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D I S A F F E C T E D PA RT I E S
 Disaffected Parties
Political Estrangement and the Making
of English Literature, 1760–1830

J O H N OW E N H AVA R D

1
 1
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 Preface

After the US presidential election in November 2016, I held a discussion for

students to share their feelings about the stunning upset that saw Hillary Rodham
Clinton, the Democrat widely favoured to win, lose to the Republican candidate.
The accompanying reading, from that week’s lecture, was from William
Wordsworth’s Prelude. One student was visibly shocked when I pointed out her
similarity in age to the poet when his own political hopes were destroyed. For those
who believed, as those who experienced the French Revolution as a blissful dawn
had believed, that recent progress had not only been inevitable but was assured to
continue, the abrupt collapse of expectations had been shattering. The surprise
vote for ‘Brexit’ that summer occasioned its own shock and disbelief. These events
were experienced not only as surprise reversals (or belated revelations) of public
opinion but as the stripping away of existing certainties: a violent rending aside of
political life’s decent drapery and pleasing illusions. Among those shocked by
the outcome of the American election, an emphasis emerged on taking solace
in intimate bonds and small circles, a particularly Wordsworthian quantum of
solace.1 (Clinton herself did a lot of walking in the woods.) Yet initial shock also
quickly gave way—in contrast with the pervasive resignation and palpable malaise
following the British vote to leave the European Union—to renewed commit-
ment: the kind of perpetual resistance that we particularly associate with the sec-
ond-generation Romantics. In his blistering sonnet ‘To Wordsworth’, Percy Shelley
accused the poet not only of having reneged on his earlier attachment to the revo-
lutionary cause but of a more fundamental betrayal: turning his back on a blind
and battling multitude to stand above the fray, encased in solitude. Lord Byron
developed a more idiosyncratic critique, voicing disdain for Wordsworth’s lowly
origins and appeals to ‘natural’ language. Byron’s own poetic concerns with irrep-
arable loss and the sublimation of self nonetheless resonated deeply with those of
the older poet. Yet rather than retreating into political quietism, Byron occupied a
more volatile remove. The prototypical Byronic hero, Lord Macaulay noted, was
‘proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a
scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection’.2
In his own person, Byron adopted a complex political stance and public role that
combined jadedness and misanthropy with a version of the mental fight and spir-
ited resistance witnessed in his Romantic contemporaries and precursors, continuing

1 The circulation of the following quote by Anna Freud after the election exemplifies this response:
‘I agree with you wholeheartedly that things are not as we would like them to be. However, my feeling
is that there is only one way to deal with it, namely to try and be all right oneself, and to create around
one at least a small circle where matters are arranged as one wants them to be.’ Quoted in Elisabeth
Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud: A Biography (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 18.
2 Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘Moore’s Life of Byron’, in Macaulay: Prose and Poetry, ed.
G. M. Young (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 543.
Figure 1. ‘The Royal Chace’ (1770). As the king’s representatives pursue radical printers
from horseback, the anonymous satirist ‘Junius’ lurks in an oak tree, watching on as frac-
tures develop in the ground below.
(Source: British Museum, AN364953001. © Trustees of the British Museum.)
 Preface vii

