SOURCE: Stabler, Jane. “Guardians and Watchful Powers: Literary Satire and Lyrical Ballads in 1798.” In 1798: The Year of the “Lyrical Ballads,” edited by Richard Cronin, pp. 203-30. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998.

[In the following essay, Stabler discusses Lyrical Ballads in the context of British satirical writings against the perceived threat of Jacobinism.]

An enhanced sense of the dynamics of satire in the Romantic period may modify our understanding of the early reception of Lyrical Ballads. For a long time Lyrical Ballads was accepted uncritically as one of the originary texts of Romanticism. Readers followed William Hazlitt's ‘sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry […] something of the effect that arises from the turning up of the fresh soil, or of the first welcome breath of Spring’.¹ Hazlitt was, of course, looking back on the experiment of Lyrical Ballads with a desire to make its ‘breath’ part of the ‘spirit of the age’. But if we suspend, for a moment, Hazlitt's narrative of vernal growth, it may be possible to reveal the equally characteristic relationship between the Lyrical Ballads and the mud-slinging of contemporary satire. Robert Mayo placed Lyrical Ballads firmly in its literary context in his 1954 article ‘The Contemporaneity of Lyrical Ballads’.² Mayo illustrated how in its movement towards “‘nature’” and “‘simplicity’” Lyrical Ballads followed ‘a new orthodoxy’ of late eighteenth-century poetry rather than creating an entirely fresh poetic mode.³ Mayo's article does not identify satire among the other ‘way-worn paths’ used by Wordsworth and Coleridge, but many of the characteristics of the volume he mentions (‘heterogeneity’, ‘unevenness’, ‘miscellaneousness’, ‘the sense of particularity’) are generic to satire.⁴

In 1798 satire was being used with great effectiveness by supporters of the British government against the perceived threat of Jacobinism. In January 1798 The Pursuits of Literature (Part I of which dated from May 1794) was published in a complete form whilst the Anti-Jacobin (which had been launched to coincide with the opening of Parliament on 20 November 1797) published its final triumphant number with the close of session, 9 July 1798, confident that it had “‘done the State some service’”.⁵ Correspondence in literary journals and periodicals in 1798 reveals a widespread curiosity about the authorship of the anonymous Pursuits of Literature and Mathias's poem and notes prompted a vigorous exchange of views about the role of satire and the proprieties of literary engagement.

One of the main targets of satire by Mathias and the Anti-Jacobin was literature of sensibility and one of the most effective weapons against it was parody, which had the power to change sentimental encounters into satirical ones. Readers of poetry in 1798 would be accustomed to figures of distress who either would induce tears of sympathy or would be exposed as pretenders, beguiling and abusing the reader's sensitivity. Contextual signals would guide the reader to decode the appearance of each displaced individual but there must have been moments of uncertainty as, for example, when the Gentleman's Magazine published a parody of Southey from the Anti-Jacobin amongst other specimens of recent poetry. It is difficult to assess how this might have altered readers' responses to simply plaintive verses.

The proximity of satirical and sentimental figures was not new in 1798—Jaques in As You Like It, for example, is infamously capable of both raillery against society and empathy with the stricken deer—but by 1798 the reader's decision about how to respond to outbursts against society had acquired a new political urgency and this may be seen in contemporary interpretations of the figure of Jaques. Myrddin Jones has shown how, by the later eighteenth century, Jaques was perceived as ‘a man “of extreme sensibility”’, a reading which was strengthened by the way the contemporary theatre omitted lines from the play which were critical of Jaques.⁶ Jaques' ‘weeping and commenting’ comprehends the voices of both sentimental and satirical moralist, but the crucial decision about the degree to which sentiment and satire inflect each other rests with the reader. In a similar way, the mixture of sentimental and satirical materials in Lyrical Ballads might be seen to join a debate about the function of poetry and problem of reading which since the mid 1790s had been energized by the argumentative voices of the satirists.

Although the authors of Lyrical Ballads leave little evidence of any discussions they might have had about the satiric wars of 1798, satire was a weapon with which they had both experimented.⁷ In summer 1795 Wordsworth began work with his friend Francis Wrangham on an English ‘imitation’ of Juvenal's eighth satire, and he remained interested in this production as late as 1797 (when Wrangham asked for permission to publish the work in 1806, Wordsworth asked him to destroy it). Wordsworth's letter to William Mathews about the Juvenal experiment, written from Racedown, March 1796, follows eighteenth-century precedents by creating a European lineage for satire:

Not […] entirely to forget the world, I season my recollection of some of its objects with a little ill-nature, I attempt to write satires! and in all satires whatever the author may say there will be found a spice of malignity. Neither Juvenal or Horace were without it, and what shall we say of Boileau and Pope or the more redoubted Peter. These are great names, but to myself I shall apply the passage of Horace, changing the bee into a wasp to suit the subject.

          Ego apis matinae
More modoque, & c, & c.(8)

By linking Horace and Juvenal together, Wordsworth was undoing a distinction that had usually been sustained by eighteenth-century critics. James Beattie, for example, had distinguished between comic satire (against human foibles) and serious satire (against vice and crime). Beattie argued further that Horatian satire was more acceptable to contemporary literary taste than Juvenalian satire: ‘I find that the generality of critics are all for the moderation and smiling graces of the courtly Horace, and exclaim against the vehemence and vindictive zeal of the unmannerly Juvenal.’⁹

Variations on the division between Horace and Juvenal were common. Friedrich Schiller, for example, separated ‘punitive’ satire (Juvenal, Swift, Rousseau) from ‘laughing’ satire (Cervantes, Fielding, Sterne).¹⁰ The 1790s saw a return to the harsher mode of Juvenal. Coleridge's Notebooks show that in 1795-6 he considered ‘2 Satires in the manner of Donne’ and ‘a Satire addressed to a young Man who intended to study medicine at Edinburgh’;¹¹ he later collaborated with Southey on the satirical ‘Devil's Thoughts’ (1799). And in 1797 Coleridge had grievously offended his friends Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd when he published his ‘Sonnets, attempted in the Manner of “Contemporary Writers”’ which mercilessly parodied the yielding susceptibility of verses published by Southey, Lloyd and Lamb in 1795-6.¹² As we shall see below, this composition shows Coleridge adopting what would read like an ‘anti-jacobin’ mode of satire against his friends and allies.

