Five Long Winters

The Trials of British Romanticism

John Bugg

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780804787307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book argues that the British government's repression of the 1790s rivals the French Revolution as the most important historical event for our understanding the development of Romantic literature. Romanticism has long been associated with both rebellion and escapism, and much Romantic historicism traces an arc from the outburst of democratic energy in British culture triggered by the French Revolution to a dwindling of enthusiasm later in the 1790s, when things in France turned violent. Writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge can then be seen as "apostates" who turned from radical politics to a poetics of transcendence. Bugg argues instead for a poetics of silence, and his book is set against the backdrop of the so-called Gagging Acts and other legislation of William Pitt, which in literature manifests itself stylistically as silence, stuttering, fragmentation, and encoding. Mining archives of unpublished documents, including manuscripts, diaries, and letters, where authors were more candid, as well as rereading the work of both major and minor figures, a number of whom were subject to prison sentences, Five Long Winters offers a new way of approaching the literature of the Romantic era.

CHAPTER ONE

Plots Discovered

Coleridge, Godwin, and the 1795 Gagging Acts

Be padlocks plac’d on ev’ry BRITON’s tongue.

—Peter Pindar, The Convention Bill (1795)

Mr. Pitt is determined that there shall be no discontent. At least he is determined, that discontent shall not declare itself, and that no clamours shall be heard. He shuts up every avenue, of open consulting, of political publications, and of private conversation.

—Godwin, Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills (1795)

Truth should be spoken at all times, but more especially at those times when to speak Truth is dangerous.

—Coleridge, Conciones ad Populum (1795)

In late 1795 speaking truth became especially dangerous. Over four centuries earlier a treason law had been established—25 Edward III (1351)—to protect the monarchy from armed attacks, particularly attempts at usurpation. This broad law remained in effect until 1795, when the Pitt ministry launched a legislative strike on printed and spoken discourse. The government claimed good reason for rewriting the treason law. On 29 October 1795, a riotous mob greeted the king on his way to parliament and in the commotion a window in his carriage was shattered. The loyalist press was quick to report the event as an attempted assassination and to demand a legislative reaction. A pamphlet titled A Warning Voice to the People of England broadcast that “the nation,” in response to the tumult, has “called upon the powers of government to relieve the public mind, to exert the due authority of law.”¹ A week later, the Treasonable and Seditious Practices and Assemblies bills appeared in answer to this orchestrated outcry, redefining “treason” from an act of war to an act of culture.² The country took notice. The revolution in the relationship between law and culture that the legislation threatened triggered a singular moment, what E. P. Thompson has called “the last, and greatest, period of popular agitation.”³

The six weeks between the introduction of the Gagging Acts and their royal assent (6 November–18 December) saw a flood of essays, poems, satirical prints, speeches, petitions, and newspaper reports. Contributions to the debate included Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s impassioned The Plot Discovered; or, An Address to the People Against Ministerial Treason, John Thelwall’s urgent lectures, William Godwin’s deftly calculated Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills, the satirical verses of Peter Pindar (John Wolcot), and the strikingly radical cartoons of James Gillray and others.⁴ Uniting this panorama, the legislation’s galvanizing jolt recalls the effect, a half decade earlier, that Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France had on radical voices.⁵ Burke, however, regarded British radicals as no more than “half a dozen grasshoppers” who issued an “importunate chink,” and if they made “the field ring,” it was not enough to call down legislation to silence them.⁶ The 1795 Gagging Acts were another matter. The statute targeted those who traded in language.

