1It should be noted that Jim Mays has argued in PW that Coleridge’s first published poem was ‘The Abode of Love’. ‘The poem is not certainly by [Coleridge]’, writes Mays, ‘though it appeared over his initials in two newspapers [The World and the Cambridge Chronicle] during Jul 1790’ (1.28).↩

2Paul Magnuson, Reading Public Romanticism, 70.↩

3John R. Nabholtz, ‘Romantic Prose and Classical Rhetoric’, in Rhetorical Traditions,** 67-68.↩

4Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998), 2. The perception of the instability of the public and public opinion was also influenced by the instability of ‘the public’ itself as a concept. As Barker notes, ‘it is … difficult to pin down definitions for “the people”, “the public”, and “public opinion” within existing historiography’ (Barker, 3). Attempts to rouse a particular nationalist consciousness or consensus were at once attempts to create nationalist consciousness and consensus. For a more politicised account of the importance of the changes in newspaper publishing in Britain at this time, see H. T. Dickinson, British Radicalism and the French Revolution 1789-1815 (Oxford, 1985]: or Michael Scrievener (ed.),** Poetry and Reform: Periodical Verse from the English Democratic Press (Detroit, 1992).↩

5Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (Oxford, 1988), 79.↩

6In his compendious study of the press in this period, Arthur Aspinall has observed that ‘[c]offee-houses in the towns, public-houses in town and village, and gin-shops were, together, more important agencies for the dissemination of newspaper information than either public meetings or Radical Reformist Societies’. Consequently, ‘[t]he Anti-Jacobin Review described ale-houses as “receptacles of vice”, where “diabolical” Jacobinical prints which promoted discontent and disobedience were taken in for the benefit of their customers’. Arthur Aspinall, Politics and the Press (London, 1949), 27, 11.↩

7Barker, 14. The unofficial right to publish parliamentary debates was won in 1771. See Barker, 36↩

8Michael Scrivener, Poetry and Reform: Periodical Verse from the English Democratic Press (Detroit, 1992), 21.↩

9Barker, 36.↩

10Paulson, 21.↩

11Lowth, ‘Visitation Sermon at Durham, 1758’, inSermons, 91.↩

12Roe, 18.↩

13Peter J. Kitson, ‘Political thinker’, in The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, ed. Lucy Newlyn (Cambridge, 2002), 158.↩

14William Frend, Peace and Union 1793 (Oxford, 1991), 43.↩

15Roe, 96.↩

16Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 (London, 1987), 155.↩

17Kelvin Everest, ‘Coleridge’s life’, in The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, ed. Lucy Newlyn (Cambridge, 2002), 19.↩

18John Morrow, Coleridge’s Political Thought (London, 1990), 2.↩

19Kelvin Everest, ‘Coleridge’s life’, 21.↩

20Kenneth R. Johnston, ‘The Political Sciences of Life: From American Pantisocracy to British Romanticism’, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford, 2001), 52. In opposition to common claims about the potential escapism of the plan, Johnston has argued that ‘[i]f Pantisocracy was an escape, it was an escape from something real and dangerous: the effectiveness of Pitt’s and Portland’s systematic crackdown against domestic dissent was by 1797 just about complete’ (59).↩

21The story of Coleridge’s Pantisocracy has been discussed at length by numerous scholars and does not require detailed analysis here. In addition to the usual biographical accounts, one can find a discussion of the complications of the scheme in relation to labour, indeterminacy, and Coleridge’s radical decline in Nigel Leask, ‘Pantisocracy and the politics of the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads”; in Alison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest (eds.). Reflections of Revolution (London and New York, 1993), 39-58; Daniel S. Malachuk, “Labor, Leisure, and the Yeoman in Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s 1790s Writings”, RON August 2002; Morrow, Coleridge’s Political Thought; and Roe, The Radical Years.↩

