Criticism in Context, 1797–8

Abstract

1798 was a year of violent political ferment, local as well as national. The Marxist critic E. P. Thompson reveals an England not only ‘engaged in a war of national defence’ but ‘suppressing Irish rebellion with a ferocity which outdistances the French terror’. Wordsworth and Coleridge were all too aware of its local manifestations — the creation of a new volunteer corps to defend the Somerset coast, which meant that ‘even the lanes around Stowey and Alfoxden resounded with tramping feet’ (1969, p. 167). That radicals were now under suspicion may explain the dearth of explicit political comment in Lyrical Ballads. The pacifist sentiments of ‘The Female Vagrant’ (1791–2) find only a muted echo in ‘Old Man Travelling’ (1798) and disappear entirely from the other Alfoxden contributions. Yet Browning’s later slur, that the ‘lost leader’ turned Tory ‘just for a handful of silver’, is a long way from the facts of 1798. Critics are agreed that what the friends were turning their backs on were Jacobinism, Godwinian necessity, narrow sectarianism of any kind. In a self-consciously phrased letter of 10 March, Coleridge confessed, ‘I have snapped my squeaking baby-trumpet of Sedition and the fragments lie scattered in the lumber-room of Penitence. I wish to be a good man and a Christian, but I am no Whig, no Reformist, no Republican’ (CL, I, 238).