Chapter 10 - The French Revolution

Summary

Called by P. B. Shelley ‘the master-theme of the epoch’, the French Revolution profoundly affected British literature, giving new energy to the nascent Romantic movement while dissolving the boundary between literature and politics. This chapter examines the polarisation of British public opinion in the aftermath of the Revolution and the contestation of its ideas in the 1790s ‘pamphlet war’. The chapter analyses eye-witness accounts of the Revolution by British expatriates such as H. M. Williams and the dilemmas faced by British radicals when war was declared and the Revolution took an increasingly violent course. Wordsworth’s autobiographical account of these conflicts in The Prelude (1805) is set against later imaginative reconstructions of the Revolution by Shelley, Carlyle and Dickens and the more indirect expression of revolutionary shock in Gothic fiction. The chapter concludes by noting the linguistic legacy of the Revolution experience, which created much of the political vocabulary by which we still discuss ideas of nationhood.