Coleridge defended his parodic sonnets by claiming that they were ‘good-natured’ and therefore not satirical.¹³ It is not, however, simply the tone but the timing of parody which gives it a satirical edge. As Coleridge realised by the time he composed the entry on ‘Parodies’ for his and Southey's Omniana: ‘Parodies on new poems are read as satires; on old ones […] as compliments. A man of genius may securely laugh at a mode of attack, by which his reviler in half a century or less, becomes his encomiast.’¹⁴

Coleridge, we are assured by Cottle, ‘had a singular taste for satirising himself’ but an examination of the ‘Sonnets by Nehemiah Higginbottom’ makes it difficult to believe that they do not contain a hint of the ‘spice of malignity’ identified by Wordsworth as the essence of satire.¹⁵

Oh I do love thee, meek Simplicity!
For of thy lays the lulling simpleness
Goes to my heart, and soothes each small distress,
Distress tho' small, yet haply great to me,
'Tis true on Lady Fortune's gentlest pad
I amble on; and yet I know not why
So sad I am! but should a friend and I
Frown, pout and part, then I am very sad.
And then with sonnets and with sympathy
My dreamy bosom's mystic woes I pall;
Now of my false friend plaining plaintively,
Now raving at mankind in general;
But whether sad or fierce, 'tis simple all,
All very simple, meek Simplicity!(16)

Coleridge fastens on the mawkish self-absorption of cultivated ‘simplicity’ and the repetitions, ‘'tis simple all, / All very simple’ evoke the monotonous register of some poems of sensibility. As David Fairer has argued, this sonnet ‘went beyond mere parody to the very heart of the matter’.¹⁷ Coleridge would later inveigh against the depiction of satirical personalities but as his target here is nakedly personal, parody mutilates the main organ of sensibility, the feeling heart. Indeed, Coleridge is using exactly the same techniques as those deployed by the Anti-Jacobin when it claimed ironically that it hoped to ‘acquire, by dint of repeating after them, a more complete knowledge of the secret’ of the ‘Bards of Freedom’.¹⁸ The colonization of satire within the voice of sentiment in Coleridge's sonnet anticipates the mocking alliterative lines of ‘New Morality’ devoted to ‘Sweet Sensibility, who dwells enshrined / In the fine foldings of the feeling mind’. The subsequent critique of Rousseau fastens on exactly the same accusation of mawkish self-pity and inane ‘babble’:

Sweet child of sickly Fancy!—her of yore
From her loved France Rousseau to exile bore;
And, while 'midst lakes and mountains wild he ran
Full of himself, and shunned the haunts of man,
Taught her o'er each lone vale and Alpine steep
To lisp the story of his wrongs, and weep;
Taught her to cherish still in either eye,
Of tender tears a plentiful supply,
And pour them in the brooks that babbled by.(19)

The third rhyme on ‘eye’, which breaks the pattern of rhyming couplets, captures the same soft insistence as Coleridge's sonnet. The final line of this extract echoes the depiction of the melancholy youth in Gray's elegy:

‘His listless length at noontide would he stretch,
‘And pore upon the brook that babbles by.(20)

As Myrddin Jones has pointed out, Gray's poet bears a strong resemblance to the sentimentalized figure of Jaques who

                                                                                                    lay along
Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out
Upon the brook that brawls along this wood

(II.1. 35-7),

and it appears that Canning's poem is anti-Jaques as much as anti-Jean-Jacques or anti-jacobin. By referring to Gray's Elegy, Canning shows how closely the instability of the sensible man and the vehemence of the satirist are related. Coleridge, too, has channelled the spontaneous overflow of simplicity into satire. In 1797-8, therefore, we can see jacobin and anti-jacobin writers satirizing the figure who ‘[raves] at mankind’ or ‘[shuns] the haunts of man’.²¹

Coleridge admitted that the sonnets had been written with a desire to ‘ridicule’ what he saw as,

that affectation of unaffectedness, of jumping & misplaced accent on common-place epithets, flat lines forced into poetry by Italics (signifying how well & mouthis[h]ly the Author would read them) puny pathos & c & c—the instances are almost all taken from mine & Lloyd's poems.²²

This goes to the heart of a paradox about the method of parodic satire: it relies on a multiplication or augmentation of traits in the object to be satirized in order to correct a perceived imbalance. The reader has to cooperate in this augmentation, assisted by the emphases afforded by rhyme, repetition or italics. The latitude of parodic satire, however, may also be seen as a malicious distortion of the truth. William Godwin allows us to pinpoint this operation. In the variants to Book IV of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Godwin included the following reflections on sincerity:

If I spoke to a man of my own faults or those of his neighbour, I should be anxious not to suffer them to come distorted or exaggerated to his mind, or to permit what at first was fact, to degenerate into satire […] An impartial distribution of commendation and blame to the actions of men, would be the most operative incentive to virtue. But this distribution at present scarcely in any instance exists. One man is satirised with bitterness, and the misconduct of another treated with inordinate lenity. In speaking of our neighbours we are perpetually under the influence of sinister and unacknowledged motives. Every thing is disfigured and distorted.²³

Placing ‘fact’ and ‘satire’ as opposing categories, Godwin's comments reveal an author's anxiety about the instability of interpretation. Traditionally, satire was often criticized for relying too heavily on references of topical particularity—Mathias talks of the need to ‘descend to minutiae’ and ‘stoop to trifles’ to create ‘the full effect and completion of Satire’.²⁴ Godwin, however, believes that satire hinders objectivity because its rhetoric of feeling is capable of modifying ‘things’.²⁵ Godwin's comments also highlight the way that satire, as it is directed at individuals and particularities, is a peculiarly intimate—‘neighbourly’—mode. This last characteristic allows us to see satire working as a covert parallel to literature of sensibility.

‘HOME TO THE BOSOM’: THE MORAL FORCE OF SATIRE

The authors of the Anti-Jacobin and The Pursuits of Literature were careful to set out the aims and justifications for their use of satire: both works foregrounded national and domestic concerns. For later editions of his poem Thomas Mathias augmented his ‘Introductory Letter to A Friend’ with reflections on the present state of society and a history of satire:

I see, with sorrow and fear, the political constitutions of Europe falling around us, or crumbling into dust, under the tyrannical Republick of France […] Government and Literature are now more than ever intimately connected […] In my opinion, the office of a Satirist is by no means pleasant or desirable, but in times like the present it is peculiarly necessary.²⁶

Mathias then went on to admit that ‘private malignity’ and the idea of anonymous attack might be seen as ‘incompatible with Christian practice’. ‘But’, runs his qualification,

if Satire is an instrument, and a powerful instrument, to maintain and enforce publick order, morality, religion, literature, and good manners […] the community may authorize and approve it. The authorized instruments of lawful war are lawful.