22David Vallins, Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism (Basingstoke and New York, 1999), 103. On the same page, Vallins neatly sums up a ‘syncretic’ account of the philosophical influences invoked in Coleridge’s rhetoric of clarity: ‘Coleridge’s early response to the empirically-based psychological, religious, and political thought of mid- to late-eighteenth-century British philosophers, therefore, seems to be a prime example of the syncretic method which several critics have discovered in his work. Its governing principle… is a consistent pursuit of grounds for optimism, and specifically for belief in the necessary and unlimited progression of human beings towards freedom, happiness, and virtue. Broadly speaking, Hartley provides the materialist basis for this “necessitarianism”, claiming to discover physical and scientific grounds for a Neoplatonic conception of humankind’s ascent towards the deity. Priestley… separates Hartley’s theology from his psychology…. Godwin… combines an interest in humankind’s ascent above a merely physical existence with an emphasis on the practical forms of liberation to be derived from our increasing rationality’.↩

23This ability is alternatively represented as either equivocation, confusion, or a positive desire to organize ‘antitheses into an inconsequential simultaneity, rather than a dialectical succession’. See Perry, Division, 25.↩

24Vallins, 155.↩

25CL, 1.152.↩

26Ibid. 1.152.↩

27BL, 1.46.↩

28Though the radical power of fact itself became a persuasive figure associated with clarity, and the rhetoric of obscurity responded with a positive valuation of persuasion by any means, the two rhetorics ultimately became indistinguishable in their rhetorical attempts to persuade readers to action (or inaction). Kevin Gilmartin has discussed the emergence in the early nineteenth century of a ‘radical rhetoric of fact’ in which ‘[d]ispassionate description gathered the explosive energy of sedition and blasphemy’ in the form of encyclopedias such as the Red Book (Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England [Cambridge, 1996] 153, 147). Likewise, in a discussion of the political climate in Britain around 1819, Peter Holt and Malcolm Thomis argue that [w]hat was political information and education for the radicals was sedition and blasphemy to the authorities’ (Peter Holt and Malcolm Thomis, Threats of Revolution in Britain 1789-1848 [London, 1977], 68). But the origin of this radical interest in fact and information was clearly central to writers in the mid-1790s. Gilmartin’s claim that ‘[e]ffective political opposition might prefer a rhetoric of transparent description, but it could not avoid a riot of figures… when it actually described the enemy’ (ibid. 63), as my first two chapters have shown, applies clearly to an important and self-conscious tension in the writings of Thelwall and Wollstonecraft and, in its attempt to appropriate unto itself the privileged language of clarity, was central to the radical critique of Burke. For Coleridge in particular, I argue, the problem became not what clear communication was as such, but how to make it possible. In his work the concept of information was expanded beyond being a mere object to being an act, and it was an act of exchange between communicator and recipient which could involve mutation or corruption of ideas and facts, and involved in addition an economic schema of the mutual exchange of labour. Thus his anxieties about his public’s intellectual capacity and his desire to mould it meant that ‘information’ implied not only the ‘communication of the knowledge or “news” of some fact or occurrence’, but also the ‘action of informing… [the] formation or moulding of the mind or character’ (OED). The problematic Romantic resolution of the contradictions in and between the rhetorics of clarity and obscurity was related to the insight of what I have called ‘ Romantic information’, that the ability (and authority) to communicate even ‘plain facts’ came with a heavy burden of responsibility, and that there was no such thing as mere data. But by the early 1790s, this optimism for a perfect form of rational communication was called into question along with ambitious concepts of the potential for the perfection of human knowledge and reason. With the spread of ‘plain speaking’ radical texts and encyclopedias and the simultaneous spread of popular dissent, the danger accorded to the communication of passion in traditional philosophies of rhetoric was transferred to the communication of bare fact or information.↩

29Lects 1795, 19.↩

30Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, 89.↩

31Vallins, 102.↩

32Lects 1795, 6.↩

33Ibid. 10.↩

34Ibid. 7.↩

35Ibid. 5.↩

36Ibid. 8, 7. See William Godwin, Caleb Williams, in The Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, vol. 3, ed. Patricia Clemit (London, 1992). Coleridge makes a similarly politicised division of ‘Sorts of Readers’ in On the Constitution of Church and State (65]: where he divides them into ‘Spunges’, ‘Sand Glasses’, ‘Straining Bags’, and ‘Great-Mogul Diamond Sieves’, perhaps echoing Swift’s division of readers into the ‘Superficial, the Ignorant, and the Learned’ (Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub: With Other Early Works 1696-1707, ed. Herbert Davis [Oxford, 1939], 117.↩

