1Tom Paulin, The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style (London, 1998), 167. On the same page, Paulin points out that ‘[t]he Analytical Review, a periodical edited by the Unitarian Thomas Christie and published by Joseph Johnson, attacked [Burke] for “looseness of style”’.↩

2Charles R. Weld, A History of the Royal Society (London, 1848]: 1.146 and quoted in Howell, 481.↩

3The Record of the Royal Society (London, 1897), 119, quoted in Howell, 481.↩

4Ronald Paulson has discussed the particularly eighteenth-century French origins of this English ‘Jacobin’ discourse in connection with rhetorical inversion and transvaluation: ‘[a]round the middle of the century, by the kind of transvaluation we associate with revolutions, the sense of light was shifted by the philosophes to individual human reason, to the “Enlightenment,” and the king and the church became darkness (and so ignorance) which the light attempts to penetrate and dispel. Or perhaps we should say the philosophes, les lumières, grafted onto the sun as God the iconographical tradition of the sun as Truth chasing away the shadows of the night…. And that “light” of the Sun King [Louis XIV] was of course recognized and reinterpreted as “darkness,” and the most commonplace set of associations during the Revolution revolved around this contrast of light-enlightenment-reason-freedom versus darkness-ignorance-imprisonment, which were at least in England strongly associated with New Testament redemption opposed to Old Testament cruelty, oppression, and darkness’ (Paulson, 46-7).↩

5Hepworth, 140.↩

6John Horne Tooke, ΕΠΕΑ ΠΤΕΡΟΕΝΤΕΑ, or The Diversions of Purley (London, 1786), 25 and n. Interestingly, Lowth’s grammar was preceded by three years by the publication of Coleridge père’s A Short Grammar of the Latin Tongue, in the preface of which he argued that ‘I shall only add, that this Grammar can possibly be no great Burden in any respect; and if the Rules of Syntax are more comprehensive as well as exact, for the Language, than some Grammars; if the Rules are not only more concise, but more clear in expressing the Reason of it, and better connected in its consequential Method; then truly learned, unbigoted, and disinterested Men will soon perceive their Value’. John Coleridge’s 1768 Miscellaneous Dissertations placed a similar positive value on clarity, though given his biblical subject it was reflected more in his endorsement of a quasi-radical protestant inner light, while the title page of his 1772 A Critical Latin Grammar announced ‘A CRITICAL / LATIN GRAMMAR: / CONTAINING / CLEAR AND DISTINCT RULES / FOR BOYS JUST INITIATED; / AND / NOTES EXPLANATORY / OF ALMOST / EVERY ANTIQUITY AND OBSCURITY / IN THE LANGUAGE’. Such texts as John Coleridge’s participated in what David Simpson, in Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory (Chicago and London, 1993), has identified as a politicised Ramist tradition (which indeed includes the radical innovations of Paracelsus, who taught in his native German rather than in Latin) which sought to clarify Latin for the masses and indeed introduced clarity as a method, for example in the introduction of the use of italics for illustrative material, or the table of contents. See Simpson, 19-25 and John Coleridge, A Short Grammar of the Latin Tongue (London, 1759), i-ii; Miscellaneous Dissertations Arising from the XVIIth and XVIIIth Chapters of the Book of Judges (London, 1768); and A Critical Latin Grammar (1772), title page; and Paracelsus: Essential Readings, trans. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (Chatham, Kent, 1990), 18.↩

7Lisa Plummer Crafton, ‘The “Ancient Voices” of Blake’s The French Revolution”’, in The French Revolution Debate in English Literature and Culture, ed. Lisa Plummer Crafton (London, 1997), 42-3. ↩

8Brody, 109. Miriam Brody also notes on the same page that the new rhetoric’s relation to classical rhetoric was less oppositional, and perhaps more opportunistic, than the Royal Society’s linguistic ideology: ‘[t]he new rhetoricians, receiving such texts from the ancient world, rescued classical rhetoric from the ashbin of history to which the Royal Society, convened in 1665 to advance the new learning of science, had consigned its naive epistemology’. ↩

9Lisa Plummer Crafton, ‘Ancient Voices’, 43.↩

10Jon Mee**, **‘The Political Showman at Home: Reflections on Popular Radicalism and Print Culture in the 1790’s’, in Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775-1848, ed. Michael T. Davis (London, 2000), 42.↩

