Some of the roots of pro-social behavior, of which caring and compassion are forms, are from the evolution of parental investment and caring (Brown & Brown, 2015; Fogel, Melson, & Mistry, 1986; Gilbert, 1989/2016, 2009; Mayseless, 2016; Preston, 2013; Seppälä, Simon-Thomas, Brown, Worline, Cameron, & Doty. (2017)). There are a number of different dictionary definitions of caring. A typical one is “the provision of what is needed for the well-being or protection of a person or thing” (www.dictionary.com/browse/caring). Fogel, Melson, and Mistry (1986) suggested that the core elements of care-nurturance are “The provision of guidance, protection and care for the purpose of fostering developmental change congruent with the expected potential for change of the object of nurturance” (p. 55).

The Hurricane and its Notes

By word-count alone the notes to The Hurricane take up nearly three-quarters of the total contents of the book; the notes are not subordinate but an essential part of a work that combines verse and prose in the hybrid form known as prosimetric. Well-known examples of this genre in European literature include Dante's Vita Nuova and Il Convivio, in which Dante combined his own poems with extended philosophical commentary and narrative to create a wider frame within which the poems were set. Thomas Blount's Glossographia of 1656 is cited by OED as the first English work to use the term ‘prosimetricall’ as a name for this mixed form.

The practice of adding notes to poems burgeoned during the Romantic era. By 1825 Xavier de Maistre felt that this had gone too far and joked about having made a good preparation toward writing a poem by accumulating ‘five hundred pages of notes, which comprise, as everyone knows, all the merit, and fill out all the bulk, of most modern poems’. Robert Southey delighted in adding notes to his epics (the example of Thalaba has already been noted); these are usually quotations from his exotic source material that it seems he could not resist sharing with the reader. Shelley's Queen Mab: a Philosophical Poem, with Notes (1813) is closer to Gilbert's ‘theosophical’ Hurricane in style, propounding its author's convictions in the unrestrained way that private publication makes possible. Shelley's notes – while not reaching Gilbertian proportions – take up as much space as his nine-canto poem, and are intended to support its philosophical message.

If Gilbert was following a precedent in his use of this form in the mid-1790s, the influence is likely to be Erasmus Darwin's The Economy of Vegetation, part one of The Botanic Garden (1791). Darwin's extensive notes sometimes amounted to wholly independent essays, and Gilbert's references to Darwin's book in his own Hurricane notes show how closely he had read it (HN §17).

Gilbert was back in Bristol by May 1795. One possible link with the city was his Aunt Grace, who had moved there in 1792. She was married to one Captain Thomas Webb, who had lost an eye and nearly died in the 1759 battle for Quebec. With his eye-patch and military bearing he cut a striking figure as a lay Methodist, preaching in full uniform ‘with his drawn sword laid across the pulpit cushion’. Although approaching seventy and plagued by gout, he initiated fundraising towards the building of a Methodist chapel in the new residential area of Kingsdown on the slopes above the city, where he and Grace lived (Bates, pp. 32–3). Grace's surviving letters make no mention of William, whose revolutionary zeal and leanings towards occultism might be viewed as putting him at odds with these pillars of local Methodist society. The Methodist Arminian Magazine had, after all, printed in 1793 a disapproving account of what it called John Henderson's ‘reprehensible […] knowledge of the occult sciences of Magic and Astrology!’

However, such divisions were by no means clear cut: Captain Webb, according to a dinner guest, would describe the angels he had seen and his converse with spirits. The ex-Methodist bookseller James Lackington commented in 1791, the year of John Wesley's death, that many Methodists were defecting to the recently formed Swedenborgian church, which was then ‘gaining ground very fast’. Lackington's dismissal of this migration as ‘the fondness of mankind for novelty, and the marvellous’ (p. 291), reflects his own disenchantment: the appeal of Methodism had been, in its early days, the promise of religious experience, a ‘claim to extraordinary revelations of powers from the Holy Spirit’ that the established church had condemned as ‘enthusiasm’. As Methodism settled into respectability, such experiences were no longer courted or encouraged, and some members felt that to be a loss. Gilbert, although not formally a member of the Swedenborgian church, seems to have had a foot in both camps: while in Bristol, he acted as an intermediary for a local Methodist who was attracted to Swedenborg's writings, and wanted to know what other Methodists in Shropshire, with whom Gilbert had family connections, thought of them.

A Strange Poem

A ‘strange poem’ indeed: a poem set in the Caribbean, which starts with the unseen effects of the European invasion of America that followed Columbus's voyage of discovery. The natives slaughtered by these European invaders have gathered as spirits beneath the sea, patiently plotting their revenge. Gradually, over 300 years, they have taken over the bodies of successive generations of European invaders until they rebel against Europe and, as Americans, establish the first state to have Liberty and the Rights of Man enshrined in its constitution. This freedom is now spreading back to Europe, and the old despotic order is being swept away. Like John on Patmos, our poet–seer on the Caribbean island of Antigua is given a vision of this impending change and rebirth, which is magically aligned to the action of a hurricane that turns toward Europe to inspire revolution, first in France and next (he hopes) in England.