Satire never can have effect, without a personal application. It must come home to the bosoms, and often to the offences of particular men. It never has it's [sic] full force, if the author of it is known or stands forth; for the unworthiness of any man lessens the strength of his objections. This is a full answer to those who require the name of a satirical poet.²⁷

In its Prospectus, the Anti-Jacobin expressed concern for the fabric of society and a desire to serve

those persons (a very large part of the community) who must have found themselves, during the course of the last few years, perplexed by the multiplicity of contradictory accounts of almost every material event that has occurred in that eventful and tremendous period.²⁸

As Steven Jones observes, the Anti-Jacobin's moral concern with “‘the bands of social order’” as opposed to individual rights ‘provides a highly significant mirror image of the proclaimed values of the polemical writers on […] the side of parliamentary reform’.²⁹ As we shall see below, the Anti-Jacobin and the self-justifying ‘Advertisement to the Lyrical Ballads’ shared aims and methods. From the start, the magazine announced that its particular purpose was to correct distorted representations:

It is the constant violation, the disguise, the perversion of the Truth, whether in narrative or in argument, that will form the principal subject of our Weekly Examination: and it is by a diligent and faithful discharge of this duty—by detecting falsehood, and rectifying error, by correcting misrepresentation, and exposing and chastising malignity—that We hope to deserve […] the approbation of the Country.³⁰

With this announcement, the Anti-Jacobin cleverly linked all the malign attributes of satire (‘violation … perversion … malignity’) to its adversaries. In its first issue, the editors explained how the Jacobin poetry of the day sprung from ‘exaggeration’ or ‘direct inversion of the sentiments and passions’ which have traditionally animated the poet. In order to strip off the multiple disguises of the Jacobin poet, the editors of Anti-Jacobin determined to

select from time to time from among those effusions of the Jacobin Muse which happen to fall in our way, such pieces as may serve to illustrate some of the principles on which the poetical as well as the political doctrine of the New School is established—prefacing each of them, for our readers' sake, with a short disquisition on the particular tenet intended to be enforced or insinuated in the production before them—and accompanying it with an humble effort of our own, in imitation of the poem itself, and in further illustration of its principle.³¹

Parody was to be one of the main tools of the Anti-Jacobin. By basing its critiques in ‘humble … imitation’, the editors attempted to evade the charge of misrepresentation or distortion.³² Partisan responses to their work when it was collected together in 1799 show that these efforts were effective. In January 1799, the British Critic applauded the publication of the fourth edition of the collected Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner. In Two Volumes:

Its excellence is universally allowed. Learning, taste, spirit, elegance, harmony, and invention, are not, however, its sole merits […] its true and genuine claims to applause […] consist in attacking, with unparalleled dexterity and humour, that hateful medley of ignorance, vanity, spleen, and irreligion, which under the impudently assumed mask of philosophy and candour, labours to destroy all the endearing charities of life, to weaken or tear asunder all the bands of society, and to render man a selfish, brutified, and unprincipled savage! […] The didactic poems form a most excellent satire on false taste and bad poetry, united with bad principles.³³

The British Critic's perception of ‘candour’ as a ‘mask’ in this critique of Jacobinism is interesting. ‘Candour’ was claimed by poets of the ‘New School’ and by Tory satirists. Mathias began his ‘Advertisement’ to the seventh edition of The Pursuits of Literature (1798) by aligning himself with the practitioners of candour: ‘No man of candour and reflection could wish to see any mistakes continued without correction …’, and he commented in a subsequent address that if his poem were read ‘with candour and attention’, the reader would discover ‘that uniformity of thought and design, which will always be found in the writings of the same person, when he writes with simplicity and in earnest.’³⁴ Mathias's confident ‘always’ disguises an anxiety about interpretation. The etymological origins of the word candour in the Oxford English Dictionary—dazzling whiteness, innocency, purity and sincerity—link it with the moral qualities of simplicity—free from duplicity, innocent and harmless, honest, open, straightforward. Candour and simplicity, therefore, should represent the touchstones of the writer who is free from malignity. The presence of the 1798 ‘Advertisement’ with its comments on readerly ‘judgment’ suggests that Wordsworth and Coleridge were alert to the possibility of naive or deliberate misapprehension of their work and made some attempt to establish a correct reading.

In July 1798 the Anti-Jacobin poem ‘New Morality’ included a stern warning about the dangers of tolerance and pluralism:

‘Much may be said on both sides.’—Hark! I hear
A well-known voice that murmurs in my ear,—
The voice of Candour.—Hail! most solemn sage,
Thou drivelling virtue of this moral age,
Candour, which softens party's headlong rage.
Candour, which spares its foes;—nor e'er descends
With bigot zeal to combat for its friends.
Candour—which loves in see-saw strain to tell
Of acting foolishly, but meaning well;
Too nice to praise by wholesale, or to blame,
Convinced that all men's motives are the same;
And finds, with keen discriminating sight,
Black's not so black; nor White so very white.(35)

This passage imitates in order to criticize a probing analysis of individual motivation. ‘Candour’ here has become an inversion of its proper meaning and ushers in—with ‘keen discriminating sight’—a grey area of moral ambiguity referred to scathingly by the Anti-Jacobin as ‘taste in morals’. What we can see here is a conservative resistance to a new relativity of moral judgement. Whereas Mathias claimed ‘candour’ as the discriminating prerogative of the satirist, the candour of sensibility threatened satire because it undermined the possibility of stable opposition between what is and what ought to be. Tory satire in the 1790s aimed to eradicate uncertainty and ambiguity about ‘almost every material event’, but this mission was thwarted by newly sensible and contradictory accounts of satire itself.

The literary debates of 1798 highlight the problem of reading: how was poetry to be understood? In a culture which lacked agreed moral perspectives how could the motives of different readers be directed? Between 1797 and 1799 the major literary journals ran a series of articles and correspondence on satire, fuelled by publications elaborating on or contesting The Pursuits of Literature. The British Critic, for example, reviewed the Fourth Part of Mathias's satire in its issue for September 1797. As the Tory bias of the journal dictated, the work was greeted with enthusiasm:

At length this unknown poet, much enquired for, but enquired for in vain, has concluded his greatest literary career: and though with the wild and wandering foot of a satirist, he sometimes treads on spots, which we could wish to be inviolate, we cannot withhold from him our strong commendation as the patriotic champion of morality, religion, and sound principles, literary and political.³⁶

Here, the reviewer half-admits that the satire ‘wanders’ in the direction of violation, but withdraws from the charge because the work is believed to be politically ‘sound’. Continuing in this vein of approbation for The Pursuits of Literature, in February 1798 the magazine included a review of The Progress of Satire: an Essay in Verse. With Notes, containing Remarks on the Pursuits of Literature (1798). The author of The Progress of Satire was quoted as objecting to personal satire as ‘a vehicle for prejudice and malignity’ and likening satire to ‘a species of tyranny over literature’. The British Critic disagreed with this, arguing that ‘satire must be, and always has been, in part temporary and personal’ but it welcomed the rest of the essay including the ‘lively and strong specimen … of parody’ in the Preface.³⁷ Support for Mathias's work continued into 1799 when the January issue carried a review of A Translation of the Passages from Greek, Latin, Italian, and French Writers, quoted in the Prefaces and Notes to the Pursuits of Literature. … To which is prefixed, A Prefatory Epistle, intended as a general Vindication of the Pursuits of Literature, from Various Remarks which have been made upon that Work (1798). At the end of the article the reviewer admitted, ‘We have not very anxiously examined the translations’; the review's purpose was to join in attempts to rescue the author of the Pursuits from ‘the fangs of malignity’:

