Conclusion

Abstract

The period that I have argued was so distinctive was a short one. It lasted for two years: from the Peterloo massacre in August 1819 to the funeral of Queen Caroline in August 1821. That this was a period of crisis seemed as much to a radical poet, such as Shelley, as to a high Tory, like Robert Southey: ‘It is no longer a question between Ins and Outs, nor between Whigs and Tories. It is between those who have something to lose, and those who have everything to gain by a dissolution of society.’¹ The crisis resulted in a victory as swift as it was complete for those who had something to lose. The power of a tiny ruling class, the land-owning aristocracy, was violently ratified; the Peterloo demonstrators were routed, the Cato Street conspirators were either executed or transported and Caroline was ejected from the Abbey. For more than a century, through three carefully orchestrated parliamentary reforms at the end of which universal male suffrage had been all but secured, this class managed to maintain its hegemony. Yet, in this time-frame, poetry and politics became interlinked, as disparate groups of poets struggled to intervene in the representation of major political events. Conceptions of literary stratification, what constitutes ‘high’ and ‘low’ poetry, became undermined as a new kind of writing emerged that became classless in its form.