsworth’s Second Nature, 51, 5, and note the recognition of Wordsworth’s ‘most
fervently radical period’ associated with ‘Salisbury Plain’, 130.
New Introduction 13
The poem apparently arose from a revisiting on a particular day, Friday
13 July 1798, but a revisiting and a return to what? Seemingly nothing
links the poem’s landscape—‘this dark sycamore’, ‘these orchard-tufts’—
with the actuality of the Wye Valley at or above Tintern, and, as we are
constantly told, the ruin of Tintern Abbey does not appear in the poem.³⁴
So what made the banks of the Wye a few miles above Tintern Abbey a
necessary place for Wordsworth, and this poem at that moment a neces-
sary expression?
It now seems to me that ‘Lines Written a few Miles above Tintern
Abbey’ most likely grew from revisiting a spot that cannot be precisely
located, for the simple reason that it was, and is, constantly in flux—in a
word, elusively fluent, like the poet himself. Wordsworth could neverthe-
less see, hear, and recognize this location, and it was and is a well-known
topographical location recorded on maps. Look again at the poem’s title:
LINES
WRITTEN A FEW MILES ABOVE
TINTERN ABBEY,
ON REVISITING THE BANKS OF THE WYE DURING
A TOUR,
July 13, 1798.
When the poem’s first readers saw this on page 201 of Lyrical Ballads
(1798), they would have been aware that the same page has a footnote to
the phrase ‘sweet inland murmur’ in the fourth line: ‘The river is not
affected by the tides a few miles above Tintern’. The word ‘murmur’,
partly borrowed from French, was originally associated with popular
discontent or anger, as in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale: ‘The murmur and the
cherles rebellyng’.³⁵ This old sense of the word was still current in Words-
worth’s lifetime, as we’ve seen in reports of the Bourdon executions. Here,
too, is Azariah Pinney writing to Wordsworth in September 1795: ‘the
murmurs of the people will for a time be suppressed by the military forces
but whenever circumstances shall favour resistance, their complaint will
burst forth with the whirlwind’s fury’.³⁶ ‘[A] few miles above Tintern
Abbey’, murmur has a different aspect—that is, upstream from the stretch
³⁴ But see David Miall, ‘Locating Wordsworth: “Tintern Abbey” and the Community
with Nature’, Romanticism on the Net, 20 (Nov. 2000): https://www.erudit.org/en/jour
nals/ron/2000-n20-ron432/005949ar/ [date accessed: 16 Oct. 2017]. See also Charles
J. Rzepka, ‘Pictures of the Mind: Iron and Charcoal, “Ouzy” Tides and “Vagrant Dwellers”
at Tintern, 1798’, Studies in Romanticism, 42. 2 (Summer 2003).
³⁵ See OED murmur, n. sense 1a, citing Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale: ‘The murmur and the
cherles rebellyng’.
³⁶ BUL, Pinney Family Letter Book 13, and see p. 155–6.

of river that marks the mean high water level, the furthest reach of tides
beyond which sweet water flowing from its mountain springs is not
contaminated by salty tidal water with its turbid associations of ebb and
flow.³⁷ The UK’s Ordnance Survey locates the Wye’s mean high water
level approximately three miles upstream from Tintern, as Wordsworth’s
title and footnote suggest.
Friday 13 July 1798 was the first day of a new moon: with the earth,
moon, and sun aligned, a spring tide on the river would have been
particularly noticeable, as would the stretch of water beyond which ‘the
river is not affected by the tides’—a phrase that with an eddy of genius
suggests how the poet’s mind is, by implication, likewise ‘not affected’, no
longer subject to violent reversals of thought or feeling. The poem glosses
this as a ‘serene and blessed mood’,
In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul.
(42–7)
‘To this point’, Keats suggested, ‘was Wordsworth come, as far as I can
conceive when he wrote “Tintern Abbey”’. A much-travelled poet him-
self, Keats understood Wordsworth’s poem as a pause or resting point on a
journey: a tour of the banks of the Wye, as the title announces, and also
‘into the heart and nature of Man’. Making this human journey has the
effect ‘of convincing ones nerves that the World is full of Misery and
Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression’: that, in Keats’s view, was
the existential ‘point’ to which Wordsworth had arrived in ‘Tintern
Abbey’ and he speculates a little about Wordsworth’s explorative genius
moving onwards, beyond this point, into ‘dark passages’.³⁸ Whether
³⁷ Compare David Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination. The Poetry of Dis-

