Letters
Vol. 11 No. 4 · 16 February 1989
From Nicholas Roe
E.P. Thompson’s review of my Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (LRB, 8 December 1988) contains many fascinating speculations about Wordsworth’s revolutionary youth and his Godwinian ‘crisis’. But Thompson’s preoccupation with the book that he claims I ‘intended to write’ has distracted him from the one I have published, which explains his misrepresentation of my argument on several points relevant to his own conjectures.
It would indeed be ‘false’ and rather foolish if I had argued that there was ‘a very considerable Cambridge element’ leading the Corresponding Society solely on the basis of Losh’s and Frend’s membership of one of its committees. Fortunately, however, this is one of Thompson’s inventions. What I do show is that out of 16 men on this particular committee eight had studied at Cambridge University. By way of explaining their presence I trace how, from the 1770s on, radicals and dissenters from Cambridge University provided the intellectual leadership for the democratic reform movement in London. This link helps to explain why, in the 1790s, so many of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s university friends moved in circles associated with the Corresponding Society and with William Godwin, and why the two poets nearly coincided in this company in London late in 1794-5.
As Thompson says, membership of the Corresponding Society was a ‘borderline situation’: a person could attend meetings or speak at the tribune while not formally affiliated to the society. But Thompson might have paused before citing Francis Place as ‘scrupulous’ evidence for his assertion that William Frend was ‘never a member’. John Thelwall was equally well-placed to know, and in his lecture of 1 May 1795 he refers to ‘Citizen Frend [in the belief that] he will be better pleased to be called Citizen than Reverend and Mr’. Frida Knight’s excellent biography of Citizen Frend has Frend as a member of the society and I agree with her.
Thompson is too eager to constrain the reform movement within discrete categories, and to project the careers of Wordsworth and Coleridge along ideal ‘trajectories’. So he claims that ‘not one of the … public reformers … or supporters of the reform societies, were Godwinians’. This begs the question as to what a pure ‘Godwinian’ might have been in 1794-5, but I doubt if this animal (if it ever existed) was only to be found among Thompson’s ‘young radical intelligentsia’. Equally, there is no reason why those young people should not respond to Political Justice and also participate in the reform movement. Thompson implies that because Frend was a Unitarian he was not a ‘Godwinian’, yet oddly enough, Wordsworth first met Godwin at William Frend’s house in February 1795. Are we to believe that the discussion then did not turn to some extent upon Godwin’s writings, and that Frend remained completely unaffected by Godwin’s ideas? It was possible for him to respond favourably to the rational perfectibility of Political Justice (as Coleridge did for a short time) while rejecting Godwin’s atheism. The same point can be made about George Dyer, one of the most active London reformists and a Unitarian to boot, who was also present at Frend’s house and frequently met Godwin on other occasions. The complicated reality of London radicalism appears particularly clearly in the careers of John Binns and Francis Place: both were regularly in Godwin’s company, demonstrably influenced by his thinking, and paid-up members of the Corresponding Society as well.
What we should be seeing, I think, is a vital intersection between the radical intelligentsia and the reform movement, such that Wordsworth, Thelwall, Frend, Place and Binns – among others – could respond to Godwin’s ideas while retaining an active commitment to political change and formal membership of the Corresponding Society. If one accepts this possibility, Thompson’s pother about whether ‘Godwinism = True Radicalism’ becomes irrelevant, and his interpretation of Wordsworth’s ‘climactic crisis’ solely ‘in terms of English thought’ unhelpfully narrow. With one or two side-lights from Crabb Robinson and Basil Montague, Thompson’s version of Wordsworth’s ‘crisis’ is identical to Wordworth’s own in The Prelude and in The Excursion. Both poems idealise an experience which had a lived, historical milieu that I have tried to recover – in this instance, by relating Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s doubts about Godwin to their perception of the French Terror and fears of similar violence in Britain. This was not a matter of the poets’ ‘sudden recoil’ to rural retreat, as Thompson has it, but a drawn-out process of self-interrogation and realignment: only in retrospect could Wordsworth assess Godwin to have been a ‘threat to his vocation’ as a poet. While Thompson objects that my book is ‘encumbered with detail’, his own reading of the poets’ lives as ‘trajectories’ simplified a complex experience that I have deliberately not reduced to ideal patterns.
Finally, it is unfortunate that his last paragraph dismisses all other 20th-century comment on Wordsworth’s revolutionary years in favour of Harper’s 1919 Life of the poet. One hopes Thompson doesn’t include his own work in this wholesale rejection, and he might have added that Harper was indebted to, and admired, the work of Wordsworth’s great French biographer Emile Legouis. Legouis’s Early Life of William Wordsworth (1896) was reissued last year, and his reading of Wordsworth’s Godwinian ‘crisis’ as it appears in The Prelude is in no way challenged or improved by Thompson’s.