William Gilbert published this poem, The Hurricane: a Theosophical and Western Eclogue, in Bristol in 1796. To be in Bristol in the second half of the 1790s was to be present at the beginning of English Romantic poetry. Introduced by their publisher Joseph Cottle, Gilbert was soon on intimate terms with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and William Wordsworth, who were all impressed enough by his poem to praise it, quote from it, adopt imagery from it, and promote it on his behalf.

Wordsworth, quoting a long extract from Gilbert's extensive notes to The Hurricane, praised it as ‘one of the finest passages of modern English Prose’. Southey called Gilbert ‘a man of brilliant genius’, and admired The Hurricane's ‘passages of exquisite beauty’. Coleridge published a short fragment of selected lines from The Hurricane in his periodical The Watchman, six months before the whole poem appeared in print. When it was published, Coleridge – evidently charged with distributing copies by mail – gave a striking profile of its author in a covering letter:

The Problem with Allegory

Chapter 6 looked at Gilbert's structure of Hermetic geography, the underlying metaphysical scheme of The Hurricane. This interaction of the continents is also represented in what Jonathan Wordsworth has described as its ‘complicated, only-partly-construable […] allegoric narrative’. The mystery of this narrative particularly concerns Elmira, the somewhat ambiguous girl (or young woman), described as a ‘form Divine’ (II: 49–50). Elmira is at first sight an ideal love object appearing in answer to the narrator's prayers (I: 138–41), but the narrator's descriptions of her exceed the normal hyperboles of romantic love, and the suspicion that Elmira is more spirit or angel than human is confirmed when she undergoes a transformation at the end of the poem, and her ascendancy seems to match the development of America the fourth continent as it becomes a triumphant revolutionary force. This is confirmed by the way the American element of air is prominent at the end of the poem, when Elmira emerges reborn from the shelter:

In this passage, the ocean (water: Europe), which drowned Elmira's mother, is defeated by air (the hurricane: America) and becomes the ‘conquered ocean’. Elmira, identified with air (‘through the Isle and air she lives’), is the renewed spirit of America, who has now gained a mysterious god-like supremacy.

The narrative of the poem can be briefly summarised. It begins by describing the European invasion of the Americas, and how the spirits of the natives, slaughtered and subjugated by the invaders, have gathered beneath the sea, building up power that will rebalance the injustice they have suffered. Now arrived at their full strength, they rise up into the air as elemental forces that are to form a hurricane, the signs of whose coming are clear to anyone who knows what to look for.

The Watchman

The most immediate signs of Coleridge's intimacy with ‘poor Gilbert’ are two pieces of Gilbert's writing that appeared in The Watchman, the periodical ‘miscellany’ that Coleridge published every eighth day (thus avoiding a tax on weekly newspapers) between March and May 1796. The Watchman was intended as part of the concerted opposition to the Two Bills that threatened to ban political protest as ‘Treasonable Practices’ or ‘Seditious Meetings’; but these ‘gagging’ Bills became law before The Watchman appeared in print. Hence Coleridge's first essay shied away from direct opposition and talked of ‘the diffusion of that general knowledge which should be the basis or substratum of politics’ (p. 14), an approach that shows remarkable consistency with his later writings.

Gilbert's essay ‘The Commercial Academic: No. I’ by ‘Mr. G—rt’ appeared in The Watchman, V: 2 April 1796. It was first attributed to Gilbert by Lewis Patton (Watchman, pp. 168–72). The strutting barrister rhetoric has enough in common with Gilbert's prose style to give credibility to Patton's attribution. Its topic, macroeconomics, may seem a surprising departure from the macrocosmal astrology Gilbert had been propounding in London, but it certainly proves Cottle's point about Gilbert delighting in argument. Coleridge's praise is qualified (Gilbert's ‘reasonings are perhaps not unimpregnably solid’) but he has a periodical to fill, is hungry for contributions, and a regular series has been promised: ‘The Editor returns his grateful acknowledgements to Mr. G—rt for the following Essay, and will anxiously expect the remaining Numbers’ (p. 168). No further numbers appeared.

Although this is nowhere stated, the contents of Gilbert's essay suggest strongly that he was prompted to write it in response to Coleridge's ‘On the Slave Trade’, which had appeared in the previous issue of The Watchman. Coleridge's essay (based on his ‘Lecture on the Slave-Trade’ given at the Assembly Coffee House on 16 June 1795) argued that human vices (and hence the slave trade) arise from ‘imaginary Wants. […]