11For an introduction to this vast literature see (in addition to the work of Blakemore, Boulton, Epstein and Paulson) Philippe Roger, ‘The French Revolution as “Logomachy”’, in Language and Rhetoric of the Revolution, (Edinburgh, 1990), 5-17; Language and Rhetoric of the Revolution, ed. John Renwick (Edinburgh, 1990); and of course Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language 1791-1819 (Oxford, 1984). As I noted in my first chapter, Paul Hamilton has drawn attention to the threat of a ‘linguistic idealism’ in this focus on language in relation to the Reflections controversy, and as in other cases of literary-historical analysis it is always important to be aware of falling into the related ‘textual attitude’ which Said cautions us against (‘the kind of view attacked by Voltaire in Candide, or even the attitude to reality satirized by Cervantes in Don Quixote’. See Edward Said, Orientalism [London, new ed. 1995], 92). And it certainly is a threat in discussion of the rhetoric of clarity in the Reflections controversy, especially when one considers works like Epstein’s and Paulson’s which use a sort of semiotic principle to expand the notion of inversion and transvaluation to include non-literary rituals and objects of relevant symbolic significance. But the fact that so much of the work written in response to Burke, and the work in which Burke responded in turn, was metarhetorical, means that this threat may be avoided by maintaining an awareness that reflexive rhetorical publication was an act of serious legal and social significance for the radicals I consider, not merely a contribution to a transcendent Laputian library or the participation in a sort of linguistic ontology of forms.↩

12Simpson, 28.↩

13Ibid. 130-1.↩

14Public Advertiser, 21 January 1784.↩

15Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790-1822 (Oxford, 1994), 242. For a discussion of the image of the sun-eye in Cruickshank, Gillray, and Samuel Ward, see 254-57.↩

16Boulton, 172. Throughout his chapters on the radicals, from Paine to Mackintosh and Godwin, Boulton demonstrates how their own rhetoric inevitably adopted the formations of Burkean discourse.↩

17Luisa Calè, Henry Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: ‘Turning Readers into Spectators’ in Late Eighteenth-Century London, 2 Vols., D.Phil Thesis (Oxford, 2002), 1.19.↩

18Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, 1789 (Oxford, 1992), 15.↩

19Ibid. 14.↩

20William Godwin, An enquiry concerning Political Justice, 1793, (Oxford, 1992), 1.v.↩

21Price, 14.↩

22Richard Price, A sermon, 19-20.↩

23Ibid. 21.↩

24Ibid. 19-20n.↩

25Lowell T. Frye, ‘“Great Burke,” Thomas Carlyle, and the French Revolution’, in The French Revolution Debate in English Literature and Culture, ed. Lisa Plummer Crafton (London, 1997), 94.↩

26Thomas Paine, ‘Common Sense’, in The Selected Work of Tom Paine, ed. Howard Fast (London, 1948), 27.↩

27Ibid. 19.↩

28F. P. Lock, ‘Rhetoric and Representation in Burke’s Reflections’, in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. John Whale (Manchester and New York, 2000),** **18.↩

29Epstein, 9.↩

30Furniss, 133.↩

31Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford, 2001), 31.↩

32Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (London, 1969), 16.↩

33Ibid. 34, 52.↩

34Ibid. 102.↩

35Ibid. 162, 163. For related discussions of the obfuscation of political origins through the teaching of dead languages, see Thomas Paine, ‘The Age of Reason’, in Paine: Collected Writings (New York, 1995), 696, or Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1796) (New York, 1975), 230, 237, 352, 404, 467, 487.↩

36Paine, The Rights of Man, 181, 11.↩

37Ibid. 72.↩

38Ibid. 252.↩

39Ibid. 211-212.↩

40Paine, of course, was himself a figure for clarity, and was associated with more than one revolutionary illumination. As David Worrall notes, Richard Carlile once commissioned, from the ‘sculptor-spy George Edwards’, ‘“[a] Globe on the small pedastal, lighted with Gas, represents America illuminated next to PAINE”’. See David Worrall,** **‘Mab and Mob: The Radical Press Community in Regency England’, in Romanticism, Radicalism and the Press, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (Detroit, 1997), 145.↩

41Thomas Paine, ‘The Age of Reason’, in Paine: Collected Writings (New York, 1995), 680.↩

42Ibid. 687.↩

43Ibid. 690-691.↩

44Ibid. 691.↩

45Ibid. 828 n.↩

46Ibid. 702.↩

47Ibid. 685.↩

48Clark, 2.↩

49Ibid. 3.↩

50Patricia Howell Michaelson, ‘Religion and Politics in the Revolution Debate: Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine’, in The French Revolution Debate in English Literature and Culture, ed. Lisa Plummer Crafton (London, 1997), 36. ↩

