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Among the Romantics: E. P. Thompson and the Poetics of Disenchantment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 March 2017

James Epstein
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Abstract

This article examines key themes in the political and intellectual life of E. P. Thompson. It argues for the centrality of romanticism to his work; it focuses on his unfinished study of the early Romantics. Thompson drew parallels between socialist hopes and disappointments of his own day and the reactions of the early romantic poets to the failed promise of the French Revolution. This article charts the trajectory of the early Romantics as they moved from political engagement to retreat, and relates this trajectory to Thompson's own politics. Thompson discerned a pattern whereby intellectuals and artists moved through stages from political engagement to disenchantment and then to “apostasy” or default. Disenchantment could be a productive condition; at issue was how the poet handled the “authenticity of experience,” how disenchantment was dealt with in verse. Both Thompson and the Romantics privileged the concept of “experience” which they set in opposition to abstract theory. The article's final section turns to themes that Thompson had intended to address but left unfinished, including shifting views of patriotism and the defeated cause of women's rights. For Thompson the romantic impulse was ultimately linked to utopian desire, to the capacity to imagine that which is “not yet.”

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Articles
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 2 , April 2017 , pp. 322 - 350
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Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2017 

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97 Thompson, “Disenchantment or Default?,” 37–38. See also the illuminating discussion in Mahoney, Charles, Romantics and Renegades: The Poetics of Political Reaction (Basingstoke, 2003), 7–9 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

98 Thompson, “Disenchantment or Default?,” 36–37. The poem was composed from April 1797 to March 1798. The composition history is complicated with ongoing revisions until its publication in book one of the Excursion.

99 Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age, 11: 87.

100 His formulation has come in for criticism and revision. See, most recently, Steedman, Carolyn, An Everyday Life of the English Working Class: Work, Self and Sociability in the Early Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 1.

101 Wordsworth, Prelude, 496.

102 Wordsworth, William, Preface (1802) to Lyrical Ballads, ed. Brett, R. L. and Jones, A. R. (London, 1968), 255–61Google Scholar.

103 E. P. Thompson, “Education and Experience,” in Thompson, Romantics, 4–32.

104 Ibid., 10, quoting Tribune 2, no. 16 (1796): 16–17 Google Scholar; Thompson, “Hunting,” 167.

105 Thompson, “Education and Experience,” 10–13, 28, quoting Prelude, bk. 8, 420–25. Compare Lindsay and Rickword, eds., Handbook of Freedom, xi–xii, where Rickword notes “how the word ‘common’ and its derivations … appear and re-appear like a theme through the centuries.”

106 See Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, 58–68; Smith, Olivia, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar, chap. 6; and Bugg, John, “Revolution,” in William Wordsworth in Context, ed. Bennett, Andrew (Cambridge, 2015), 175–81Google Scholar.

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108 Thompson, Making, 342–44. See also Eastwood, David, “Robert Southey and the Intellectual Origins of Romantic Conservatism,” English Historical Review 104, no. 411 (April 1989): 308–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The reciprocities of paternalism formed a central theme in Thompson, E. P., Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (London, 1991)Google Scholar.

109 See the essays collected in Thompson, E. P., Writing by Candlelight (London, 1980)Google Scholar. His case for the importance of rule of law to democratic society was first articulated in Thompson, E. P., Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (London, 1975), 258–69Google Scholar.

110 Palmer, E. P. Thompson, chap. 5; Bess, Michael, Realism, Utopia, and the Mushroom Cloud: Four Activist Intellectuals and Their Strategies for Peace, 1945–1989 (Chicago, 1993), 136–54Google Scholar; Veldman, Meredith, Fantasy, the Bomb, and the Greening of Britain: Romantic Protest, 1945–1980 (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar, chap. 9. For his writings from this period, see Thompson, E. P., The Heavy Dancers (London, 1985)Google Scholar; and idem, Double Exposure (London, 1985)Google ScholarPubMed.

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114 McGann, introduction to Romantic Ideology; Levinson, Marjorie, Wordsworth's Great Period Poems (Cambridge, 1986), 9Google Scholar, and introduction. See also Liu, Alan, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford,  1989)Google Scholar. Compare Abrams, M. H., “On Political Readings of Lyrical Ballads ,” in Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory, ed. Fischer, Michael (New York, 1989), 364–91Google Scholar.

115 Thompson aligned himself with the work of David Erdman and Carl Woodring. Of the “new historicists,” he shared most in common with Butler.

116 Thompson, “Interview,” 14. For Thompson as a reader of texts, see Luke Spencer, “The Uses of Literature: Thompson as Writer, Reader and Critic,” in Fieldhouse and Taylor, eds., E. P. Thompson, 96–117.

117 Wordsworth, Preface to Brett and Jones, eds., Lyrical Ballads, 257.

118 Tribune 1, 18 April 1795, 132–33; “Plato,” Politics for the People, vol. 2, no. 4 (1794): 49–52 Google ScholarPubMed. In his article, “Modern Patriotism,” Coleridge questioned Thelwall's status as a “patriot,” an early indication of their differences over religion. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Watchman, no. 3, 17 March 1796 Google Scholar, in Collected Works of Samuel Coleridge, vol. 2, The Watchman, ed. Patton, Lewis (London, 1970), 98–100Google Scholar.