placement (New York and London, 1987), 109, for the poem’s ‘wishful allusion to the tides
of men and nations’. For the poem’s ‘imaginative transformations in the form of tidal
movements’, see Damian Walford Davies, ‘Romantic Hydrography: Tide and Transit in
“Tintern Abbey” ’, English Romantic Writers and the West Country, ed. Nicholas Roe
(Basingstoke, 2010), 218–36. For sweet water and salt tidal water, see R. J. Fertel, ‘The
Wye’s “Sweet Inland Murmur” ’, The Wordsworth Circle, 16. 3 (Summer 1985), 134–5. For
murmur as complaint, see Michelle Speitz, ‘The Wordsworthian Acoustic Imagination,
Sonic Recursions, and “that dying murmur” ’, Studies in English Literature, 55. 3 (Summer,
2015), 621–46, especially 623.
³⁸ The Letters of John Keats 1814–1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (2 vols; Cambridge,
MA, 1958, rpt. 1972), i. 281.
New Introduction 15
those passages would bring further discoveries and enlightenment,
a more profound understanding, or, perhaps, a forgetting could not be
determined.
How Wordsworth came to this point forms part of the story in this
book—only a part, because Wordsworth was just one of many individuals
in this book who were inspired, disappointed, and, some of them, des-
troyed by an age of revolutions and counter-revolutions.³⁹ The Prelude was
the autobiography of a survivor; many of Wordsworth’s contemporaries
found themselves flung out of the 1790s, if not out of Britain,
beset not only by a host of prejudices, but assailed with all the engines of
power, by nicknames, by lies, by all the arts of malice, interest and hypocrisy,
without the possibility of their defending themselves “from the pelting of the
pitiless storm”, that poured down upon them from the strong-holds of
corruption and authority.⁴⁰
Those defiant words are from Hazlitt’s essay ‘Mr Coleridge’ in The Spirit
of the Age (1825). Hazlitt, who had visited Nether Stowey in 1798, knew
what he was talking about. So did John Thelwall, who could look back on
years when
so active was the acrimony that pursued him, that . . . a mob of soldiers and
loose people was hired, by certain zealots . . . to assail him . . . The ordinary
transactions of life [were] interrupted—the intercourses of the closest rela-
tionship violated and impeded . . . and even magistracy, that should have
protected, [was] the insidious prompter of hostility and insult.⁴¹
Here Thelwall was recalling his lecture tour of East Anglia in summer of
1796 (see Chapter 6), when the ‘transactions of life’ in his lecture presen-
tations had indeed been repeatedly and violently interrupted. So far as
I have been able to determine, however, personal relationships had little
bearing on Thelwall’s East Anglian tour, and considerably more on his
meetings with Coleridge and Wordsworth one year later.
I say that, because ‘relationship impeded’ explained why Thelwall was
writing those very words at Llyswen, a village on the banks of the Wye
further inland than Tintern and approximately eight miles upstream from
Hay-on-Wye. Coleridge had feared that if Thelwall was permitted to settle
at Nether Stowey, ‘even riots & dangerous riots might be the conse-
quence’: ‘come! but not yet!’, he told Thelwall,
³⁹ See in particular the group biographies in Kenneth R. Johnston, Unusual Suspects.

⁴⁰ ‘Mr. Coleridge’, The Spirit of the Age, Howe, xi. 37.
⁴¹ ‘Prefatory Memoir’, Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement (2nd edn; Hereford, 1801),
xxx, xxxiv.