51Ibid. 29.↩

52Paine, The Age of Reason, 709.↩

53Jonathan Wordsworth in the introduction to Joseph Priestley, Letters to Burke 1791 (Poole, England, 1997), 1.↩

54Priestley, Letters to Burke 1791 (Poole, 1997), 8. In 1761 and 1762 Priestley published his own contribution to the new rhetoric of clarity with a scientific and liberating grammar in The Rudiments of Grammar and A Course of Lectures on the Theory of Language and Universal Grammar, and in 1777 he published ‘A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism’ in which his aim, according Vincent Bevilacqua and Richard Murphy, was ‘to distinguish the proper end of rhetoric (informing the judgment, the regard of recollection and method) and the accessory ends of rhetoric (moving the passions and affecting the imagination so as to persuade, the regard of style). In Priestley’s rhetoric these ends integrate so as to be virtually indistinguishable’ (Joseph Priestley, A Course of Lectures on the Theory of Language and Universal Grammar [Warrington, 1762]; A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism, eds. Vincent M. Bevilacqua and Richard Murphy [Carbondale, Il., 1965], xxxix).↩

55Ibid. 18.↩

56James Engell, ‘The New Rhetoric and Romantic Poetics’. 228. Though he does not follow through on the catastrophic implications of his claim for the new rhetoric of clarity, and indeed himself adopts the optimism of a sort of revolutionary-epistemological progressivism, Engell remarks elsewhere that ‘[p]erfect clarity or “true” communication is a mirage, a collective delusion perhaps, but at least it keeps us walking ahead’ (Engell, ‘The New Rhetoricians: Psychology, Semiotics, and Critical Theory’, in Psychology and Literature in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Christopher Fox [New York, 1987], 292).↩

57Priestley, Letters, 64, 68.↩

58Furniss, 105.↩

59Priestley, Letters, 84, 137.↩

60Ibid. 137.↩

61Ibid. 111.↩

62Ibid. 126.↩

63Ibid. 140-141.↩

64Positive progressivism was as much a part of the rhetoric of clarity as the representation of revolution as regression was a part of the rhetoric of obscurity. Hugh Blair, for example, associates the progress of man from savagery to civilisation as a movement towards greater perspicuity. Thus ‘[w]hat we call human reason, is not the effort or ability of one, so much as it is the result of the reason of many, arising from lights mutually communicated’, and ‘according as society improves and flourishes, … [men] will bestow more care upon the methods of expressing their conceptions with propriety and eloquence’ (Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. Harold F. Harding [Carbondale and Edwardsville, Il., 1965], 1.2). Blair’s Lectures also reflect the movement in the rhetoric of clarity towards indistinguishability from the rhetoric of obscurity. Like George Campbell and Adam Smith, Blair may have asserted the necessary connection between good speech and truth ‘because it was valid in terms of the way in which the human faculties work together and apart’, and thus perpetuated a tradition originating in classical rhetoric, but he was no closer to any scientific of philosophical proof of this crucial commonplace than Longinus or Quintilian. Thus the fact that Blair’s rhetoric ‘does not enable the critic to decide whether one example of the successful adaptation of words to the author’s purpose is ever to be considered better or worse than another example’ is in fact a more revealing consequence of his theory than any sham strength in the assertions of other new rhetoricians. The fact that ‘Blair’s definition [of poetry] does not provide an adequate explanation of the difference between oratory and poetry’ and allows ‘such differences as these to remain blurred and confused’ is not an indeterminacy specific to his own lack of penetration, but rather one endemic to new rhetorical discourse as a whole. The increasingly apparent interchangeability of the (prosaic) divine and the (poetic) demonic in communication which was crucial to the decline of radical progressivism and optimism in the 1790s was underwritten by Blair’s manifest new rhetorical weakness (see Howell, 655, 655, 669, 670. Adam Smith and George Campbell’s important contributions to the new rhetoric were Smith’s mid-eighteenth-century Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J. C. Bryce [Oxford, 1983] and Campbell’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 2 vols. [London and Edinburgh, 1776]).↩

65Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Men’, in Wollstonecraft, 28.↩

66Michaelson, 28.↩

67‘Sincerity was, in fact, a style valued by many of the radicals. Paine made much of the clarity and reasonableness of his prose as contrasted with the bombast of Burke’ (Tim Fulford, Romanticism and Masculinity [London, 1999], 72-3, my emphasis).↩

