‘Adam of a New World’: Lyrical Ballads and The Prelude

Abstract

Tom Paine’s Rights of Man offered the most compelling definition of the French Revolution as ‘a renovation of the natural order of things’: ‘The present generation’, said Paine, ‘will appear to the future as the Adam of a new world’ (RM, ii. 290). In these terms Paine sought to counter Burke’s idea of the revolution as a destructive inversion of the natural order constituted by society: ‘There must be blood for the evil is radical and intrinsic’.¹ As things turned out, the optimism of the early revolution was succeeded by terrorism in France and twenty-three years of war in Europe: ‘The Adam of a new world’ shared the same human weaknesses as Adam of the older world, and this was the melancholy proof of experience which qualified Wordsworth’s memory in Book Six of The Prelude:

France standing on the top of goloden hours,

And human nature seeming born again.

(vi. 353–4)

I had a better guide — that innocent babe

Who to this hour hath saved me from all evil …

The Borderers, III, iii. 110–111.