—come in two or three months—take lodgings at Bridgewater—familiarize
the people to your name & appearance—and when the monstrosity of the
thing is gone off, & the people shall have begun to consider you, as a man
whose mouth won’t eat them—& whose pocket is better adapted for a
bundle of sonnets than the transportation or ambush-place of a French
army—then you may take a house—but indeed—I say it with a very sad,
but a very clear conviction—at present I see that much evil & little good
would result from your settling here. (CL, i. 343–4)
A man ‘whose mouth won’t eat them’ suggests that Coleridge had seen
James Gillray’s grisly cannibalistic caricature of Parisian sans-culottes
(see Figure 3, p. 120). Like many contemporaries, Coleridge thought
that Thelwall was ‘the man for action’, and in 1797 Nether Stowey was
not a place for him to get his act together: he had personal and public
reasons to keep Thelwall at a distance, and his recent correspondence had
alluded nervously to ‘assizes’, ‘tryal’, persecution, and Thelwall’s notoriety
‘thro’ every part of the kingdom’ (CL, i. 341–2). It is difficult to believe
that Coleridge did not sympathize with Thelwall’s predicament, although
his letter deliberately links him with a series of temporary dwellings and
furtive concealments—lodgings, a pocket, an ambush-place. Even ‘taking
a house’ would not make it a home. In a word, Thelwall must move on,
although wherever he went acrimony would be in pursuit, infiltrating and
poisoning personal life and relationships.⁴² At Llyswen local hostility was
subsequently aggravated, Thelwall said, by ‘pointed and inflammatory
allusions from the pulpit’, and in due course he was forced to leave the
village.⁴³ Had he been allowed to settle in Nether Stowey the upshot, as
Coleridge feared, would most likely have been the same.
Viewed from the twenty-first century, the 1790s were years of antici-
pation and regret, peace and war, happiness and melancholy, panic and
sanity, optimism and failure. As Percy Shelley pointed out, the age of
revolutions was also ‘an age of despair’⁴⁴—yet out of it all, perhaps, came a
new attitude to emotion that was more self-centred and inward, with a
palette of feelings extending from ecstasy to despondence to the ‘feel of not
to feel’.⁴⁵ The new attitude was ‘Romantic’, with all of that word’s
connotations of individualism and alienation, liberty and enthralment—
⁴² See John Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford,
2006), especially the final chapter on ‘Cottage Politics’.
⁴³ Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, xxxvii.
⁴⁴ For ‘age of despair’, see Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Preface’ to Laon and Cythna, The Major
Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (2003; Oxford, 2009), 132.
⁴⁵ Rachel Hewitt, A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind
(London, 2017); John Keats, ‘In drear nighted December’, 21, John Keats, The Complete
Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (London, 1978), 221.
New Introduction 17
binaries that in one way or another shadow Wordsworth’s poetry in
‘Tintern Abbey’. That poem lifts itself out of context, poised momentarily
between murmurs and gleams of the past and a transit to ‘where I no more
can’: death, the underworld, Hades. And so we return to the banks of the
River Wye, with its ‘sweet inland murmur’ flowing musically and oblivi-
ously from its mountain springs like a benign tributary of Lethe, one of the
rivers of hell ‘whose waters the souls of the dead drank after they had been
confined for a certain space of time in Tartarus’. As Lemprière told Keats,
Tartarus was ‘one of the regions of hell, where . . . the most impious and
guilty among mankind were punished’; Lethe, by contrast, ‘had the power
of making them forget whatever they had done, seen, or heard before, as
the name [lithi] implies, oblivion’.⁴⁶ Often cited as a poet of recollected
experience, Wordsworth, like Keats, was also a poet of forgetting.
And John Thelwall? When I was speculating about what Wordsworth
planned to do as he rambled back from Tintern in July 1798, I didn’t
mention a curious follow-up to his tour. Less than a month later, Words-
worth, his sister Dorothy, and Coleridge were back at the Wye a few miles
above Tintern Abbey, on their way to visit the man they had been so eager
to banish from Nether Stowey. Was this visit tactless or tactical? Their
‘unpremeditated scheme’, as Wordsworth called it (EY, 232) was in fact
proposed by Coleridge and acted upon immediately—which is as much as
to say that it was indeed intended, and not least so by Coleridge. But why?
To apologize? To set records straight? Repair friendship? Perhaps, on
reflection, they were attempting to close a circle: their second visit to the
Wye that summer was almost a year to the day in July 1797 when
Thelwall had left Nether Stowey and set off for Llyswen. The poets,
that is, were now treading in Thelwall’s footsteps, seeking the self-styled
‘new Recluse’ they had exiled from their company. ‘Come! but not yet!’
might have been Thelwall’s response as he watched all three of them
ambling up to his new home, figures from his former life with whom he
now realized he had to break—even if the poets themselves seemed to be
having second thoughts about that. To find out why this might have been
so, please read on.
⁴⁶ J. Lemprière, Bibliotheca Classica; or, A Classical Dictionary (4th edn; London, 1801).
1
Voices from the Common
Grave of Liberty
I am sure I need not request you not to mention my name in your

memoirs . . .
S. T. Coleridge to John Thelwall, 23 April 1801 (CL, ii. 723)
TWELVE years after the fall of the Bastille, William Godwin recollected
responses to that event in Britain. ‘Where was the ingenuous heart which
did not beat with exultation’, he enquired, ‘at seeing a great and cultivated
people shake off the chains of one of the most oppressive political systems
in the world, the most replenished with abuses, the least mollified and
relieved by any infusion of liberty? Thus far we were all of us disinterested
and generous.’¹ Coleridge disagreed. In the margin of his copy of
Godwin’s pamphlet Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr Parr’s Spital
Sermon, he wrote beside this passage:
Had this been the fact, which the whole History of the French Revolution in
its’ first workings disproves a posteriori, it would have been a priori impos-
sible that such a revolution could have taken place. No! it was the discord &
contradictory ferment of old abuses & recent indulgences or connivances—
the heat & light of Freedom let in on a half-cleared, rank soil, made twilight
by the black fierce Reek, which this Dawn did itself draw up.—Still,
however, taking the sentence dramatically, i.e. as the then notion of good
men in general, it is well—and just.²
While conceding that Godwin’s idea of the revolution was true to ‘the
then notion of good men’, Coleridge emphasized that with hindsight it
was not ‘the fact’. When seen ‘a posteriori’ it appeared flawed from
the outset, a ‘contradictory ferment’ that had beguiled and betrayed a
¹ William Godwin, Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr Parr’s Spital Sermon