68As David Simpson has observed, citing representations of Wollstonecraft by Godwin and others, ‘[l]ike the Jacobins and the Germans, Wollstonecraft is… imagined as at once overrational and quite irrational, hypermasculine and hyperfeminine, and doubly damned’ (Simpson, 106).↩

69Blakemore, Intertextual War, 41.↩

70Fulford, Romanticism and Masculinity, 76.↩

71Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Men’, 18.↩

72Ibid. 18.↩

73Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, in Wollstonecraft, 210.↩

74Ibid. 74.↩

75Ibid. 237.↩

76See Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, and Repetition¸ ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, 1983). ↩

77Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, 271.↩

78Blakemore, Intertextual War, 83.↩

79Lowell T. Frye, 96. ↩

80Boulton, 167-176.↩

81Ibid. 176.↩

82Quoted in Blakemore, Crisis in Representation, 140.↩

83Paulson, 46.↩

84Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and the Progress of the French Revolution and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe (New York, 1975), 8.↩

85Ibid. 20-21.↩

86Ibid. 289.↩

87Ibid. 281.↩

88Ibid. 282.↩

89Ibid. 289.↩

90Ibid. 290, 291.↩

91Ibid. 281-282.↩

92Ibid. 309, 247.↩

93In the early nineteenth century, Thelwall began a new career as an elocutionist, establishing an Institute of Elocution and promoting the science of speech until he returned to the rhetorical podium following the Peterloo massacre in 1819. Though Nicholas Roe has argued in his entry on Thelwall in the DNB that his elocutionary activities ‘merged the scientific and political ideals that had formed two aspects of his career in the 1790s’, Howell has observed that in the early nineteenth century ‘by stressing instruction in voice and gesture as a mechanical rather than an intellectual or philosophic matter, the elocutionists made rhetoric appear to be the art of declaiming a speech by rote, without regard to whether the thought uttered were trivial or false or dangerous; and under auspices like these rhetoric became anathema to the scholarly community and sacred only to the anti-intellectuals within and outside the academic system’ (Howell, 713, my emphasis).↩

94Roe, 171.↩

95Paulin, 79.↩

96Thelwall, Peaceful Discussion, and not Tumultuary Violence the Means of Redressing National Grievances (London, 1795). Other examples of Thelwall’s published rhetorical politics in this period include his periodical The Tribune (London, 1795-6]: and The Speeches of John Thelwall (London, 1795).↩

97Thelwall, Rights of Nature (London, 1796).↩

98Thelwall, Poems Written Chiefly in Retirement 1801 (Oxford, 1989), and Poems Written in Close Confinement in the Tower and Newgate (London, 1795). For a recent account of the trials of Thelwall’s relationship with Coleridge, see the chapter on ‘Coleridge, Thelwall, and Oppositional Friendship’ in Gurion Taussig, Coleridge and the Idea of Friendship, 1789-1804 (Newark and London, 2002), 177-213. ↩

99Roe, 175.↩

100John Thelwall, ‘Sober Reflections on the Seditious and Inflammatory Letter of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke to a Noble Lord’, in The Politics of English Jacobinism, ed. Gregory Claeys (University Park, Pennsylvania, 1995), 370. The ignis fatuus, ‘[a] phosphorescent light seen hovering or flitting over marshy ground, and supposed to be due to the spontaneous combustion of an inflammable gas (phosphuretted hydrogen) derived from decaying organic matter; popularly called Will-o’-the-wisp, Jack-a-lantern, etc.’ (OED) was to become an important figure of obscurity in Coleridge’s writings, related to the indeterminacy of the divine and the demonic in the appearance of any figure for guidance.↩

101Thelwall, 339. ↩

102Ibid. 337.↩

103Ibid. 373.↩

104Ibid. 364, 366.↩

105Ibid. 369.↩

106Ibid. 386.↩

107Ibid. 386.↩

108Michael Scrivener, ‘John Thelwall’s Political Ambivalence: Reform and Revolution’, in Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775-1848 (London, 2000), 70.↩

109Ibid. 69.↩

110Edmund Burke, Reflections, in Burke, 8.215.↩

111Blair, 1.13.↩

112Ibid. 1.183.↩

113Boulton, 209, my emphasis.↩

114Priestley, A Course of Lectures, 109.↩

115Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View, 352.↩

116As Marilyn Butler has remarked, ‘the international style of the Enlightenment was in reality neither universal nor popular, but the lingua franca of an aristocracy’ (Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries (Oxford, 1981), 68).↩

117Howell, 669.↩

118Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, 55.↩

119Thelwall, 370.↩

120Paine, The Rights of Man, 182.↩

121Ibid. 210.↩

122Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View, 17.↩