to claim the mantle of stringent ‘opposition’ (not least to the onset of a newly
emboldened ‘Toryism’ taking hold at home and abroad) alongside his distinctive
brand of cynicism.
This stark divide, between Wordsworth’s retreat from political activity into
smaller circles and the renewed commitment, voiced by Shelley if not also by
Byron, to political transformation even in the face of its apparent impossibility,
cuts to the heart of an abiding predicament.3 Fuller reckoning with these so-called
generations of Romantic writing, building upon fuller attention to their reckoning
with each other, reveals the complicated interplay between quietistic retreat and
revolutionary horizons, the bonds between men (usually men) in small numbers
and the commitment to mankind as a whole. The pervasive sense, exemplified in
late Romantic texts including Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and the final cantos of
Byron’s Don Juan, that political hopes, the human species, and even the planet
itself have been exhausted, casts these respective responses to political disillusion-
ment further into relief. In the face of dismantled certainties and impending crises,
retreat and rebellion emerge less as opposites embraced by mortal enemies than
alternatives embraced by men united in clinging to whatever hopes they can, on a
darkling plain and shrinking shoreline. These various movements, between salving
quietism and renewed idealism, between the depressed belief that possibilities have
been exhausted and the radical hope that spring cannot be far behind, provide
paradigms—particularly when considered in their dynamic interplay with each
other—for thinking about our own moment of eroding political certainties and
deepening planetary despair. ‘There is nothing in disenchantment inimical to art’,
E. P. Thompson has maintained, drawing a distinction between the layered disen-
chanted state and the apostasy he characterizes as ‘self-mutilation and the immod-
erate reverse of attachments’.4 The ‘withdrawal from the vortex of an unbearable
political conflict’ may cause one to clutch at sources of limited optimism, but ‘[t]here
must be some objective referent for social hope, and it is one trick of the mind to
latch onto an unworthy object in order to sustain such hope’—as much the case,
Thompson reminds us, for Mary Wollstonecraft as for Wordsworth.5
These complementary responses to political disappointment are not the subject
of this book. Although my discussions of political disenchantment, renewed com-
mitment, and more elusive kinds of disengagement, cynicism, opposition, and

3 The student mentioned above, incidentally, inclined squarely to the latter course: ‘I can appreci-
ate the calmness in Wordsworth’s poetry, I can understand wanting to go into nature, needing to take
some time to put yourself back together, to get back on track. I definitely had to do that for a day. But
it’s not enough. We can’t retreat like he did, we can’t give up. We just can’t.’
4 ‘Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon’, in The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age
(New York: Norton, 1997), 37. For Thompson, apostasy involves relapsing into ‘received patterns of
thoughts and feelings’ and a psychology that includes that ‘peculiar and vengeful kind of bitterness
which a certain kind of man finds for an idealized mistress who has disappointed him’ (62, 68, 63). ‘It
is easy enough to make fun of Wordsworth’s apostasy, which was in some senses abject, in his last forty
years’, Thompson concedes; ‘less easy is to conceive how he upheld, through all the preceding fifteen
years, so great a confidence that “fair seasons yet will come, and hopes as fair.”’ Compare his suspicion
about apostasy as a ‘stimulant to the critical faculties’ (including for jaded leftist intellectuals writing
in the Partisan Review closer to his own moment) (64).
5 ‘Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon’, 59, 68.
viii Preface

recalcitrance take inspiration from studies of writers animated by the French

Revolution or estranged by its failure, this study does not address Wordsworth and
his generation of Romantic poets directly, whether critically or sympathetically
(except for Robert Southey, the former radical turned Poet Laureate, whom Byron
scathingly derided for having turned out ‘Tory at last’). With the crucial exception
of Byron, ever an exceptional figure, I do not address Romantic writers animated
by the ‘spirit’ of revolution, whether radical politicians like John Thelwall, radical
nationalists like Sydney Owenson, or radical outsiders like William Blake. The
French Revolution was unprecedented: electrifying and inspiring, galvanizing
and terrifying. The subsequent decades transformed the relationships—real and
imagined—between political organization, religious practice, public feeling, and
literary expression.6 Rather than foregrounding the French Revolution and its frac-
tal refashioning across subsequent decades, this book instead adopts a diagonal
course through the long Romantic period that locates these developments within
broader contexts and against deeper histories of unrest.7 In the first instance, this
means approaching the post-1789 period in relation to the global ‘age of revolu-
tions’ that began several decades earlier; this book pays particular attention to the
neglected discontent and unrest within Britain during the decades surrounding