Literature indeed, at this hour, can hardly be divided from the principles of political safety. Satire also has a character which she was never before called upon to assume. Sensum coelesti traxit ab arce! She must now co-operate with the other guardians and watchful powers of the state, in her degree.³⁸

The rest of this reprinted extract is devoted to an attack on ‘The Monstrous Republic’ and the review concludes that ‘Whatever contest calls forth, at this moment, such animated and glowing expressions of genuine patriotism, may be hailed as auspicious.’³⁹ This review highlights the extent to which literary contests were inseparable from debates about political principles: for the British Critic, Mathias's work was admirably anti-French, but from a different political perspective, the satire of The Pursuits could present its own threat to English culture.

Between 1797 and 1799, the Gentleman's Magazine published conflicting views about the merits of The Pursuits, raising objections to the way in which satire could transgress the dictates of taste. In August 1797 a letter published in the magazine from J. Milner decried the motives of the anonymous assailant who ‘hides himself in order to take his aim, and, having shot his dart, plunges into the promiscuous crowd […] in every way deserving of contempt and oblivion’.⁴⁰ In January 1798, a correspondent called ‘Candidus’ was offended by the ‘malignity’ of the attack made by Mathias on the Literary Fund: ‘the pen that could attempt to revile a benevolent public charity, must […] have been prompted by a base and unfeeling heart’ and the writer was alarmed by the way that an earlier supporter of The Pursuits was ignorant of the ‘avidity’ with which ‘satirical publications are read, and how little enquiry is made by most readers as to the truth of any insinuations contained in them’.⁴¹ Again we see an anxiety about satire's influence spreading over the community: satire escapes from being a purely literary form and is able to impress its design on the hearts and minds of its readers. In April 1798, the correspondent ‘Toby Belch’ reflected on the work of Junius and The Pursuits of Literature:

however the vice and follies of the age call forth the keen weapon of the satyrist, yet it should be wielded with discretion. To wound the innocent, and let the guilty escape, speaks little judgement in a censor general, and stands a record of garrulity rather than a mark of acute observation.⁴²

The accusation of ‘garrulity’ is interesting because it overlaps with a Johnsonian satirical trope of babbling women (or feminized men) who were portrayed producing copious amounts of sentimental literature. The correspondent's preference for restraint and ‘acute observation’ may remind us of Coleridge's reservations about the loquacious narrator of ‘The Thorn’: ‘it is not possible to imitate truly a dull and garrulous discourser, without repeating the effects of dullness and garrulity.’⁴³ Coleridge's point might also be applied to works of satirical parody. The Anti-Jacobin's imitations of Southey replicated ‘the effects of dullness and garrulity’, but it is not imitation alone which makes satire garrulous. Like sentimental literature, satirical poetry is performative, relying on rhetorical excess to communicate moral urgency. As with Coleridge's satirical injection of ‘mouthishness’ in the Nehemiah Higginbottom sonnets, the collapse of poetry into garrulity or prattle may be witnessed in satire and sentiment.

We can trace a further confluence of satiric and sentimental discourse in the return of Candidus to the columns of the Gentleman's Magazine in May 1798. Still campaigning against supporters of The Pursuits, Candidus accused the author of assuming ‘a dictatorial authority in literature’ and went on to accuse Mathias's defender of being

insensible of the distinction between private conversation and public writings; and that much raillery; which may well be borne from our friends in social circles, becomes ill-natured, and sometimes even malignant, when published to the world.

This critique of satire is particularly interesting because it matches almost exactly the advice which was given to Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd by the British Critic in 1798:

It is a fault of the present period, that young writers are too apt to imagine that what is pleasing to themselves and the circle of their friends, must necessarily be acceptable to the public. But this is far from being the case, and though to young writers we would not assume the severity of Aristarchus, we must, nevertheless, advise them to read more and publish less.⁴⁴

Here, we can see how an alleged confusion of the boundaries between private and public decorum is combined with a suggestion of ‘garrulity’ and self-indulgence.

That Wordsworth and Coleridge were aware of these pitfalls in literary composition is indicated in the way the ‘Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads’ carefully prepares the reader for a mixture of public and private spheres:

The tale of Goody Blake and Harry Gill is founded on a well-authenticated fact which happened in Warwickshire. Of the other poems in the collection, it may be proper to say that they are either absolute inventions of the author, or facts which took place within his personal observation or that of his friends.⁴⁵

Further examples from the debate about satirical propriety in reviews of verse by Peter Pindar could be cited, but it is clear already that Lyrical Ballads (1798) appeared at a time when critics of the day were preoccupied with a vain attempt to distinguish rival social forces of poetry. Supposedly opposing modes shared a desire to influence their readers and a wish to be accepted as candid and free from ulterior motive. Both satire and the literature of sensibility rely on the affective power of personal intimacy or physical immediacy, together with a focus on the commonplace.

Wordsworth and Coleridge shared this disputed territory and the rest of the essay will be devoted to tracing the satirical legacy in the proclaimed aims, the content and the particular voices of Lyrical Ballads.

‘EACH BALLAD IS A TALE OF WOE’: JACOBIN SATIRE IN LYRICAL BALLADS

When Dr Burney reviewed Lyrical Ballads (1798) in the Monthly Review, he pondered the ways in which the poetry seemed to criticize contemporary society: ‘seemed’ is important because Dr Burney remained uncertain. According to his review, ‘The Female Vagrant’ ‘seems to stamp a general stigma on all military transactions’ and he found himself equally unsure about the implications of ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’:

The hardest heart must be softened into pity for the poor old woman; and yet, if all the poor are to help, and supply their wants from the possessions of their neighbours, what imaginary wants and real anarchy would it not create?⁴⁶

In ‘The Dungeon’, Dr Burney identified the pernicious moral slippage of democratic liberalism which had been noted in the Anti-Jacobin's verses on ‘candour’. ‘Here candour and tenderness for criminals seem pushed to excess’, Dr Burney said, and he objected to ‘the drift’ of ‘The Convict’:

What a description! What misplaced commiseration! […] We do not comprehend the drift of lavishing that tenderness and compassion on a criminal, which should be reserved for virtue in unmerited misery.⁴⁷

His comments on ‘Old Man Travelling’ also convey a sense that something is ‘misplaced’:

Finely drawn, but the termination seems pointed against the war, from which, however, we are now no more able to separate ourselves, than Hercules was to free himself from the shirt of Nessus. The old traveller's son might have died by disease.⁴⁸

Judging from Dr Burney's comments on ‘The Convict’, we might have expected that the old man should have represented an example of ‘virtue in unmerited misery’, one ‘suffering untimely death from accident, injustice or disease’. Dr Burney's wish that the son might have died from a disease shows how his own political sympathies refract the effect of the poems.