(London, 1801), 2–3, reproduced in William Godwin, Uncollected Writings, 1785–1822
(Gainesville, Florida, 1968), cited hereafter as Godwin, Thoughts, and Godwin, Uncollected
Writings.
² Coleridge’s manuscript marginalia appear in Godwin, Uncollected Writings, 285–7.
Voices from the Common Grave of Liberty 19

generation of liberals and radicals throughout Europe and America.³
However, Coleridge’s early ‘Ode on the Destruction of the Bastile’ reveals
that he too had shared Godwin’s ‘disinterested’ exultation,
I see, I see! glad Liberty succeed
With every patriot Virtue in her train!
(43–4)
—and although they appear to differ in their ideas of revolution, Godwin
and Coleridge shared a common purpose: each wished to explain his
support for the French Revolution in the aftermath of its failure.
Keen to rebuff recent criticism of Political Justice, Godwin invoked the
generous spirit with which it had originally been written: ‘My book, as was
announced by me in the preface, was the child of the French revolution’,
he claimed.⁴ William Hazlitt remembered that when Political Justice first
appeared in February 1793 it was treated as ‘the oracles of thought’, its
author ‘talked of . . . looked up to . . . sought after’ (Howe, xi. 16). Eight
years later the popularity of Godwin’s book had diminished, and he was at
pains to understand why. ‘If the temper and tone in which this publication
has been treated have undergone a change’, Godwin wrote in his pamph-
let, ‘it has been only that I was destined to suffer a part, in the great
revolution which has operated in nations, parties, political creeds, and the
views and interests of ambitious men. I have fallen (if I have fallen) in one
common grave with the cause and love of liberty.’⁵ That ‘great revolution’
in public opinion was impelled by the demise of revolutionary idealism,
French imperial expansion, and hostility to reform in Britain. In The
Prelude Wordsworth dates his own experience of this alteration to the
outbreak of war between France and Britain:
Not in my single self alone I found,
But in the minds of all ingenuous Youth,
Change and subversion from this hour.
(1805, x. 231–3)
The story of that protracted ‘turn of sentiment’ is Wordsworth’s subject in
The Prelude, Books Ten and Eleven. For Coleridge, on the other hand, the
fateful hour of disappointment did not come until February 1798 when
France attacked Switzerland and threatened to invade Britain. That
moment of disillusion is recorded in two poems, ‘France, an Ode’ and
‘Fears in Solitude’, after which Coleridge’s creativity became entangled
³ For the varieties of ‘recoil and retreat’, see the case studies in Johnston, Unusual
Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s.
⁴ Godwin, Thoughts, 2. ⁵ Godwin, Thoughts, 2.

with opium dependence and the unhappiness of his personal life. For
Wordsworth, revolutionary disappointment was to some extent offset by
his rapid advance as a poet; for Coleridge, by contrast, it led to despond-
ency, addiction, and illness. These differing experiences coloured the ways
in which each looked back upon the person he had been.
‘[J]uvenile errors are my theme’, Wordsworth announces a little over
half-way through The Prelude, Book Ten (1805, x. 637), and he was not
the only writer who had once been young. In Newspapers Thirty-Five Years
Ago Charles Lamb recalled his own first ‘boyish heats’ of political aware-
ness ‘kindled by the French Revolution, when if we were misled, we erred
in the company of some, who are accounted very good men now’.⁶ But of
course it only appeared that they had ‘erred’ in retrospect; there had been
no sense of being ‘misled’ at the time. Coleridge’s note in Godwin’s
pamphlet registered this division by acknowledging the welcome for
revolution in 1789 while also pointing out that, years later, another view
might be possible. Elsewhere, Coleridge was less candid about the revolu-
tionary decade. His letter to Sir George and Lady Beaumont of 1 October
1803, for instance, announced that during the 1790s he had been
utterly unconnected with any party or club or society—(& this praise I must
take to myself, that I disclaimed all these Societies, these Imperia in Imperio,
these Ascarides in the Bowels of the State, subsisting on the weakness &
diseasedness, & having for their final Object the Death of that State, whose
Life had been their Birth & growth, & continued to be their sole nourish-
ment—. All such Societies, under whatever name, I abhorred as wicked
Conspiracies—and to this principle I adhered immoveably, simply because it
was a principle . . . (CL, ii. 1001)
Utterly unconnected . . . disclaimed . . . abhorred? Certainly not—and Cole-
ridge never adhered ‘immoveably’ to a principle ‘simply because it was a
principle’. By emphasizing his distance from the popular reform movement
he was defending a position that no one in 1803 would have thought to
challenge; rather than establishing his disconnection from such ‘wicked
Conspiracies’, his letter to the Beaumonts speaks of complicity. Coleridge
was ill, unhappy, and sleepless when writing it, granted; but he was also
misrepresenting his past to his ‘dear Friends’. He repeated his claim to have
been ‘utterly unconnected’ with other reformists in his essay ‘Enthusiasm
for an Ideal World’ in The Friend. ‘I was a sharer in the general vortex’, he
concedes there, ‘though my little world described the path of its revolution
in an orbit of its own’ (Friend, i. 223). Later in this essay Coleridge says that,
⁶ The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas (7 vols; London and New York,
1903–5), ii. 225.
Voices from the Common Grave of Liberty 21