6 These developments and the enduring transformations to which they helped to give rise have
attracted extensive attention. See, inter alia, E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
(New York: Vintage, 1966); John Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Georgina Green, The Majesty of the People: Popular Sovereignty
and the Role of the Writer in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Kevin Gilmartin, Print
Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996); Andrew Franta, Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007); Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the
Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Daniel E. White,
Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Mark
Canuel, Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002); Harriet Guest, Unbounded Attachment: Sentiment and Politics in the Age of the French
Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
7 Although beyond the scope of this book, the Haitian Revolution presents one—though by no
means the only—example of political disaffection in this period that promised to trouble Euro-
Atlantic society and its constitutive exploitation of unfree racialized labour. Emphasizing the global
scope of upheaval in the 1790s, Ashley L. Cohen reminds us that ‘[i]n Ireland, England, India, and
Jamaica, the Jacobin crisis was fueled by extreme levels of worker disaffection and resistance to Britain’s
imperial-capitalist world order’ and contends that this ‘global Jacobin crisis threw into relief the ease
with which processes of exploitation, dispossession, and political and economic oppression subverted
boundaries between the domestic and the imperial, free and unfree labor, the East and West Indies.’
‘Wage Slavery, Oriental Despotism, and Global Labor Management in Maria Edgeworth’s Popular
Tales’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 55 (2014), 195. The West Indian slave plant-
ations obliquely alluded to in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee present
an outer limit for this book’s more delimited concerns with disaffected political energies, amplifying
the forces that promise to disrupt politics ‘at home’—a designation already fractured by the appendage
of Ireland and parallel exclusion of the English working classes from political recognition—with
reminders of the wider world in which the domestic polity was inescapably implicated. Given the
limited control of Sir Thomas Bertram over Mansfield Park, David Bartine and Eileen Maguire, draw-
ing upon Edward Said’s seminal discussion of the inseparable binds between ‘home’ and overseas
imperial activity in Austen’s novel, intriguingly ask whether we must not ‘entertain the possibility of
some sort of parallel creeping disintegration and potential rebellion’ at his Antigua slave plantation.
‘Contrapuntal Critical Readings of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park: Resolving Edward Said’s Paradox’,
Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 11 (2010), 47.
 Preface ix

the American Revolution. This book similarly locates the 1760–1830 period
within histories of partisan contestation that span the long eighteenth century as a
whole. In addition to looking ahead to transformed governing practices that
accompanied the onset of nineteenth-century liberalism, this book looks back-
wards: to the tangled legacies bound up with Whig and Tory party labels and
increasingly rickety post-1688 political structures.8 The disenchantment, reimag-
ined horizons, and radical contestation (including the rise of a mass public and
incipient democratic reforms) following the French Revolution remain crucial to
thinking about political estrangement in this period. Yet in giving those develop-
ments too much centrality, this book contends, we risk eclipsing the variously
distanced, conflicted, antagonistic, and simply confused relationships to politics
that I emphasize here—from familiar and mundane kinds of grumbling about
‘politics’, to more subtle challenges to the status quo, to the heterogeneous con-
stituencies that hovered at the margins of political activity and the alternative per-
spectives these disaffected parties helped make available. Bringing an untidier
understanding of the histories shaping political activity together with attention to
an expanded period of upheaval, this book accordingly returns a wider array of
relationships with politics and understandings of ‘political’ writing to view, argu-
ing in particular for an expanded understanding of the ‘parties’ animating political
activity. Disaffected Parties thus examines the often uncertain relationships between
disaffected responses to politics of various stripes and the changing terrain of pol-
itical activity, during a moment in which partisan dynamics were at times fluid
(in contrast with the ‘Rage of Parties’ in the early eighteenth century and subsequent
instances of partisan deadlock) and when politics more widely was not yet domin-
ated by the regulatory, governmental norms and liberal ideals that took hold in the
nineteenth century—and that continue to shape, if not distort, our understanding
of politics in the present.
Byron’s own disaffection encompassed his radical detachment from the country
of his birth and the trappings of his earlier life; it extended at its furthest, Swiftian
extreme to his repudiation of human society as such. This radical estrangement
nonetheless coincided with an abiding attachment to his Whig party identity. At a
remove both from the remnants of his party and the changing guises of oppositional
political activity (he was no fan of the ‘rabble’), his writings show how continuing
attachment to partisan identities—even amidst political estrangement and the
opening of altogether more radical possibilities—might reveal alternative political
horizons, even and perhaps especially as those commitments confronted their own
frustration, incoherence, or obsolescence. These competing tendencies are on dis-
play in a journal for January 1814, in which Byron noted the ‘sad enmity with the
Whigs’ created by a friend’s criticisms of Charles James Fox, the earlier Whig hero,
in an article for the Quarterly Review. ‘As for me,’ Byron continued, in a now familiar

8 The terms ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ carried wayward legacies. Established as political identities in the
later seventeenth century, they were first employed as insults, derived from names for Scottish religious
rebels and Irish Catholic highwaymen. See Mark Knights, The Devil in Disguise: Deception, Delusion,
and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 47–8.
x Preface

statement of cynical attitudes towards politics, ‘by the blessing of indifference,