119 Wordsworth went in order to visit his former lover, Annette Vallon, and their daughter, Caroline.

120 Wordsworth, William, William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Gill, Stephen (Oxford, 2000) 275, 289Google Scholar. For “national defense patriotism,” the feeling that best describes Wordsworth's reaction, see Cookson, J. E., The British Armed Nation, 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, introduction and chap. 8. For the difference between the invasion threats of 1797–1798 and 1803–1805, see also Mark Philp, “Introduction: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797–1815,” in Philp, ed., Resisting Napoleon, 1–17.

121 Thompson, “Disenchantment or Default?,” 70.

122 Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, 282–83. A recent statute banned all persons of color from France's continental territories. My comments draw on Kaplan, Cora, “Black Heroes/White Writers: Toussaint L'Overture and the Literary Imagination,” History Workshop Journal 46, no. 1 (Autumn 1998): 35–62 Google Scholar.

123 Wordsworth, Prelude, 410–12.

124 Thompson, Making, 402, 146–47.

125 Blackburn, Robin, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London, 1988)Google Scholar, chap. 4; Linebaugh, Peter and Rediker, Marcus, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000), 334–41Google Scholar. For a typical example associating abolitionists with “Jacobins,” see A Very New Pamphlet Indeed! … Containing Some Strictures on the English Jacobins (London, 1792), 3–5 Google Scholar.

126 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Lecture on the Slave-Trade,” in Patton and Mann, eds., Collected Works, 1:248–49. For Thelwall, see Tribune 3 (1795), xxxv, 47–48 Google Scholar. See also Wood, Marcus, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford, 2002), 169–80Google Scholar.

127 Robert Southey: Poetic Works, 1793–1810, ed. Pratt, Lynda (London, 2004), 5:54–56 Google Scholar; Sonoi, Chine, “Southey's Radicalism and the Abolitionist Movement,” Wordsworth Circle 42, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 22–26 Google Scholar. See also Geggus, David, “British Opinion and the Emergence of Haiti, 1791–1805,” in Slavery and British Society, 1776–1846, ed. Walvin, James (Baton Rouge, 1982), 123–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

128 See Steedman, Carolyn, “A Weekend with Elektra,” Literature and History 6, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 17–42 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, “The Price of Experience: Women and the Making of the English Working Class,” Radical History Review, no. 59 (Spring 1994): 108–19Google Scholar.

129 E. P. Thompson, afterword to Thompson, Romantics, 221–23. For female literary casualties, see Johnston, Unusual Suspects, 113–16, and chap. 7, on Helen Maria Williams. See also Kelly, Gary, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

130 See Midgley, Clare, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London, 1992)Google Scholar, chap. 2; Ferguson, Moira, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (London, 1992)Google Scholar, chaps. 7–11; and Chernock, Arianne, Men and the Making of Modern British Feminism (Stanford, 2010)Google Scholar.

131 Thompson, Making, 162–63. See also Cayton, Andrew, Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Radicalism and Historical Change, 1793–1818 (Chapel Hill, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

132 E. P. Thompson, “Which Britons?” (1993), in Thompson, Persons and Polemics, 321–32; Colley, Britons, chap. 6. See also Franklin, Caroline, “Romantic Patriotism as Feminist Critique of Empire,” in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, ed. Knott, Sarah and Taylor, Barbara (Basingstoke, 2005), 551–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the feminist version of More, see, for example, Mellor, Anne K., Mothers of the Nation: Women's Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington, 2000)Google Scholar, chap. 1.

133 E. P. Thompson, “Mary Wollstonecraft” (1974), in Thompson, Persons and Polemics, 1–9. From the large literature on Wollstonecraft, see Taylor, Barbara, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge, 2003)Google Scholar, particularly chap. 6.

134 Taylor, Wollstonecraft, 188, 246–55; idem, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1983)Google Scholar; Gleadle, Kathryn, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women's Rights Movement, 1831–51 (Basingstoke, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

135 Wollstonecraft, Mary and Godwin, William, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and Memoirs of the Author of “The Rights of Woman,” ed. Holmes, Richard (Harmondsworth, 1987)Google Scholar, letter 14, 148–49, and editor's introduction, 20–21.

136 Thompson, “Socialism and the Intellectuals,” 31.

137 Thelwall, John, Rights of Nature, Against the Usurpations of Establishments … Part the Second (London, 1796), 32Google Scholar.

138 E. P. Thompson, “An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski” (1973), in Thompson, Poverty of Theory, 92–192, at 176, responding to Kolakowski, Leszek, “Intellectuals against Intellect,” Daedalus 101, no. 3 (Summer 1972): 1–15 Google Scholar. The passage might be compared to Herbert Marcuse, of whom Thompson was critical, discussing the reduction of “the romantic space of the imagination.” Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, 1964), 195–96Google Scholar.

139 See Matthews, New Left, chap. 3; and Anderson, Arguments, particularly chap. 5. For a different take on Thompson's “Englishness,” see Satia, Priya, “Bryon, Gandhi and the Thompsons: The Making of British Social History and the Unmaking of Indian History,” History Workshop Journal 81, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 135–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

140 Thompson, “Poverty of Theory,” 196, 199–201; idem, “Interview,” 17; idem, “The Politics of Theory,” in People's History and Socialist Theory, ed. Samuel, Raphael (London, 1981), 396–408 Google Scholar. Compare Stuart Hall, “In Defence of Theory,” in Samuel, ed., People's History, 378–85.

141 See Thompson's roundtable comments, “Agendas for Radical History,” Radical History Review, no. 36 (Fall 1986): 26–45 Google Scholar, at 37–42. See also Kenny, Michael, “Socialism and the Romantic ‘Self’: The Case of Edward Thompson,” Journal of Political Ideologies 5, no. 1 (February 2000): 105–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.