British Jacobin Politics, Desires, and Aftermaths

Focusing on British "Jacobin" politics in the 1790s and its return in later years, this book stresses performative aspects of radicalism, and spaces of mobilization. Links between popular radicals and the Romantics are explored in a dialogue between history and literary studies.

This book explores the hopes, desires, and imagined futures that characterized British radicalism in the 1790s, and the resurfacing of this sense of possibility in the following decades. The articulation of "Jacobin" sentiments reflected the emotional investments of men and women inspired by the French Revolution and committed to political transformation. The authors emphasize the performative aspects of political culture, and the spaces in which mobilization and expression occurred - including the club room, tavern, coffeehouse, street, outdoor meeting, theater, chapel, courtroom, prison, and convict ship. America, imagined as a site of republican citizenship, and New South Wales, experienced as a space of political exile, widened the scope of radical dreaming. Part 1 focuses on the political culture forged under the shifting influence of the French Revolution. Part 2 explores the afterlives of British Jacobinism in the year 1817, in early Chartist memorialization of the Scottish "martyrs" of 1794, and in the writings of E. P. Thompson. The relationship between popular radicals and the Romantics is a theme pursued in several chapters; a dialogue is sustained across the disciplinary boundaries of British history and literary studies. The volume captures the revolutionary decade's effervescent yearning, and its unruly persistence in later years.

Autorentext

James Epstein is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of History, Vanderbilt University.

David Karr is a Professor of History at Columbia College in Columbia, Missouri.

Zusammenfassung
Focusing on British "Jacobin" politics in the 1790s and its return in later years, this book stresses performative aspects of radicalism, and spaces of mobilization. Links between popular radicals and the Romantics are explored in a dialogue between history and literary studies.

Inhalt

Introduction 1

PART 1

Seditious Hearts: 1790s 17

1 Playing at Revolution: British "Jacobin" Performance 19

2 Everyday Life and Everyday Sedition: Situating Radical Identities 54

3 "Thoughts That Flash Like Lightning": Thomas Holcroft and Radical Theater 86

4 "Equality and No King": Sociability and Sedition 121

5 Writing America from Newgate Prison, 1795 149

PART 2

Aftermaths and Recurrence 195

6 1817: Return of the Suppressed 197

7 "The Embers of Expiring Sedition": Maurice Margarot, the Scottish Martyrs Monument, and Radical Memory across the South Pacific 254

8 Among the Romantics: E. P. Thompson and the Poetics of Disenchantment 293

Works Cited 329

Index 375