while he rescued himself from ‘the pitfalls of sedition, . . . there were thou-
sands as young and as innocent as myself who, not like me, sheltered in the
tranquil nook or inland cove of a particular fancy, were driven along with
the general current!’ (Friend, i. 224).
In presenting his then beliefs as ‘a particular fancy’ of ‘innocent’ youth,
Coleridge launched himself down the Bishop of Llandaff ’s Slide towards a
disavowal of his past.⁷ In 1817 he used an identical strategy to defend
Southey’s authorship of the recently pirated Wat Tyler, arguing in the
Courier for Southey’s ‘lofty, imaginative, and innocent spirit’ in writing the
play while still ‘a very young man’ (ET, ii. 459).⁸ By so doing Coleridge
contrived to hide the past, but he did so at a cost: he was deliberately
disowning ideas and opinions that had been vital to his intellectual and
creative life, and this inevitably proved damaging. If he had indeed been
‘sheltered’ from the mainstream of British radicalism in the 1790s, there
was no need for his justifications of that ‘immoveable’ position—why
bother, if he had not been involved?
Coleridge’s letter to George Dyer of late February 1795 indicates that
he was very much ‘connected with a party’ at Bristol, and by no means
insulated from the ‘general current’ of political life. ‘The Democrats
are . . . sturdy in the support of me’, he says, ‘but their number is com-
paratively small’; he then goes on to tell Dyer about the ‘scarcely
restrained’ threats of attack at his lectures (CL, i. 152). If one allows a
little exaggeration for Dyer’s benefit, it is nevertheless clear that Coleridge
was a prominent and outspoken figure of Bristol opposition; equally, his
political concerns were not confined to a restricted local ‘orbit’, as he later
pretended in The Friend. In December 1795 one of the ‘chief objects’
announced in his Prospectus to The Watchman was explicitly ‘to
co-operate . . . with the PATRIOTIC SOCIETIES’ in opposing Pitt’s and Gren-
ville’s two ‘Gagging Acts’, and in pressing for ‘a Right of Suffrage general
and frequent’ (Watchman, 5). At this moment ‘PATRIOTIC SOCIETIES’ meant
the London Corresponding Society and its provincial associates in the
popular movement for parliamentary reform—precisely those societies he
later told the Beaumonts he had ‘abhorred as wicked Conspiracies’—and,
to underline the extent of his co-operation and commitment, he set out on
an extensive tour through the industrial boom towns of the Midlands to
raise subscriptions for his new journal.
⁷ E. P. Thompson’s phrase; see ‘Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon’ in

C. C. O’Brien and W. D. Vanech (eds.), Power and Consciousness (London and
New York, 1969), rpt. in Thompson, The Romantics. England in a Revolutionary Age
(Woodbridge, 1997), 71.
⁸ ‘Mr. Southey’, The Courier (18 Mar. 1817).

Fourteen years after Coleridge’s ‘utterly unconnected’ letter to the
Beaumonts, reformists were resurgent following the end of the Napo-
leonic wars: this was the era of Henry Brougham and Leigh Hunt, The
Examiner, the Spa Fields Riots, Peterloo, the Six Acts, and the Cato Street
Conspiracy. Anxious to distance himself from all of this, Coleridge refash-
ioned the past in Biographia Literaria (1817) by claiming that his opinions
in the 1790s had been ‘opposite . . . to those of jacobinism or even of
democracy’ (BL, i. 184). John Thelwall had known Coleridge at the time,
and was utterly astonished when he read this; taking up his pen, he
scribbled in the margin:
that Mr C. was indeed far from Democracy, because he was far beyond it,
I well remember—for he was a downright zealous leveller & indeed in one of
the worst senses of the word he was a Jacobin, a man of blood—Does he
forget the letters he wrote to me (& which I believe I yet have) acknowledg-
ing the justice of my castigation of him for the violence, and sanguinary
tendency of some of his doctrines . . . ⁹
The point at issue here is not whether Mr C’s opinions had been
democratic, levelling, ‘Jacobin’, or ‘sanguinary’, although I shall return
to these matters in Chapter 7. Thelwall’s note is most salutary as a
reminder of letters, lectures, and poems composed during Coleridge’s
radical years that his later accounts in Biographia and elsewhere contrived
to overlook, suppress, or forget.
Wordsworth did not deliberately misrepresent his revolutionary opin-
ions and involvements to the same extent, preferring a strategy of veiled
or ‘uncertain notice’ during years of war, repression, and reaction.¹⁰
Although he had visited France twice, in 1790 and again in 1792, his
commitment to a political life was not as public as Coleridge’s or Thel-
wall’s, nor was it connected with religious dissent.¹¹ Moreover, the emo-
tional arc of Wordsworth’s experiences between 1792 and 1796 (hope,
excitement, dismay, despair) formed a hinterland to the imagined worlds
of Lyrical Ballads (1798) and The Prelude. Wordsworth did not share his
friend’s impulse to disown his past and in Books Six, Nine, and Ten of The
Prelude the age of revolutions and counter-revolutions forms a significant
⁹ B. Pollin and R. Burke, ‘John Thelwall’s Marginalia in a Copy of Coleridge’s

