Review of E. P. Thompson's "The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

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.