Nicholas Roe
University of St Andrews
Vol. 11 No. 5 · 2 March 1989
From E.P. Thompson
No, there wasn’t ‘a very considerable Cambridge element’ leading the London Corresponding Society. This is clear from the Society’s minutes and papers. Nicholas Roe (Letters, 16 February) has found his Cambridge alumni on an ad hoc committee which was set up to raise funds for the victims of the Treason Trials. Probably William Frend, who was certainly a warm supporter of the LCS, helped to get the committee together and drew in several of his Cambridge associates. He was to do the same in the last year of the LCS, when many members were in prison and when Francis Place applied to him for help: ‘He readily undertook to do so and said he would assemble some of his friends … for the purpose.’ The committee had no other role in the Society. It is possible that Frend did join the Society in 1795, although his name has not been found in the minutes or in the lists of any division. His biographer, Frida Knight, says that he did, and so does Albert Goodwin (The Friends of Liberty), but neither offers evidence, whereas Mary Thale in her Selections from LCS papers says that he probably did not (page 329), and offers reasons. Frend seems to have belonged to the Whig Club in January 1796, and was trying, without success, to bring it into a ‘junction’ with the LCS.
I don’t want to make much of all this, although historical evidence, like poetry, requires careful reading. Roe and I agree that in 1795 intellectual reformers (of various hues) and the more plebeian members of the LCS were brushing shoulders with each other. And of course the radical intelligentsia were continually exchanging views with each other, and on some issues making common cause. Roe quotes me as writing that ‘not one of … the public reformers, or supporters of the reform societies, were Godwinians.’ That would be easy to disprove. But what in fact I wrote was: ‘not one of the men who acquired notoriety as public reformers, as active opponents of government, as advocates of peace, friends of France, or supporters of the popular reform societies, were Godwinians.’ These are different statements. Certainly the popular societies included, for a time, enthusiastic readers of Political Justice as well as of works by Paine and Volney. But for many young intellectuals Godwinian philosophy was an alternative to poltical commitment, and it was this ‘abstraction’ which Wordsworth came to reject. The date of Harper’s Wordsworth should be 1929, and not 1919 (as given in my article and Roe’s letter).
E.P. Thompson
Upper Wick, Worcester
Vol. 11 No. 8 · 20 April 1989
From Jenny Graham
E.P. Thompson in his review of Nicholas Roe’s Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (LRB, 8 December 1988) comments on the improbability of the identification of ‘Citizen Wordsworth’ sitting in a tree, in Gillray’s cartoon of the meeting of the London Corresponding Society in Copenhagen Fields on 12 November 1795. Equally improbable is Roe’s surmise that ‘Joseph Priestley appears in the centre forground facing Thelwall.’ Priestley left England for America in April 1794. There seems even less reason why Gillray should depict him in Copenhagen Fields in 1795.
Jenny Graham
Lucy Cavendish College,
Vol. 11 No. 10 · 18 May 1989
From Jonathan Bate
Jenny Graham (Letters, 20 April) dismisses as an improbable surmise the identification by Nicholas Roe in his book Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years of the figure of Joseph Priestley in James Gillray’s 1795 caricature Copenhagen House, on the grounds that Priestley left England for America in 1794. Ms Graham should be informed that Gillray did not care about such details. The figure in the caricature is unquestionably that of Priestley. Furthermore, in 1798 Gillray included in his Anti-Jacobin caricature New Morality representations of both Priestley (he has a paper on ‘Inflammable Air’ in his pocket and ‘Priestley’s Political Sermons’ in his hand) and a pamphlet called ‘Original Letters to Dr Priestley in America’. In caricature you can be in two places at the same time. As for Roe’s supposedly improbable identification of ‘Citizen Wordsworth’ sitting in a tree, that, as E.P. Thompson saw in his original review (‘Perhaps Roe is pulling our leg?’), is a joke. Roe’s point in making it was, I assume, to suggest that Wordsworth remained in the background: since he did not publish his subversive writings, such as ‘A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’, he was not publicly identifiable as a radical in the way that his fellow poets were. In this respect, it is noteworthy that among the Jacobins in New Morality are Southey, Coleridge, Lamb, ‘&Co’ – as Stephen Gill points out in his new biography. ‘& Co’ is Wordsworth.
May I suggest that the correspondence about whether Wordsworth was a Red (under the bed, up a tree, or anywhere else) be closed and one about whether he was a Green be opened? In his review of Geoffrey Hartman’s The Unremarkable Wordsworth, in the same issue, Peter Swaab claims that Wordsworth ‘quite strikingly didn’t’ write ‘proto-ecological poems about a ravished countryside’. What is the ‘Sonnet on the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway’, if not such a poem? (‘Is then no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?’) Or the section in Book Eight of The Excursion concerning ‘changes in the country from the manufacturing spirit’? ‘Where does Wordsworth call to “save” nature, and what would it be to do this?’ Swaab asks. The answer is that Wordsworth made such a call in his most ‘proto-ecological’ text, ‘A Guide to the Lakes’. As for the question of what saving nature would involve, those who established the Lake District Defence Society in the later 19th century took their cue from Wordsworth’s remark in the ‘Guide’ about the Lakes being ‘a sort of national property’: in many ways, it is Wordsworth we have to thank for the National Trust (in its original function as the preserver of land, not its 1930s aberration as the custodian of stately homes) and the National Park system.