37Lects 1795, 8. It should be noted that Coleridge consistently excludes women from his descriptions of the ranks of the politically active. The prioritisation of the masculine as the representative political agent was of course quite conventional at the time, though it was attacked by Wollstonecraft and others, and it was grounded in a coherent discourse of feminised sensibility according to which the feminine acted as a figure for the irrational. To restrict one’s information to the masculine was therefore to signify one’s attempt to restrict the potentially dangerous influence of misinformation by an uncontrollable feminine force.↩

38Ibid. 8.↩

39‘This Oscillation of political Opinion, while it retards the Day of Revolution, may operate as a preventative to its Excesses’ (ibid. 9).↩

40Jon Mee has throughout his work on the nature of ‘enthusiasm’ discussed the medical figures and has remarked on Coleridge’s tendency to divide recipients into different identities in the 1790s that ‘Coleridge’s career as a poet was forged in the midst of this very struggle to differentiate rational self-sufficiency both political and spiritual from its pathological alter egos’. Jon Mee, ‘Mopping Up Spilt Religion’ RoN 25 (February 2002).↩

41Lects 1795, 9.↩

42Ibid. 9.↩

43Ibid. 10.↩

44Ibid. 11.↩

45Ibid. 11.↩

46Ibid. 12.↩

47Ibid. 12. ↩

48Ibid. 12.↩

49Ibid. 12. The same idea lies behind Wordsworth’s famous support for the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling’ in poetry: contrary to most claims about this famous endorsement, Wordsworth was arguing in the 1802 preface to the Lyrical Ballads that the poet, like Coleridge’s Patriot, should cultivate his emotional movements and affinities in order to reach a point at which they might be trusted to be grounded in, essentially, fixed principles. See LB, 246-7.↩

50Lects 1795, 13.↩

51Anonymous review of A Moral and Political Lecture, The Critical Review, NS 13 (April 1795), 455, quoted in Jackson, 24.↩

52Lects 1795, 22.↩

53Ibid. 22.↩

54Ibid.* *25 n.↩

55Ibid 27.↩

56Ibid. 30. ↩

57Ibid.** 31, my emphasis.↩

58For a description of the economic circumstances surrounding the availability of food in 1795 see ibid. 29 n.↩

59Ibid. 33.↩

60Ibid. 47.↩

61Coleridge’s point is that a group should not ‘attribute to the system which they reject, all the evils existing under it’; rather, they should also take into account ‘the natures, circumstances, and capacities’ of the ‘recipients’ of ‘constitutions and dispensations’ (ibid. 37). Deirdre Coleman has identified this ultimately derogatory reference to the ‘capacities of their recipients’ as a Burkean tactic of intimidation. See Deirdre Coleman, Coleridge and The Friend (1809-1810) (Oxford, 1998), 122.↩

62Lects 1795, 34.↩

63Ibid. 35.↩

64Ibid. 35.↩

65Ibid. 35.↩

66Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm, 192.↩

67Lects 1795,** 43. ↩

68Ibid. 43.↩

69Ibid. 43. ↩

70Ibid. 43.↩

71Godwin, Political Justice, 2 vols.** (London, 1793), 1.310.↩

72Lects 1795, 52↩

73Ibid. 52.↩

74Ibid. 52.↩

75Ibid. 53.↩

76Ibid. 59.↩

77Ibid. 57.↩

78Ibid. 56-7, 59.↩

79Ibid. 53.↩

80Ibid. 63.↩

81Ibid. 60. The reference is to the wizards in Isaiah 8:19.↩

82Ibid. 66-7.↩

83Ibid.** 67-8.↩

84In a footnote, the editors of Lects 1795 colourfully state that the ‘bishops, it was thought, tended first to look after their stocks and then their flocks’ (67 n).↩

