The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age [Hardcover]

E. P. Thompson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 1997

The last of three volumes of E.P. Thompson's work to be published posthumously continues the author's examination of the turbulent 1790s through literary works of the time. Thompson traces the intellectual influences and societal pressures that gave rise to the English Romantic movement including the French Revolution. A fitting close to an extraordinary career.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This is the last volume of essays from the pen of English social historian Thompson (Witness Against the Beast, New Pr., 1993), a scholar of exceptional acuity and a graceful writer who died in 1993. The essays here?on Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the reformers William Godwin and William Thelwall?focus on the 1790s and early 1800s, when their subjects confronted the gap between the high ideals of the French Revolution and the sordid reality of a self-seeking Directorate and tyrannical Napoleon. Wordsworth, argues Thompson, was invigorated by his republican faith in "the worth of the common man...in universal brotherhood." In a lecture to an adult education class, Thompson, championing the common man, asserts: "Universities engage in adult education not only to teach but also to learn;...[they] need the abrasion of different worlds of experience, in which ideas are brought to the test of life." An illuminating work; enthusiastically recommended.?David Keymer, California State Univ., Stanislaus
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

The many longtime admirers of Thompson (Making History, 1994, etc.)--and any serious lovers of the past at its most vividly and subtly resuscitated--should slowly savor this last posthumous publication of his work. The somewhat misleadingly broad title must be a relic of the larger project on romantic literature on the threshold of the 19th century, of which this book was to be a part. Another part was published as the Blake study Witness Against the Beast in 1993. This volume comprises a miscellany of lectures, book reviews, and essays, collected by the author's widow, all of them loosely centered on the political vicissitudes of Wordsworth and Coleridge during the political and social upheavals of the 1790s, and their various relationships with lesser-known dissenting thinkers and agitators like William Godwin and John Thelwall. While readers unfamiliar with either the historical chronology or the poets' careers will have to piece together a makeshift picture of what's going on, it should be a pleasure to do so. Thompson draws on his obviously vast knowledge and legendary narrative brio to rescue a sense of the political, intellectual, and personal tensions in which the poets worked from the arid scholarship that would separate their poetry and politics, at the expense of both. The final long essay on Thelwall suggests the kind of dramatic synthesis a fully completed study would likely have achieved, using the life story of this rebellious poet and public speaker to plunge into the thick of radical politics in the 1790s--and to illustrate the journey of his sometime friends Wordsworth and Coleridge from revolution to disenchantment and ``apostasy,'' culminating with their role in Thelwall's eventual political and intellectual extinction. Thompson's work offers a perfect unity of history and literature, fulfilling the rich promise of his terse command for the historian's reading discipline--``these words in this context.'' -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 225 pages
• Publisher: New Press, The (August 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565843606
• ISBN-13: 978-1565843608
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,049,400 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Salmagundi of Lectures and Reviews on English Romantics, August 30, 2011

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A Certain Bibliophile (San Antonio, Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age (Paperback)

E. P. Thompson, perhaps best known for his "The Making of the English Working Class," and his posthumous book-length treatment of the poetry of William Blake titled "Witness Against the Beast," planned a comprehensive - and possibly multi-volume - treatment of English Romantic poetry. Unfortunately, he only got a chance to sketch the plan for the project before he passed away in 1993. This volume, "The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age," then represents not Thompson's complete vision, or even anything close to it, but is rather a compilation of some preliminary ideas collected by Thompson's wife (a fine historian in her own right, but not of the English Romantics), which constitute about one-fourth of the material of the book. The rest consists of extended book reviews that, while integrating a lot of the relevant history that certainly would have been included in Thompson's completed book, fail to contribute to the overarching thesis that Thompson seemed to set out in the first couple of essays.

The weakest parts of the book were the reviews, which were really tied together by nothing other than the fact that they concerned the figures involved in the lives of either Coleridge or Wordsworth, and influenced their ideas about and reactions to the French Revolution. William Godwin and John Thelwall are two of the most prominent of these figures, who are of no small amount of historical interest. However, I would imagine that the average reader of this book would not likely be interested in reading Mark Philp's seven-volume edition of the "Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin," and might feel genuinely miffed that reviews like these make up the majority of the book. To make matters worse, the words "book review" are mentioned nowhere on the inside flaps or back cover of the book.

But there are a couple of pieces that save this book from being completely uninteresting to the average reader. The first piece, "Education and Experience," is a convincing if somewhat truncated argument asserting that Wordsworth's poetry tried to bridge the gap between the educated gentry and the common man, elevating pure experience as the true metric of education. Thompson argues that education prior to the 1790s was practically synonymous with social control, and that a so-called classroom of experience could be liberating. Of course we recognize this viewpoint now as one of the cynosures of Romantic thought, but it was radically new in the last decade of the eighteenth century.

In the second piece, "Disenchantment or Default?," Thompson discusses the role of what he calls disenchantment (being critical of former positions, politics, and opinions generally) versus apostasy (the total and utter disavowal of said positions). He says that disenchantment can enhance poetry, while the completeness of apostasy ruins it, often turning the poet into a cynic, which is what I take it to mean when he says, "There is a tension between a boundless aspiration - for liberty, reason, egalite, perfectibility - and a peculiarly harsh and unregenerate reality. So long as that tension persists, the creative impulse can be felt. But once the tension slackens, the creative impulse fails also." Thompson insinuates that this might have happened to Wordsworth, and that it certainly happened to Coleridge. The title of the last piece, "Hunting the Jacobin Fox," refers to the political radical John Thelwall and his relationships with Wordsworth and Coleridge, and their subsequent repudiation of his political positions.

During the years leading up to his death, Thompson was passionately involved in worldwide nuclear disarmament. I suppose some of us think that the eradication of atomic weapons is more important than 1790s England. While I too share this sentiment, I secretly found myself wishing that he would have used the down time between delivering polemics against Reagan's Star Wars program to sketch some crib notes on our beloved Lake Poets.