The review of Lyrical Ballads in the Tory British Critic also identified a tendency to criticize contemporary society:

‘The Female Vagrant,’ is a composition of exquisite beauty, […] yet we perceive, with regret, the drift of the author in composing it; which is to show the worst side of civilized society, and thus to form a satire against it. But let fanciful men rail as they will at the evils which no care can always prevent, they can have no dream more wild than the supposition, that any human wisdom can possibly exclude all evils from a state which divine Providence has decreed.⁴⁹

Satire is here characterized as ‘fanciful’, almost an out-growth of sensibility and, as with Dr Burney's contemplation of ‘all the poor’, the reviewer's gesture to ‘all evils’ questions the significance of individual cases. Both reviewers question the right of the poet to protest about particular social ills, but on this point, they seem to be several steps behind Wordsworth and Coleridge. Eventually, the British Critic reviewer acknowledged that Lyrical Ballads did not offer ‘any offensive mixture of enmity to present institutions, except in one or two instances, which are so unobtrusive as hardly to deserve notice’.⁵⁰ Such ‘cordial approbation’ of Wordsworth's attempts ‘to recall our poetry’ from ‘fantastical excess’ suggest that in 1798 Lyrical Ballads was received as a soundly reactionary volume. Parallels between the literary satire of the Anti-Jacobin and the parodic voices of Lyrical Ballads indicate that Wordsworth's and Coleridge's volume was part of a more conservative reaction to the radical writing of sensibility than the revolutionary reputation of Lyrical Ballads has hitherto allowed.

‘THAT JUDICIOUS DEGREE OF SIMPLICITY’: ANTI-JACOBIN PARODY IN LYRICAL BALLADS

Readers who saw in Lyrical Ballads the work of a democratic ‘levelling Muse’ must have been surprised to find their appreciation mirrored in the Anti-Jacobin Review whose vigilant reviewers completely failed in 1800 to identify anything subversive in the volume:

It has genius, taste, elegance, wit […] indeed the whole volume convinces us that the author possesses a mind at once classic and accomplished, and we, with pleasure, recommend it to the notice of our readers as a production of no ordinary merit.⁵¹

This is perhaps puzzling until we reflect on how much Lyrical Ballads had in common with Tory satire. The imperious ‘Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads’ followed by its miscellaneous collection of verse makes the shape of the 1798 volume very like that of the collected Anti-Jacobin (1799) and this similarity is reinforced by the aesthetic principles which Wordsworth and Coleridge held in common with Mathias, Canning and his coadjutors. The most obvious of these is a highly critical attitude towards the taste of the time: the ‘Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads’ refers to ‘the prevalent fault of the day’ chiming with Mathias's diagnosis of ‘fatal paths’ and ‘vitiated taste’. Lyrical Ballads summons the authority of ‘elder writers’ together with ‘a long continued intercourse with the best models of composition’. Again, we can identify a corresponding appeal in The Pursuits of Literature for the criteria of ‘the greatest masters of ancient and legitimate composition’. Mathias claims to represent ‘strength, simplicity, dignity’ and what is ‘natural’, and looks to ‘human actions, and human principles’; Wordsworth and Coleridge set out to present ‘a natural delineation of human passions, and human incidents’.⁵²

In expanding the ‘Advertisement’ into the ‘Preface of Lyrical Ballads,’ Wordsworth carried his prose argument further towards the ideals of Tory satirists. They shared, for example, a common satirical disdain for sub-standard publications: the Anti-Jacobin's concern about multiplying ‘vehicles of intelligence […] in a proportion nearly equal to [the] encreased demand’ anticipates Wordsworth's perception of the pernicious effects of ‘the rapid communication of intelligence’.⁵³ Likewise, Wordsworth's contempt for ‘frantic novels’ is a late addition to the criticism heaped by writers like Mathias on ‘whining or frisking in novels, til our girls' heads turn wild with impossible adventures’;⁵⁴ Wordsworth's disparagement of ‘sickly and stupid German tragedies’ echoes the well-established dislikes of the Anti-Jacobin and the Tory strictures of Hannah More.

If we step beyond the ‘Advertisement’ to the 1798 volume and examine attitudes to the relationship between individual and community, we can trace a shared methodology in the verse of Lyrical Ballads and the work of contemporary satirists. The theme of social connection was crucial to the satirists as it justified the employment of satire in the first place (as we have seen above) and because the effect of satire on the reader would carry the work into the community. Mathias advertised his principle as “‘No Man Liveth Unto Himself’”:

I speak not of a romantick, impracticable, general good, but of the specifick benefit which an individual may and can confer on his fellow-creatures, in his own limited sphere of action.⁵⁵

This emphasis on the importance of active benevolence is mirrored in the Anti-Jacobin's opposition to

that new and liberal system of Ethics, whose operation is not to bind but to loosen the bands of social order; whose doctrine is formed not on a system of reciprocal duties, but on the supposition of individual, independent, and unconnected rights.⁵⁶

Canning's perception formed the basis of the Anti-Jacobin's attack on the Jacobin's approach to the poor:

A human being, in the lowest state of penury and distress, is a treasure to the reasoner of this cast. He contemplates, he examines, he turns him in every possible light, with a view of extracting from the variety of his wretchedness new topics of invective against the pride of property. He, indeed, (if he is a true Jacobin), refrains from relieving the object of his compassionate contemplation; as well knowing that every diminution from the general mass of human misery must proportionably diminish the force of his argument.⁵⁷

This led to the parody of Southey in ‘The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-Grinder’ and ‘The Soldier's Friend’. In both these poems, the Jacobin speaker of the poem cannot establish a truly charitable relationship with the member of the community he addresses; in the first case kicking the knife-grinder who begs a sixpence before exiting ‘in a transport of Republican enthusiasm and universal philanthropy’, and in the second case bribing a little Drummer Boy with half-a-crown to distribute the works of Tom Paine in the barracks and ‘Tell them the sailors are all in a mutiny’. Charity fails to connect speaker with listener in these poems, duplicating the communicative impasse of Southey's original poem:

Cold is thy hopeless heart, even as Charity—
Cold are thy famish'd babes—God help thee, widow'd One!(58)

God is invoked in a situation where fellow humans can do nothing. It is nevertheless difficult to read Southey's poem without feeling that the speaker shrugs off responsibility with the end of the poem. The problem of the poet's relationship with the inarticulate and widespread suffering he describes emerges throughout Lyrical Ballads (1798) in poems which shadow the Tory satirist's attitude to the philanthropic poet. The possibility that Wordsworth joins in these critiques of the ostentatiously democratic author was noticed briefly by Marilyn Butler in an essay on Hazlitt where she argues that ‘an unmistakably detached and even satirical attitude to the poet's persona emerges in “Anecdote for Fathers” and “We Are Seven”’.⁵⁹ I would like to explore this idea a little further to see to what extent we can locate a satirical critique of ‘enthusiasm and universal philanthropy’ in other poems.