85Ibid. 67 n.↩

86Ibid. 67 n, 68 n.↩

87Lects 1795, 286.↩

88Ibid. 74. For a brief discussion of the publication and reception of The Plot Discovered see ibid. 278-9.↩

89Ibid. 285.↩

90The Six Lectures on Revealed Religion its’ Corruptions and Political Views *were designed to demonstrate the current and historical function of religion in the pursuit of political reform and personal enlightenment, and the consistently negative function of obscurity in them demonstrates the strength of Coleridge’s complicated theological and scientific appropriation of the rhetoric of clarity at this time. In the ‘superstition allegory’ Coleridge equally associates materialist atheism and the dark, Gnostic corruptions of Christianity in the churches of England and Rome (and Trinitarianism more generally) with the development of an obfuscating, esoteric hermeneutical hierarchy (ibid. 207). The negative image of priests as ‘black’ (ibid. 90]: echoes William Frend’s negative reference to the Church’s ‘men in black’ and invokes a common association of superstition with blackness. It also recalls Burke’s curious discussion of the colour of a black woman causing pain (Frend, 27; Paulson, 358; and Burke, ‘Enquiry’, 295). Coleridge also introduces the figures of aids to perception which are negative when they are misleading, but positive when they are associated with divine assistance to our fallen, human vision or intellect. Benjamin Brice nicely captures the Calvinist association of such imagery: ‘[a]ccording to Calvin, the analogical “likeness” of God (imago Dei), indelibly engraved on our pre-lapsarian reasoning faculties, has been almost entirely vitiated by sin. Human beings are so *blinded by sin, Calvin argued, that they are incapable of ascending to Knowledge of God through the contemplation of the natural world. The visible universe – the “mirror” of God’s Glory – has therefore become darkened and distorted in our fallen perception of it, and without the corrective “spectacles” of a Biblical faith, we are completely unable to recognise the workmanship of God in the natural world’ (Benjamin Brice, Analogy, Disanology and the Coleridgean Symbol: Some Philosophical and Theological Contexts for Coleridge’s Theory of Symbolism, D.Phil Thesis [Oxford, 2003], 13). Interestingly, in the figurative schema of the Lectures, clarity is light while obscurity is heavy in the rhetoric of Romantic obscurity which associates labour with truth. Finally, Coleridge introduces his favourite ‘Fable of the Madning Rain’ (ibid. 215), which figures as a sort of nightmare of enlightenment, in which the practicalities of the indistinguishability of an obscure communicator’s divine or demonic inspiration result in his being ostracised by his own community.↩

91In Burke and the Fall of Language, Steven Blakemore offers a lengthy analysis of the tensions arising out of the fact that Britain had no written constitution, and hence no determinate target for radical attack. The charge that Britain lacked a constitution was contested by Burke and others, who claimed that a text was unnecessary for the existence of a viable constitution, which ought to be founded on a history and tradition upheld by figures of hereditary authority. In The Plot Discovered, Coleridge argues that even if the constitution is unwritten it must in order to be just be clear and accessible, somehow, to all: ‘a Constitution, if it mean any thing, signifies certain known Laws, which limit the expectations of the people and the discretionary powers of the legislature’ (Lects 1795, 300). Without a clear, limited constitution, there only existed ‘that scheme of cruelty and imposture, which the ministry chuse to call our Constitution’ (313).↩

92The Morning Post ‘printed the entire Treason Bill with heavy black borders on 9 Nov, the Convention Bill the same way on 14 Nov’ (Lects 1795,** 286 n).↩

93Ibid. 286. James McKusick notes that in an article for the Morning Post of 22 January 1800, Coleridge again attacked Grenville’s obscurity, pointing out that Coleridge’s argument is that Grenville ‘does not seem to realize that an erosion of ethical values occurs whenever language is used to obscure rather than to reveal the truth’ (McKusick, 92). In the article Coleridge writes that ‘[w]e think in words, and reason by words’ (EOT 1.114).↩