Biographia Literaria’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 74 (1970), 81.
¹⁰ See especially Wordsworth’s ‘poetics of silence’ in John Bugg’s Five Long Winters. The
Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford, 2014).
¹¹ See Peter J. Kitson, ‘Coleridge’s Bristol and West Country Radicalism’, and Anthony
Harding, ‘Radical Bible: Coleridge’s 1790s West Country Politics’, in English Romantic
Writers and the West Country, ed. Nicholas Roe (Basingstoke, 2010), 115–28, 129–51.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Anarchy
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
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you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Anarchy
Author: Robert LeFevre
Release date: November 1, 2023 [eBook #72001]
Language: English
Original publication: Colorado Springs: The Freedom School, 1959
Credits: Bob Taylor, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from images made available by the HathiTrust
Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANARCHY

***
ANARCHY
by Robert LeFevre
Copyright 1959, by Robert LeFevre
Permission to reprint in whole or in part

granted without special request.
PRINTED IN COLORADO SPRINGS, U.S.A.
Published June, 1959
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:

59-13480
THE FREEDOM SCHOOL

P.O. Box 165
Colorado Springs, Colorado
EDITOR’S NOTE
Robert LeFevre, president and founder of the Freedom School, has
also served as the editorial writer for the Gazette Telegraph in
Colorado Springs, since 1954. In addition to several thousand
editorials, he has written numerous articles for the Freeman
Magazine, including: “The Straight Line,” “Jim Leadbetter’s
Discovery,” “Shades of Hammurabi,” “Grasshoppers and Widows,”
and “Coercion at the Local Level.”
His article “Even the Girl Scouts” (Human Events, 1953) led to a
recall of the Handbook of this organization and extensive revisions.
His book, “The Nature of Man and His Government,” has recently
been published by Caxton Printers, Caldwell, Idaho.
ANARCHY
A RATIONAL BEING, intent upon learning the nature of liberty or

