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Synopsis
Thompson galvanized audiences in New York and in England with his unique blend of historical analysis and literary acuity as he examined the turbulent 1790s through the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft, and that of such less well-known authors as William Godwin and John Thelwall. Prepared for publication by his widow, Dorothy Thompson, The Romantics contains all of E. P. Thompson's original texts and notes, as well as an overview of the ideas behind his study of the period. Combining a historian's intimate knowledge of contemporary politics with a close and sympathetic reading of the writings themselves, Thompson traces the intellectual influences that gave rise to the English Romantic movement, and examines the societal pressures - paternalism, authoritarianism, respect for tradition, and the French Revolution - that informed it.
Publishers Weekly
Thompson, the British social historian, author of Making of the English Working Class and anti-nuclear activist, died in 1993, but, as his wife says in her foreword, he had done work toward two large studies. He died before he could start organizing his study of the romantics in the 1790s. British radicalism burned brightly in the years after the French Revolution, until the Treason Trials of 1794 and the 1795 passage of the Two Acts began curtailing Jacobin demagogues. Thompson focuses on four figures with varying success. Coleridge and William Godwin are approached primarily in book reviews that are less satisfying. But John Thelwall and Wordsworth are treated in longer, more rounded essays. The 1968 lecture on Wordsworth traces the poet's political and artistic evolution particularly in 1794-1796 but he also makes a larger point: "There is nothing in disenchantment inimical to art. But when aspiration is actively denied, we are at the edge of apostasy, and apostasy is a moral failure, and an imaginative failure." In contrast, the paper on Thelwall recounts the speaker's continued political drive despite harassment and very real danger of kidnapping, or worse. Edited collections like these often have problems, and this has its share. There are redundancies and gaps that are perhaps inevitable, but other lacunae (e.g., one work is identified as by "professor Erdman," presumably David) could have been easily corrected. (Sept.)