Jonathan Bate
Trinity Hall, Cambridge
From Nicholas Roe
I identified the caricature in the foreground of Copenhagen House as Joseph Priestley, given its slight resemblance to the figure that stands at the centre of Gillray’s New Morality cartoon holding a volume labelled ‘Priestley’s Political Sermons’. Jenny Graham asserts that this identification is ‘improbable’, since Priestley had left for America in 1794 and so could not have been at the 1795 meeting depicted by Gillray in Copenhagen House. But she misses the point. Gillray’s purpose was to give the massed London ‘Jacobins’ a recognisable image, and a caricature of the well-known dissenter and reformist enabled him to do so. The matter of Priestley’s emigration is irrrelevant. Mary George’s catalogue of prints in the British Museum lists five cartoon allusions to Priestley between 1795 and 1800. With reference to Copenhagen House, she says that ‘in the centre … with his back to the woman selling drams, is Priestley, caricatured, standing with folded arms facing Thelwall.’ Priestley’s appearance there is an instance of his enduring reputation in English political and intellectual life, and is in no way ‘improbable’
Nicholas Roe
University of St Andrews
Vol. 11 No. 15 · 17 August 1989
From Jenny Graham
Nicholas Roe is entirely correct in asserting that Joseph Priestley exercised, even in exile, a profound influence upon English intellectual life, and that his political stance in the years before he left England was not forgotten (Letters, 18 May). His appearance in Gillray’s cartoon New Morality is in this context entirely understandable. New Morality, however, was above all a cartoon of allegory. Copenhagen Fields was a pictorial representation of an actual event. To compare the two – even making allowances for the conventions of caricature, in which Gillray undoubtedly did indulge with Priestley in 1791 – is, I think, to make a false analogy. Priestley was not even when in England a figure likely to be found at such a gathering: he never, as he wrote, attended ‘any public meeting, if I could decently avoid it’. And although Gillray did, in 1791, depict him at convivial gatherings of radical politicians – which he did attend – his sudden reappearance in Copenhagen Fields, unrecognisable except possibly for the wig and the nose, seems to me still on more than one count improbable.
Gillray’s depiction of Priestley in the earlier cartoons of the 1790s consistently captures the expression of many of his portraits – in particular, those by Artaud and Fuseli. It is one of alert, quizzical, playful, slightly demoniac intelligence, and it is hard to reconcile it with the expression of sullen and inert gloom which characterises the figure standing so prominently in front of Thelwall. Even as a symbolic figure this is a depiction of Priestley which it is hard to recognise, and it is perhaps worth pointing out that Grego, in his detailed study of Gillray, while identifying – I think rightly – several of the members of the Foxite opposition in the background of the cartoon, makes no identification of Priestley. The Priestley depicted by Gillray in New Morality, by contrast, still has the features of the earlier cartoons. That this is Priestley there can be no doubt, and the resemblance, as Nicholas Roe does admit, to the figure in Copenhagen Fields is ‘slight’. This, I would argue, is the only certain depiction by Gillray of Priestley after his emigration: all other allusions to him are to his works only. It was moreover surely prompted by Cobbett’s publication of the compromising correspondence from Hurford Stone in Paris, which made Priestley in the summer of 1798 once more a figure of some notoriety. In 1795, however, as the absence of other allusions to him at this time suggests, he had effectively left the English political scene.
Jenny Graham
Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge
Vol. 11 No. 18 · 28 September 1989
From Nicholas Roe
Jenny Graham is right to point out that Priestley’s appearance in Copenhagen House is historically inaccurate in that he was living in America by 1795 (Letters, 17 August). But as Jonathan Bate shows (Letters, 18 May), his presence in Gillray’s cartoon is understandable as imaginative caricature. Gillray was not offering a ‘pictorial representation’ of the Corresponding Society as a factual image of the event, although a number of individuals known to have attended the mass meeting do appear in the cartoon. Priestley’s sullen, saturnine figure is, as Ms Graham says, at odds with Gillray’s earlier and comparatively vital likenesses of him. In Copenhagen House he appears at the focal point of the cartoon, but as a spectator ab extra. His figure is a reminder that – as Ms Graham says – ‘Priestley exercised, even in exile, a profound influence upon English intellectual life’; his rueful detachment is congruent with his forced retreat abroad.
That Gillray’s likeness of Priestley should be ‘unrecognisable except possibly for the wig and the nose’, as Jenny Graham puts it, is wholly unsurprising. How else does she think caricature works?
Nicholas Roe
University of São Paulo, Brazil