freedom, is confronted almost at once with innumerable
instances of governmental predation against liberty.
As the subject of liberty is pursued, the more frequently and the
more persistently the fact emerges that governments have been one
of the principal opponents if not the only principal opponent to liberty.
Invariably, this discovery leads the perspiring seeker after truth to
a fork in the road. Is it possible, the aspirant to libertarian certainty
asks himself, to pursue the end of the rainbow of liberty into a
miasma of quicksand and uncertainty?
Might I not end at a place where I would advocate the cessation of
all government? And if I reached such a conclusion, would I not find
myself aligned with the very forces I sought to oppose in the
beginning, namely, the forces of lawlessness, chaos and anarchy?
At this fork in the road, libertarians hesitate, some briefly and
some for lengthy periods of time. The choice to be made is a difficult
one. To abandon liberty at this juncture and to endorse minimal
governments as devices which might prevent license, could cause
the devotee of liberty to endorse the active enemy of liberty, albeit in
small doses. On the other hand, to pursue liberty to its logical
conclusions might end in an endorsement of license, The very
antonym of liberty.
It is at this juncture that the word “anarchy” rears its dreadful
visage. It becomes incumbent upon sincere seekers after liberty to
grapple with this word and to seek to understand its implications.
Anarchy has very ancient roots. It is not wholly essential to probe
to the last hidden tendril altho such a probe can be highly instructive.
What does appear to be a necessary minimal effort, however, is to
explore at least the principal authors of anarchistic thought with the
view to discovering what it was that motivated these men.
We can begin with William Godwin of England. Godwin is
noteworthy as the “father of anarchistic communism” (Encyclopaedia
Britannica).
In 1793 he published the first of several works on this subject
entitled, “Inquiry Concerning Political Justice.” He is probably most
famous as the author of an anarchistic novel which he named,
“Caleb Williams.”
It was Godwin’s thesis that governments are instruments of eternal
bickering and war; that wars are fought over property; that the
ownership of property privately is the greatest curse ever to beset
the human race. As a specific example of tyranny in its worst form,
Godwin suggests marriage.
Before we lay the soubriquet “crackpot” behind his name, let us
look at the England of Godwin’s time to try to find an explanation for
his radical conclusions.
In Godwin’s day (1756-1836) with only a few minor exceptions, all
property was owned by the nobility, which is to say by the persons
favored by government. The common people owned little save the
shirts on their backs. As for marriage, women were chattels, given by
a male parent to another male, during a governmentally approved
ceremony. The idea of one person actually owning and controlling
another, which we would call slavery, and which Godwin saw as the
marriage state, was repellent to him. He insisted that females were
human beings and as such had as much right to individuality as
males.
To cure the malady, which Godwin saw as ownership of property,
the early Briton recommended an abolition of governments. It was
the government which sanctified and protected property rights, even
in marriage. To return to a state of nature (see Rousseau)
governments would have to be abolished.
Be it noted to Godwin’s credit that he despised violence. And in
this position he is far removed from both the true communist and the
anarchists of action who followed him.
The next anarchist to be examined is Pierre Joseph Proudhon of
Bexancon, France (1809-1865). Proudhon drank deeply from
Godwin’s well and came forward with certain modifications and
extensions of the Godwin doctrine.
Proudhon acknowledged a debt of gratitude to both Plato and
Thomas More, a pair of dedicated socialists (see Plato’s “Republic”
and More’s “Utopia”) and busied himself with some practical means
for implementing the socialist dream.
Like his precursors, he was fundamentally opposed to property
ownership. His most famous work, “Qu’est-ce que La Propriete?”
(“What Is Property?”), got him into immediate difficulties with the
government. Proudhon, in this opus, declared that “property is
robbery” and set about outlining a social order in which no property
could be privately owned.
The Encyclopedia Americana says that Proudhon was the “first to
formulate the doctrines of philosophic anarchism.”
It is probably true that there are no better writings extant extolling
individualism as opposed to collectivism than Proudhon’s early
essays. Yet, it should be recalled that Proudhon’s aim, in addition to
a society free of governmental coercion, was a state in which
property as a private device was abolished.
It is also interesting to recall that Karl Marx was deeply moved by
Proudhon’s arguments. The first of Proudhon’s writings appeared in
print in 1840 and formed the basis of Marx’s first expostulations
which appeared in 1842. Shortly thereafter, Marx veered away from
Proudhon’s individualism and contrived his concept of collectivism as
the natural and the inevitable course of history.
Marx, however, was never an anarchist, despite the well-known
phrase frequently attributed to him that in time the government of the
proletariat would simply “wither away.” This phrase should properly
be attributed to Lenin.
However, it is known that Marx did make an attempt to lure the
anarchists of France into the first “Internationale” and was hooted
down for his pains. The anarchists of that time were shrewd enough
to sense that the enlargement of government into a general holding
company for all property, would never result in the abolition of private
ownership of property. Rather, it would result in the perpetuation of a
privileged class of persons who would have possession of the
property to the exclusion of all others, the very contingency the
anarchists sought to avoid. And since the aim of the anarchists was
to eliminate exclusive ownership, they could not agree to the Marxist
arguments respecting the usefulness of a government as the
repository of all property.
We pass from Proudhon to another noteworthy anarchist, the
Russian Prince Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin (1842-1921). In his
hands, the doctrine of anarchism took on an international aspect. In
point of fact he added little to either Godwin or Proudhon, except the
more grandiose concept of a world order. He suggested that ALL
governments must be overthrown either peacefully or in any other
manner after which “the present system of class privilege and unjust
distribution of the wealth produced by labor that creates and fosters
crime” would be abolished.
It was Kropotkin who endeavored to preserve the ideals of a
property-less society after the most exciting and destructive of all the
anarchists had done his work. This was Michael Bakunin (1814-
1876). Bakunin took his ideology both from Proudhon and from Marx
and endeavored to unite the objectives of the former with the
methods of the latter.
Bakunin despaired of bringing about a state of universal property-
less-ness by means of education and propaganda. So did Marx.
Marx declared that those who owned property would never give it up
without a struggle. This idea entranced Bakunin. He devised what
was to be called “propaganda of action.”
It was Bakunin’s contribution to anarchistic methods that persons
who held governmental offices should be assassinated while they
held office. Such assassination, he argued, would have a persuasive
effect upon future politicians. If the offices could be made sufficiently
dangerous and risky, there would be few who would care to hazard
their necks in such unrewarding positions. The answer to the force of
government, according to Bakunin, was the force of non-
government. As an educational device, a thrown bomb was
considered to be the final argument.
It is unnecessary to embroider the result. The peaceful arguments
of Proudhon and Godwin went by the boards as anarchists rallied to
Bakunin’s banner. Beginning in 1878 there was a series of
assassinations and attempted assassinations against the heads of
governments.
Germany’s Emperor William had a narrow escape and so did the
German princes in 1883. In 1886 in Chicago, a bomb explosion in
the Haymarket killed a number of persons. In the resulting hysteria,
seven arrests were made, all of persons known to be teaching
anarchy. Four were hanged, two drew life sentences, and one was
imprisoned for 15 years. No one to this day is certain who threw the
bomb.
Anarchists were pictured in cartoons as bearded radicals carrying
smoking bombs. President Carnot of France was assassinated in
1894. The Empress Elizabeth of Austria was assassinated in 1898.
King Humber of Italy was assassinated in 1900. President McKinley
was assassinated in 1901.
But Bakunin’s enthusiasm wrecked the anarchist movement
despite all Kropotkin could do to save the fragments. These
excesses, which have even been repeated in modern times, have
had the effect of uniting public opinion against anything that smacks
of anarchy.
There were, of course, other anarchists. Some have credited
Rousseau, and some even Zeno with the actual birth of the idea of a
property-less society. But the four men briefly reviewed here, with
the possible additions of Elisee Reclus and the American, Benjamin
R. Tucker, made the major contributions to anarchist doctrine. There
is no serious cleavage in anarchist ranks.
It is these thoughts which must confront the libertarian as he seeks
to understand the meaning of individualism, liberty, property, and so
on.
But in complete candor, the sincere libertarian cannot be called an
anarchist whichever fork of the road he elects to pursue. It must be
recalled that without exception, anarchists wished to do away with
private ownership of property. Some advocated peaceful means
ending the abolition of government. Some advocated violent means
by destroying politicians in government. But by any yardstick
employed, and whether we are speaking of “philosophic anarchists”
or “anarchistic communists,” the central aim of the anarchist
movement was to eliminate private ownership. The reduction of the
government to zero was simply, to them, a necessary first step.
In contrast, the libertarian is a better economist. From first to last
he is in favor of private ownership. It is, in fact, the abuses of private
ownership inflicted by government which arouse the most ardent
libertarians.
If we take the “communist” anarchists, we are confronted with
violence as a means to abolish private ownership with the abolition
of government as the first step. If we take the “philosophic”
anarchists, we are confronted with essays on individualism and the
desire to do away with private ownership by means of the elimination
of government.
The aim of the anarchist is to eliminate private ownership. The
libertarian is dedicated to the perpetuation and the full enjoyment of
private ownership.
Never could two doctrines be more in opposition.
The most constructive of the anarchists were, socially speaking,
individualists, peaceful and harmless. The least constructive, socially
speaking, were dedicated to the overthrow of force by counter force.
But without exception, in the realm of economics, every anarchist
comes unglazed.
In brief, let us define the anarchist as a political individualist and
an economic socialist. In contrast, the libertarian can be defined as
an individualist, both politically and economically.
As the libertarian approaches or hesitates at the fork in the road,
one direction seems to him to indicate anarchy and the other, an
advocacy of coercion in minor doses. But, on careful analysis, the
branch which seems to carry the banner “anarchy” does no such
thing.
The libertarian, however he mulls over this dilemma to his
progress, is not concerned with government. His concern is with
liberty. He is not opposed to government. He favors freedom. The
libertarian wishes to preserve all human rights, among which and
predominantly among them is the right to own property privately and
to enjoy it fully.
The libertarian is a champion of individualism. He is an advocate
of tools which can perform certain functions for him. He has no
objection to the formation of any kind of tool that will assist him to
protect his rights or his property. But he cannot brook the forceful
compulsive tool which he is compelled to pay for when he has no
use for it.
He has no objection to policemen whose function is solely that of
protection. But he resists the supposition that others know better
than he, how much protection he needs or can afford.
He sees in government a tool of man’s devising. He has no
objection to this tool so long as it is totally responsive to the man
who hires the tool and pays for its use. He does object to the
employment of this tool by some against others in an aggressive
manner, since he is primarily concerned with human liberty and the
preservation of it for all individuals.
But it is destructive of libertarian aims and objectives to label a
seeker after total freedom with the opprobrium of “anarchist.”
Economically speaking, all anarchists are, socialists, however they
may coalesce to the political spectrum. Economically speaking, the
libertarian is an individualist, believing in and supporting the concept
of private ownership, individual responsibility and self-government.
Information about the Freedom School
will be sent on request.
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Wordsworth and Coleridge The Radical Years 2Nd Edition Nicholas Roe All Chapter