The Gagging Acts underwrote by threat of death the broader program of surveillance and prosecution that the Pitt ministry pursued across the 1790s, and the immense response to the new laws indicates that they were viewed as the most chilling of the ministry’s juridical strikes. This chapter examines the strategies that writers used to engage the Gagging Acts and the tropology that emerged as they began to figure a culture of enforced silence. At the heart of what follows are two remarkable documents of oppositional engagement, Godwin’s Considerations and Coleridge’s The Plot Discovered. In order to warn the country about the Gagging Acts, Coleridge left his place of retirement in Somerset to return to political activism in Bristol. By 1795 he had already read widely in Locke, Berkeley, Thomas Reid, Lord Monboddo, and John Horne Tooke with interest in the natural language debate, but the government’s effort to legislate the boundaries of discursive possibility turned Coleridge’s focus to the constitutive relationship between language and community, a turn that had a lasting influence on his work.⁷ Coleridge’s writings of late 1795 begin to establish the coordinates for his later theologically inflected sociolinguistic theory, as the young writer and lecturer addressed the profound threat of the Gagging Acts. Godwin, still smarting from ministerial animosity to Political Justice (1793) and especially Cursory Strictures (1794), found the calculated ambiguity of the new legislation particularly alarming: “There is no case to which this bill may not be stretched,” he warns in Considerations, “there is no offence, present or future, definite or indefinite, real or fictitious, that it may not be made to include” (137). Godwin’s Considerations counters this elasticity with a slippery rhetoric of resistance, drawing on strategies that evoke his novel of the previous year, Caleb Williams.

Coleridge and Godwin shared a sense that the threat was most blatant in the government’s plan to monitor all discourse, public and private. They warned of the isolation and social degeneration that would result—Coleridge foresaw a vibrant nation hushed into “deathlike silence” (PD, 289). Given this funereal forecast, it is no surprise that challenges to the acts recruited gothic rhetoric: “[T]he cadaverous tranquility of despotism,” shuddered Coleridge, will smother the country, and “the black moveless pestilential vapour of slavery will be inhaled at every pore” (289). More remarkable, however, is that the Gagging Acts also introduced Britons to William Pitt’s gothic period. If by 1797 the Canning circle at the Anti-Jacobin (with Pitt’s support) was reveling in satire, in 1795 Pitt preferred the tropes and tricks of the popular gothic, particularly the narrative dynamics of secrecy and revelation. In his presentation of the Gagging Acts, Pitt was writing a gothic tale in juridical drag, and no trope generated so enticing a narrative as secrecy.

Secret Designs

They for the most part avoided keeping papers for fear of discovery, and they used cyphers or mysterious words in the few writings that passed between them.

—An Account of the Present English Conspiracy Taken From the Report of the Secret Committee

The rhetoric of secrecy that fueled Pitt’s proposal harnessed a broad contemporary interest in surveillance and privacy, a preoccupation that emerged across several literary genres. The atmosphere of Eliza Fenwick’s novel Secresy; or, the Ruin of the Rock (1795) is cued, for example, by an epigraph from Twelfth Night: “Disguise! I see thou art a Wickedness, / Wherein the pregnant Enemy does much.” Writers slipped the word onto title pages: A Secret History was the subtitle of Ann Yearsley’s 1795 historical novel The Royal Captives, playwright Thomas Morton deployed hidden documents and overheard dialogue in Secrets Worth Knowing (1798), and enterprising printers exhumed religious pamphlets from the seventeenth century that dwelt on secrecy, such as Rev. John Corbet’s Self-Employment, in Secret, which J. Ferraby reprinted in 1795.⁸ The politics of this gothic lexicon come into sharp focus in James Boaden’s play, The Secret Tribunal, which premiered at Covent Garden on 3 June 1795.⁹ In the central action, heroine Ida faces the Wirtemberg “Tribunal,” to whom the fate of anyone, we are told, may be consigned. Because the play’s depiction of state repression clearly echoes the fraught atmosphere of the 1794 treason trials, an indemnifying prologue was retrofitted to remind audiences that the scene of tyranny is fifteenth-century Germany, no matter how familiar things may seem. “Britain! rejoice!—The envied pow’r is Thine,” playgoers are assured,

To punish malice, and to thwart design.

Open as day our Courts judicial move,

And RICH or POOR their equal influence prove;

REJOICE! Your UPRIGHT JURIES make you free,

Bulwarks of FAME, of LIFE and LIBERTY.¹⁰

This is either utopian ideal or heavy sarcasm in Pitt’s Britain, and the lines strain under the political burden they are asked to support. Even as the notion of “thwart[ing] design” evokes announcements of foiled republican plots, the praise of “UPRIGHT JURIES” cheers the system that helped secure acquittals in the 1794 trials.¹¹ But the boast that “Open as day our Courts judicial move” cannot help but accuse present-day Britain. With the suspension of habeas corpus on 23 May 1794, prominent reform leaders were imprisoned without trial, and the terror of juridical obliquity amplified the suffering. “We are no longer Freemen,” warns Coleridge in Conciones ad Populum, using a reiterated first person plural to indicate a shared crisis:

It is an insult to tell us that we cannot suffer Death at the pleasure of a Minister, as is the case under arbitrary Governments—Suffer death! we can be torn from the bleeding breast of domestic affection—we can be thrown into foul and damp dungeons—we can hear of the death of a dearly loved Wife, heartbroken by our Imprisonment—till overpowered by disease and wounded sensibilities we sink into the Grave.¹²

Coleridge’s scenario of violence, extreme pathos, and the violation of sentimental domesticity is no less dramatic than Boaden’s Secret Tribunal. Whether in fifteenth-century Germany or Coleridge’s Britain, the government may invade homes, destroy families, and end lives at the “pleasure of a Minister”—for Coleridge and many others, Britain’s legal system was hardly as “Open as day.”¹³

Coleridge’s gothic idiom sounds the fear felt across the country as surveillance and prosecution became synonymous with the ministry. Private correspondence was routinely perlustrated, and in some cases the government went much further. In May 1794, agents raided the homes of several reform leaders, confiscating their papers and books. Along with his entire library, Thelwall lost several works still in draft. “Every manuscript was seized,” he would later report, “upon whatever subject—Poems, Novels, Dramas, Literary and Philosophical Dissertations, all the unpublished labours of ten years’ application.”¹⁴ This surveillance of public and private discourse was pervasive and unrelenting. “Every coffee-house is filled with party hirelings and venal associators,” Thelwall warned, while

anonymous letters are sufficient to blast the peace and destroy the personal security of the best and worthiest members of the community. . . . [E]ven your own house and your own table furnish no longer a sanctuary and an altar where it is safe to offer the free incense of friendly communication [and] the very domestic who eats your bread stands open-mouthed, perhaps, behind your chair to catch and to betray the idle conversation of your unguarded moments;—when every skreen conceals some myrmidon of oppression, lurking, like a beast of prey.¹⁵

From the hearth and beyond, no one is safe from surveillance. This panoptical warning is not hyperbole: Thelwall cites the example, among many others, of the satirist Charles Pigott, who was imprisoned, with fatal consequences, for a coffee house utterance.¹⁶ Appalled by the fate of those such as Pigott, and alert to infiltration by government agents, the corresponding societies felt besieged by what Thelwall referred to as the ministry’s “system of Spies and Informers.” “System” is an apt term here, for the modern concept of a centrally coordinated network of salaried spies was coming into shape in the mid-1790s, following an important change in governmental structure. In 1794, the War Office took over foreign intelligence work, allowing the Home Office to concentrate on domestic security.¹⁷ And espionage paid well: when the pursuit of treasonous or seditious activity was at issue, the Secret Service fund was an open coffer, so that from the 1780s to the mid-1790s its expenditures soared seven hundred percent.¹⁸ Amidst a failing economy, famine, and war, domestic spying was a boom industry in 1790s Britain.

As an indication of the modernity of this system, the phrase “His Majesty’s Secret Service” makes its first appearance in 1799 (the earliest mention of the organization that would develop into the MI5).¹⁹ By this time, William Wickham could hail domestic espionage as a point of national pride:

It would be sufficient for Your Grace to take Mr. Pitt for one half hour only into the Office and shew him the different Official Books, Secret as well as Public. . . . A mind like his could not fail to see that without bustle, noise, or anything else that can attract Public Attention, Government possesses here the most powerful means of Observation and Information, as far as their Objects go, that ever was placed in the Hands of a Free Government,—that in observing Foreigners resident here, much curious information respecting the ill intentioned of Our Countrymen and Concerning Foreigners resident abroad, has been, and must continue to be indirectly obtained.²⁰

Wickham not only puts this information on display for the prime minister, but also implies that the system is validated by Pitt’s own surveillance: he is the über-surveyor whose authority justifies the entire structure. Wickham had good cause for claiming that Pitt would commend the Alien Office’s work, for secrecy’s appeal to the prime minister was public knowledge. Pitt was accused of “establishing a system of espionage, arming the mind of each man against his neighbor,” and of using “his agents” to torment those who “raise their voices against his measures.”²¹ The first minister’s surveillance even rattled a few Tories, such as Lord Garlies (John St...