Thematically, of course, the poems are critical of poetic self-absorption but the authors often go further than this and offer a stylistic parody of sentimental excess. In ‘The Foster Mother's Tale’, the imprisoned youth sounds like another version of Rousseau in ‘New Morality’ as he sings in his dungeon

a doleful song about green fields,
How sweet it were on lake or wild savannah,
To hunt for food, and be a naked man,
And wander up and down at liberty.

Dr Burney's remark on the fragment is pertinent, ‘if it means anything, [it] seems to throw disgrace on the savage liberty preached by some modern philosophers’⁶⁰: in other words, he reads the poem as a satire. The bathos of this poem's ending ‘'tis supposed, / He lived and died among the savage men’ invites comparison with the Anti-Jacobin's brilliant parody of idealistic jacobin drama. In the Preface to The Rovers; or, the Double Arrangement readers of the Anti-Jacobin were introduced to the precepts of Godwinian plays:

to substitute, in lieu of a sober contentment, and regular discharge of the duties incident to each man's particular situation, a wild desire of indefinable latitude and extravagance,—an aspiration after shapeless somethings that can neither be described nor understood—a contemptuous disgust at all that is, and a persuasion that nothing is as it ought to be.⁶¹

To represent the type of the sensitive malcontent, the Anti-Jacobin offered the character of Rogero who in June 1798 made his first appearance in The Rovers singing in a dungeon. He was rescued in a series of comically compressed stage directions in a later instalment of the play.

The existence of Rogero alerts us to the way that Wordsworth and Coleridge were dealing with what was perceived to be jacobin stock-in-trade. The ambiguous presentation of these figures in Lyrical Ballads, however, usually leaves room for satirical inflection. The poem immediately following the abrupt denouement of ‘The Foster Mother's Tale’ offers another version of the disillusioned genius whose story ‘left upon a seat in a yew-tree […] on a desolate part of the shore’, is told with gothic exaggeration: ‘Stranger! those gloomy boughs / Had charms for him’; ‘Stranger! henceforth be warned …’ Again we feel that the picture of the tortured youth is suspiciously overdone, that narrative excess verges on parody. Dr Burney thought that ‘The Yew Tree seems a seat for Jean Jacques; while the reflections on the subject appear from a more pious pen’.⁶² Dr Burney's detection of an impulse to correct the sentimental excess of the Jean Jacques figure is further strengthened by the next poem, ‘The Nightingale; a Conversational Poem, written in April’ in which Coleridge gives a walk-on part to ‘some night-wandering Man, whose heart was pierc'd / With the remembrance of a grievous wrong’. This distempered or melancholy poet is always alluded to ‘with levity’ in Lyrical Ballads which may be one of the reasons that the volume was initially welcomed by Tory journals like the British Critic and the Anti-Jacobin.⁶³

Recurrently in Lyrical Ballads, the speaker of the poem encounters another individual and listens to a tale of suffering. The tales vary in length from the seven parts of the Ancient Mariner's ‘ghastly aventure’ to the four-line reply of the Old Man Travelling. Southey's bathetic narratives of distress were parodied by the Anti-Jacobin as we have seen, but the ambiguous presentation of the effect of taletelling in Lyrical Ballads suggests that Wordsworth and Coleridge also criticized the poet's easy assumption of the role of friend to humanity.

Particularly in the first ten poems of the collection, conversational or narrative exchanges only offer a sense of dislocation, of frustrated communication or a failure to connect.⁶⁴ The first narrator can contemplate but is unable to relieve; the second narrator can speak but telling offers no relief. This impasse is signalled in a series of unexpected narrative deflections and terminations: ‘the wedding guest / Turn'd from the bridegroom's door’; the youth in ‘Lines left upon a seat in a Yew-Tree’ goes out into the world and ‘At once, with rash disdain […] turned away’; at the end of the Female Vagrant's tale, ‘She ceased, and weeping turned away’; the pattern is repeated in ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’:

Young Harry heard what she had said,
And icy-cold he turned away,

One of the most obviously blocked encounters between humanitarian poet and representative of the poor occurs in ‘The Last of the Flock’ where the object of compassion seeks to avoid contact with the poet from the start of the poem:

He saw me, and he turned aside,
As if he wished himself to hide.

This attempt to escape from the prying concern of the poet who addresses him as “‘My friend’” is understandable so far as the man would rather be alone with his lamb than explain himself to a poet. We sense that the poet may be setting himself up as an unwelcome intruder but the man's pathetic situation is not unmingled with comedy. His obsessive counting of his flock and his children creates the exaggerated type of parody assisted by the comic predictability of ‘From ten to five, from five to three […] And then at last, from three to two’. Counting is of course a minute form of attention to material particulars, and as such it is fundamental to poems which parody enumerated grievance. The Anti-Jacobin attempted to undermine Southey's catalogues of distress by foregrounding metrical imitation and calculating syllables as laboriously as Southey amasses instances of distress:

Wearisome Sonnetteer, feeble and querulous,
Painfully dragging out thy demo-cratic lays—
Moon-stricken Sonnetteer, ‘ah! for the heavy chance!’(65)

In ‘The Last of the Flock’, Wordsworth's use of the repetitive force of rhyme and an iterative structure seems aware of the possibility that both the subject and form of the poem run the risk of self-parody. As Hazlitt observed in reference to Canning's work, any doubt about the feeling in a serious work can turn it instantly into burlesque.⁶⁶ Like other narratives of distress, the poem ends without a response from the poet. Dr Burney expressed disapproval: ‘If the author be a wealthy man, he ought not to have suffered this poor peasant to part with the last of his flock.’ His response is not as naive as it sounds: the uneasy role of the poet in ‘The Last of the Flock’, moving between interrogation and silence, offers a subtle critique on jacobin sensibility which would assume that the transference of the tale would be enough. Our sense of rupture as the tale ends is another measure of the space that had been identified by the Anti-Jacobin between the rights of individual subjectivity and ‘the general mass of human misery’.

Wordsworth's exposure of iniquities in poor-relief finds a twin in the Anti-Jacobin for 19 March 1798 where a parody of Chevy Chase gives a dialogue between the Duke of Northumberland and the taxing-man:

‘Nay,’ quoth the Duke, ‘in thy black scroll
          Deductions I espye—
For those who, poor, and mean, and low,
          With children burthen'd lie
‘And though full sixty thousand pounds
          My vassals pay to me,
From Cornwall to Northumberland,
          Through many a fair countree;
‘I at St. Martin's Vestry Board,
          To swear shall be content,
That I have children eight, and claim
          Deductions ten per cent.’