94Lects 288. Marcus Wood has discussed obscurity in relation to the law at length in relation to the 17th-century trial of John Lilburne and the 19th-century trial of William Hone. Lilburne attacked the obscurity of the law, invoking Lockean and Hobbeseian arguments concerning the relationship between obscurity and unjust authority (see Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790-1822 [Oxford, 1994], 125). Olivia Smith writes of the same two trials that ‘[b]oth [Lilburne and Hone] state that their trials are unjust because the obscurity of the law encourages tyranny and because Parliament was publicly supporting the prosecution’ (Smith, 196-97). Magnuson follows up the political implications for the use of obscurity in literature by defending Coleridge against Hazlitt’s charge about the “convenient latitude of interpretation” in the Biographia, commenting that ‘[i]t is common for those who try to maintain opposition in times of oppression to speak a type of double talk’ (Magnuson, 94; the Hazlitt quotation is from Hazlitt, Review of Biographia Literaria, Edinburgh Review (Aug 1817), quoted in Jackson, 309).↩

95Lects 1795, 314.↩

96Ibid. 288.↩

97Victoria Myers, ‘The Other Fraud: Coleridge’s The Plot Discovered and the Rhetoric of Political Discourse’, Romanticism, Radicalism and the Press, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (Detroit, 1997), 66. ↩

98Lects 1795,** 296.↩

99Coleridge had articulated his belief in the importance of public opinion in Conciones: ‘[t]he system [the Terror] depended for its existence on the general sense of its necessity, and when it had answered its end, it was soon destroyed by the same power that had given it birth – popular opinion. It must not however be disguised, that at all times, but more especially when the public feelings are wavy and tumultuous, artful Demagogues may create this opinion’ (ibid. 36).↩

100Ibid. 312-13. The term ‘winged’ invokes Horne Tooke’s Diversions of Purley.↩

101Lects 1795, 313.↩

102Myers, 76.↩

103Ibid. 78-9.↩

104Ibid. 80.↩

105Lects 1795, 47.↩

106The story of the rise and fall of The Watchman, which was originally conceived as a fundraising project for the proposed community of Pantisocrats, has been narrated extensively by various editors, biographers, and critics. By this time Coleridge had achieved a ‘stature… comparable to – and certainly not less than – that of leading figures of metropolitan radicalism’ (Roe, 117), but his attempt to create a provincial paper that would cross metropolitan and local interests was fraught with problems typical for such papers at the time (for an account of this commercial and cultural publishing environment see Barker, 4-8, 97, 111, and of course the introduction to the Collected Coleridge edition). Interestingly, Coleridge’s project echoes Wordsworth’s plan in 1794 to create The Philanthropist a Monthly Miscellany. As Stephen Gill writes of the project in his biography of Wordsworth, ‘Mankind walked in darkness, but Wordsworth declares, “I would put into each man’s hand a lantern to guide him”. The Philanthropist was to be such a lantern’ (Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life [Oxford and New York, 1989], 86).↩

107Watchman, 197.↩

108Ibid. lviii. To take Coleridge’s announcements of his intention at face value in this way is to underestimate the importance (political and otherwise) attached to metarhetorical posturing, especially the complicated manner in which it signalled political allegiances. Deirdre Coleman nicely captures this problem in her article on Coleridge as a journalist: ‘[a]t a time when choice of style and register were read as indicators of political allegiance – take, for example, the contrast between Tom Paine’s plainness and Edmund Burke’s ornateness – Coleridge gave off a mixed message’ (Coleman, ‘The journalist’, in The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, 135).↩

109Aspinall, Politics and the Press, 78.↩

110Watchman, 4. Marcus Wood has pointed out, humorously but somewhat unfairly, that Coleridge promoted the advantage of having no advertisements ‘ironically in a handbill advertisement for his journal The Watchman’ (Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790-1822 [Oxford, 1994], 160). In fact, Coleridge’s argument was that ‘[t]here being no advertisement, a greater quantity of original matter must be given’ (Watchman, 5). A handbill which is separate from the publication itself therefore represents no contradiction on Coleridge’s part.↩