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Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical

Years 2nd Edition Nicholas Roe

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

‘And please what’s Hulks?’ said I.

On Tuesday 30 September 1794 the following advertisement appeared

xii Preface, 1988–2018

Unless indicated otherwise, quotations from Wordsworth’s poetry are

2 Wordsworth and Coleridge

4 Wordsworth and Coleridge

⁶ Frend’s speech appears in ‘London Corresponding Society. Meeting in Mary-le-Bone

6 Wordsworth and Coleridge

8 Wordsworth and Coleridge

²² The pamphlet containing the name ‘Citizen Wordsworth’ is London Corresponding

²⁴ Seamus Heaney, ‘Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland’

10 Wordsworth and Coleridge

²⁹ In Memoriam A. H. H. Obiit MDCCCXXXIII, stanza 5 lines 5–6: ‘for the unquiet

12 Wordsworth and Coleridge

³⁰ ‘Salisbury Plain 1793–4 Reading Text’, Gill, 38, lines 541–7.

14 Wordsworth and Coleridge

³⁷ Compare David Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination. The Poetry of Dis-

³⁹ See in particular the group biographies in Kenneth R. Johnston, Unusual Suspects.

16 Wordsworth and Coleridge

I am sure I need not request you not to mention my name in your

¹ William Godwin, Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr Parr’s Spital Sermon

Voices from the Common Grave of Liberty 19

20 Wordsworth and Coleridge

Voices from the Common Grave of Liberty 21

⁷ E. P. Thompson’s phrase; see ‘Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon’ in

22 Wordsworth and Coleridge

⁹ B. Pollin and R. Burke, ‘John Thelwall’s Marginalia in a Copy of Coleridge’s

Author: Robert LeFevre

Release date: November 1, 2023 [eBook #72001]

Original publication: Colorado Springs: The Freedom School, 1959

Credits: Bob Taylor, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANARCHY

Permission to reprint in whole or in part

PRINTED IN COLORADO SPRINGS, U.S.A.

Published June, 1959

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:

THE FREEDOM SCHOOL

A RATIONAL BEING, intent upon learning the nature of liberty or

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

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