The ballads of 1798 alert us to the way in which domestic distress in the 1790s had become something of a cliché, a formula which could be slotted into numerous different contexts. Part of the experiment of Lyrical Ballads seems to be an attempt to reinvest these satirical stock figures with a reformed literature of feeling. Wordsworth and Coleridge, however, make their contribution after literature of sensibility has been thoroughly rinsed by satire. This may account both for the playful knowingness of the poems and the way in which the volume spawned a multiplicity of contradictory accounts.⁶⁷

In ‘Simon Lee’ we can see this doubled effect as the familiar grotesque body of protest poetry totters into view like an animated Gillray cartoon:

And he is lean and he is sick,
His little body's half awry
His ancles they are swoln and thick;
His legs are thin and dry

The disfigurement of this portrait exhibits a satirical ‘spice of malignity’ as the reader is invited to enjoy the way that rhyme renders a body composed of ludicrous contrasts—‘sick … awry … thick … thin and dry’. These rhetorical excesses are advertised four stanzas later when we are told that ‘the more he works, the more / His poor old ancles swell’. The lines have been identified as ‘self-parody’ by Gilbert Highet (who also locates parody in the details of teeth-chattering in ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’), while J. F. Danby refers to ‘the scandalous particularity of the swollen ankles’ and argues that the reader is led from the matter-of-fact to the ‘indulgently sympathetic’ in a process which includes humour but then transcends it.⁶⁸ I would like to argue that ‘Simon Lee’ exemplifies the destabilizing confluence of satirical and sentimental attention to physical objects without offering a resolution of the two modes:

O reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle reader! you would find
A tale in every thing.

The archness of the tone points to the poem's excess of artifice as it effects an encounter between a caricature of poverty and a caricature of the Jacobin poet—a man with the leisure to contemplate suffering and, as the Anti-Jacobin suggested, the capacity to regard ‘penury and distress’ as a ‘treasure’.

If we place Lyrical Ballads in the context of the 1798 satirical battles we can see how it develops out of a perceived crisis in the relationship between poet and society. A strong contributing factor to this crisis was a fear that the identity and function of poetry had been brought into question by increasing numbers of authors.⁶⁹ Mathias referred to this unsettling change in his Preface to the Fourth Dialogue,

I am scarcely able to name any man whom I consider as wholly ignorant. We no longer look exclusively for learned authors in the usual place, in the retreats of academick erudition, and in the seats of religion. Our peasantry now read the Rights of Man on mountains, and moors, and by the wayside; shepherds make the analogy between their occupation and that of their governors […] Our unsexed female writers now instruct, or confuse, us and themselves in the labyrinth of politicks.⁷⁰

Despite the pervasive irony with which Lyrical Ballads treats the figure of the sentimental poet, it is noteworthy that the volume's array of peasantry and shepherds and ‘unsexed females’ are rigorously controlled and directed by the learned author who produces the ‘Advertisement’ and, eventually, the lengthy Prefaces to the poems. This voice, as we have seen, has more in common with a desire to correct and restrain than with the more waywardly candid drift of sensibility. Lyrical Ballads is one of many works in the late 1790s which aims to curb the excesses of ‘too much liberty’. In the last poem of Lyrical Ballads (1798) Wordsworth turned to nature as the ‘guide, the guardian’ and ‘anchor’ of moral inner life; at the same time, Canning, Gifford, Frere and Mathias were looking for ‘guardians and watchful powers of the state’ but as the subsequent careers of Wordsworth and Coleridge would eventually prove, they all had the national interest at heart.⁷¹

Notes

1. William Hazlitt, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, edited by P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1930-34; hereafter ‘Howe’), XVII, 117.

2. PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America], LXIXX (1954) 486-522; hereafter ‘Mayo’.

3. Mayo, p. 495.

4. Mayo, p. 495.

5. Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, edited by Charles Edmonds (London: Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1890; hereafter, Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin), p. 270.

6. Myrddin Jones, ‘Gray, Jaques, and the Man of Feeling’, in RES [Review of English Studies], XXV, 97 (1974), 39-48 (39).

7. Stephen M. Parrish discusses traces of satire in A Poet's Epitaph, An Evening Walk, Descriptive Sketches and the Prefaces to Lyrical Ballads. See ‘Wordsworth as Satirist of His Age’ in The Age of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays on the Romantic Tradition, ed. by Kenneth R. Johnston and Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1987).

8. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. by Ernest De Selincourt, 2nd edn, revised by Chester L. Shaver, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), I, 169-70. The reference to Horace is to Odes IV.2.27: Wordsworth compares himself to a small bee (or wasp) labouring to create poetry as opposed to the addressee of the poem who, in the context of Horace's Ode, is more suited to sing of great civic events.

9. Beattie, Essays (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1776), p. 662.

10. See René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950, 7 vols (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955-91), I, 244-5. Schiller classifies satire as a sentimental mode and claims that it ceases to be poetry if it descends to invective or libel; likewise satire ceases to be poetry if it falls into ‘pleasantry’.

11. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Kathleen Coburn, Bollingen Series (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957; repr. 1980), I, 171; 174.

12. For a detailed exploration of radical and conservative implications in the language of Lloyd's and Lamb's poetry, see David Fairer, ‘Baby Language and Revolution: the Early Poetry of Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb’, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, 74 (April 1991), 33-51; hereafter Fairer.

13. See Coleridge's discussion of the sonnets as ‘reform’ in Biographia Literaria, ed. by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols, Bollingen Series (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), I, 26-9; all subsequent references are to this edition.

14. Robert Southey and S. T. Coleridge, Omniana or Horae Otiosiores ed. by Robert Gittings (Arundel, Sussex: Centaur Press, 1969), p. 119. Marcus Wood discusses Coleridge's later loathing of parody: see Radical Satire and Print Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 120.

15. Joseph Cottle, Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey (Highgate: Lime Tree Bower Press, 1970), p. 162.

16. Romantic Parodies 1797-1831, ed. by David A. Kent and D. R. Ewen (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992), p. 33.

17. Fairer, p. 45.

18. Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, p. 14.

19. Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, p. 275. For a recent introduction to the technique of parody in this publication, see Graeme Stones, ‘Parody and the Anti-Jacobin’, The Wordsworth Circle, XXIV, 3 (Summer 1993), 162-6.

20. ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, ll. 103-4 (The Poems of Gray, Collins and Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969; repr. 1976)).

21. Whilst they were undoubtedly significant targets of satire, Lloyd and Lamb showed themselves to be adroit practitioners of satire: Lloyd's novel Edmund Oliver (1798) contains a thinly disguised satire on Mary Hays and Coleridge whilst Lamb can be seen satirizing Godwinian rhetoric in ‘Living Without God in the World’.

22. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956-1971) I, 357-8. In December 1797 Coleridge wrote to Southey to protest ‘how you could apply to yourself a Sonnet written to ridicule infantine simplicity, vulgar colloquialisms, and lady-like Friendships—I have no conception […] I am sorry to perceive a disposition in you to believe evil of me’ (Griggs, I, 359). His comments suggest the way in which the very personal application of parody could be received as satiric malignity.

23. Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. by Mark Philp, 7 vols (London: William Pickering, 1993), IV, 161-2.

24. Thomas J. Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature: A Satirical Poem in Four Dialogues With Notes, 8th edn (London: T. Becket, 1798; hereafter Pursuits of Literature), p. 12.

25. For the importance of physical objects in literature of sensibility see Jerome J. McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 26-32 and David Fairer, ‘The Sentimental Transfer: Transient Meanings in Mackenzie and Sterne’, in Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics, ed. by Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998). An interest in the way the imagination is capable of modifying ‘our physical nature’ may be seen in Wordsworth's 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge's criticism of Wordsworth's ‘minute adherence to matter-of-fact in character and incidents’ may be found in Biographia Literaria, chapter 22 and is recalled by Hazlitt in ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’.

26. Pursuits of Literature, pp. 5-8.

27. Pursuits of Literature, p. 9.

28. Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, p. 3. For competing discourses about social fabric see Claude Rawson, Satire and Sentiment 1660-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 168-77.

29. Steven E. Jones, Shelley's Satire: Violence, Exhortation, and Authority (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994), p. 14.

30. Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, pp. 2-3.

31. Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, pp. 13-14.

32. Kent and Ewen argue that during the Romantic period ‘parody is the literary shape taken on by social satire’ and they suggest that because parody is a form of intertextuality it questions the Romantic notion of ‘literature as unique inscription’ and the self-positioning of the Romantic ‘individualistic ego […] as the center of moral and political authority’ (Romantic Parodies, 1797-1831, pp. 8-9).

33. British Critic, XIII (January-June 1799), 49-56 (51-2).

34. Pursuits of Literature, p. 276.

35. Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, pp. 277-8.

36. British Critic, X (July-December 1797), 303-6.

37. British Critic, XI (January-June 1798), 127-32 (128-9).

38. British Critic, XIIII (January-June 1799), 36.

39. British Critic, XIII, 35-8 (38).

40. Gentleman's Magazine, LXVII, 660: this issue also published ‘The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-Grinder’.

41. Gentleman's Magazine, LXVIII, 24.

42. Gentleman's Magazine, LXVIII, 288.

43. Biographia Literaria, Chapter 17 (II, 49).

44. British Critic, XI, 678.

45. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798), facsimile edition (Oxford and New York: Woodstock Books, 1990), p. 1v; all quotations are taken from this edition unless otherwise stated.

46. Review in appendix to Lyrical Ballads, ed. by R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Methuen, 1963; repr. 1971; hereafter ‘Brett and Jones’), pp. 321-3 (322).

47. ‘The Convict’ and ‘The Dungeon’ in Lyrical Ballads (1798) recall Wordsworth's criticism of sadistic law in his earlier Juvenalian satire.

48. Brett and Jones, p. 323.

49. British Critic, XIII, 364-9 (366-7).

50. British Critic, XIII, 369.

51. Quoted in Romantic Bards and British Reviewers: A Selected Edition of the Contemporary Reviews of the Works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats and Shelley, ed. John O. Hayden (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 8.

52. Pursuits of Literature, pp. 10; 20.

53. Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, p. 1.

54. Pursuits of Literature, p. 58.

55. Pursuits of Literature, p. 31.

56. Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, p. 6.

57. Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, p. 21.

58. Romantic Parodies, p. 30.

59. Marilyn Butler, ‘Satire and the Images of Self in the Romantic Period: The Long Tradition of Hazlitt's Liber Amoris’ in English Satire and the Satiric Tradition edited by Claude Rawson, assisted by Jenny Mezciems (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp. 209-25 (211). For the suggestion that ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ ‘consciously refutes Godwin's belief that lying is unnatural to children and is only the product of an evil social system’ see Brett and Jones, p. 285. The commentary by Brett and Jones opens the possibility that one dynamic in Lyrical Ballads is anti-Godwinian satire.

60. Brett and Jones, p. 321.

61. Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, p. 202.

62. Brett and Jones, p. 322.

63. An interesting development on this theme occurs in ‘To Joanna’, one of the later additions to Lyrical Ballads. Here, the poet is laughed at by Joanna (who is then admonished by the way her laugh becomes ‘a loud uproar in the hills’). The story introduces ‘those dear immunities of heart // Engender'd betwixt malice and true love’—thus embracing the modes of satire and sensibility.

64. This pattern continues in the augmented 1800 volume where confusion about where to turn is a recurring feature of the characters in the poems. In ‘Nutting’, for example, the poet turns away from the bower but in ‘Tintern Abbey’, he emphatically inscribes a turn to nature.

65. Romantic Parodies, p. 29.

66. ‘He has no enthusiasm or sensibility to make him overlook the meanness of a subject, or a little irregularity in the treatment of it, from the interest it excites: to a mind like his, the serious and affecting is a kind of natural burlesque […] To make any description or sentiment ludicrous, it is only necessary to take away all feeling from it […] The poetry, the heart-felt interest of every thing escapes through his apprehension, like a snake out of its skin, and leaves the slough of parody behind it.’ (Howe, XI, 158). Hazlitt's comments alert us to the way that context shapes the perception of parody and the way in which the withdrawal or questioning of the spirit of sensibility is enough to make the ‘romantic’ absurd.

67. Including contradictions between Wordsworth and Coleridge about the effect of ‘The Thorn’, for example, which Coleridge identified as ‘a laughable burlesque on the blindness of anile dotage’ (Biographia Literaria, Chapter 17 (II, 48)).

68. Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy of Satire (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1962), pp. 78-9. Danby's reading is quoted from Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads Casebook, ed. by Alun R. Jones and William Tydeman (London: Macmillan, 1972; repr. 1984), p. 202.

69. In the “Advertisement” (1798) poetry is referred to as ‘a word of very disputed meaning’.

70. Pursuits of Literature, p. 238.

71. In a panel discussion at the ‘Romantic Crossings’ NASSR Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, in November 1996, Kenneth Johnston suggested that Wordsworth may be the ‘bashful genius, in some rural cell’ invoked in ‘New Morality’. If this is so, it strengthens the case for Lyrical Ballads as a long-awaited riposte to jacobin ‘falsehood’. See Kenneth Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).

I would like to record my thanks to David Fairer and Nicholas Roe for reading and commenting on early drafts of this material.