111Ibid. 4.↩

112Ibid. 4.↩

113Ibid. 4-5. The quotation is from Edward Young, ‘A Paraphrase on Part of the Book of Job’, 187 (var).↩

114Watchman, 3.↩

115Ibid. 5.↩

116Ibid. 5.↩

117Ibid. 4.↩

118Barker, 125, 126.↩

119Watchman, 9.↩

120Ibid. 10.↩

121Ibid. 10.↩

122Ibid. 10.↩

123Ibid. 12.↩

124Ibid. 12.↩

125Ibid. 13.↩

126Ibid. 13.↩

127Ibid. 13-14.↩

128Ibid. lviii.↩

129Ibid. 14.↩

130The handbill is said to have been ‘[d]one at the Office of MR JOHN BULL’S Chief Decypherer, Turnagain-lane, Cirumbendibus-street, Obscurity-square’ (ibid.** 48).↩

131Ibid. 30.↩

132Ibid. 30.↩

133Ibid. 31. Patton identifies the phrase ‘Sun of Genius’ as a reference to Coleridge’s sonnet to Burke of 9 Dec 1794 (which I discuss in my fifth chapter), in which Coleridge described him as a ‘Great Son of Genius’ (ibid. 31 n). There is also an echo here of Longinus’ comment about Homer as a sinking sun.↩

134Ibid. 33. Coleridge is quoting from Burke’s ‘Letter to a Noble Lord’.↩

135Watchman, 35. Coleridge wrongly identifies Morgan as Toland, and varies the grammar of the original passage. See Thomas Morgan, A Collection of Tracts (London, 1726), 44.↩

136Watchman, 39.↩

137Ibid. 291.↩

138Michael John Kooy, ‘Coleridge’s Francophobia’, The Modern Language Review, 95:4 (October 2000), 928.↩

139Watchman, 272.↩

140Ibid. 272.↩

141Ibid. 307.↩

142Ibid. 309.↩

143Ibid. 312.↩

144Ibid. 313.↩

145Note, for example, his inclusion of an excerpt from the physician Anthony Fothergill’s 1796 An Essay on the Abuse of Spiritous Liquors (Bath, 1796]: in the final number of The Watchman. In one sense, like Beddoes’ postscript, it serves to bookend The Watchman with a discussion (always partially figurative) of the dangers of inebriation, but the only truly interesting line in the entire excerpt is Fothergill’s own version of the mission statement: ‘“[m]y aim has been to render the language sufficiently intelligible to ordinary capacities, without disgusting the more enlightened readers by vulgarity of style”’ (Watchman,** 346). ↩

146Ibid. 345-6.↩

147Ibid. 374.↩

148Ibid. 374.↩

149Ibid. 374.↩

150Ibid. 374 n.↩

151Ibid. 375.↩

152Roe, 155. It was indeed a ‘dark’ time for the radicals, as Jon Klancher remarks in a discussion of Godwin (while invoking Godwin’s own figures), who had become a ‘skeptical, sophistical, dark [imaginer]… brooding in the year of the Gagging Acts over a darkening cloud of reaction, the thinning circles of radical intellectuals, and modernity’s betrayal of high purposes’ (Jon Klancher, ‘Godwin and the genre reformers: on necessity and contingency in romantic narrative theory’, in Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre, eds. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright [Cambridge, 1998], 31). Godwin’s later, more guarded and qualified belief in the possibility of universal enlightenment through a rhetoric of clarity demonstrates his proximity to Coleridge’s own loss of optimism: as Guy Handwerk remarks, ‘Godwin’s demonstration of how hard it can be for truth, even when clearly perceived, to penetrate the mind puts enormous pressure on many of the assumptions in Political Justice’ (Guy Handwerk, ‘History, trauma, and the limits of the liberal imagination: William Godwin’s historical fiction’, in Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre, eds. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright [Cambridge, 1998], 69).↩