I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments;
and, as it is the shortest and most agreeable and summary feeling imaginable, the
first moment of an universal republic would convert me into an advocate for single
and uncontradicted despotism.’9 Yet even amidst his growing disaffection, which
became deepened by further revolutionary failures on the continent, Byron articu-
lated an ongoing—if antagonistic—attachment to the Whigs. ‘I shall adhere to my
party,’ he noted in these same remarks, ‘because it would not be honourable to act
otherwise’ but, ‘as to opinions,’ he continued, in yet another reversal, ‘I don’t think
politics worth an opinion [. . .] I have no consistency, except in politics; and that
probably arises from my indifference on the subject altogether.’
Byron’s estrangement would eventually lead him to other shores. But as closer
attention to his writings makes clear, his detachment from England jostled together
with a variety of competing impulses, including the increasingly coherent drive to
‘take some part’ back in political activity. These commitments also looked back to
an earlier period of political dynamism. Byron’s poem The Vision of Judgment staged
a trial of the late George III at the gates of heaven (in which, we learn, the angels
‘all are Tories’). Rather than looking solely to the recent international bloodshed
and domestic repression following the French Revolution, however, Byron also
looked back to the events of preceding decades, including the American Revolution
and the related emergence of a dynamic transatlantic opposition movement.
Among the witnesses that appear at the gates of heaven, Byron summoned, in
shadowy guise, an anonymous satirist whose incendiary attacks on the political
establishment during this period extended to the king himself. ‘Junius’ became a
phenomenon in the early 1770s—analogous to the twenty-first-century graffiti
artist ‘Banksy’—who remained unidentified even as he galvanized public attention
with scabrous, ad hominem letters in the Public Advertiser newspaper deriding the
recently crowned monarch and his ministers. In his own poem on the death of the
late king, Southey had made the anonymous satirist a figure for the dangerously
unshackled, monstrously inchoate mob. In a journal entry a few months prior to
his remarks on ‘adher[ing] to my party’, by contrast, Byron had expressed his
admiration, describing Junius’s writings as those of a ‘good hater’.10
Aside from his temperamental affinity with Junius’s anger and wit, Byron’s
remarks explain his attraction to this earlier moment of political activity as one in
which sharp satire could converge with active political commitment and when
detachment from the established parties of political activity could coincide with
renewed openings by which to take a part in politics. Looking back on recent decades
in his Short History of the Opposition During the Last Session of Parliament (1779),

9 Journal entry, 16 January 1814. Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973–82), 3.242.
10 Journal entry, 17 November 1813. Byron’s Letters and Journals, 3.215. The notion of a ‘good
hater’, embraced with notorious zeal by William Hazlitt, looked back at least to Samuel Johnson, who
applied the phrase—ironically in light of its later adoption by the anti-establishment Hazlitt—to a
man he esteemed for his hostility to the Whigs. See Kevin Gilmartin, William Hazlitt: Political Essayist
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 17.
 Preface xi

James Macpherson had noted that, while the political opposition had always been
‘heterogeneous’, recently ‘the heat of resentment, and rage of disappointment’ had
‘gradually melted them into one mass; and they revived in themselves the name,
though little of the principles of Whigs’.11 Junius was both product and represen-
tative of this earlier moment, in which both the practical organization and affective
contours of political activity were in flux—creating new avatars for political com-
mentary and vehicles for partisan activity. At the same time, Junius acquired a
uniquely volatile reputation, at once a political scandal and public spectacle. His
letters (supplied in the collected edition with a motto, ‘Stat Nominis Umbra’, allud-
ing to his uniquely shadowy reputation) invoked rage and disdain towards politi-
cians and the wider enterprise of politics but also the more elusive possibilities
made available by a changing political landscape. ‘The Royal Chace’ (1770) gave
visual expression to the various possibilities that Junius channelled (Figure 1). The
print depicts state power, as embodied in the king and his prosecutors, hunting
down representatives of the radical press, including those associated with the bur-
geoning transatlantic opposition cause. Dark divides in the ground beneath sug-
gest growing fissures in the country at large. Above stands Junius, in the archetypally
English oak tree, his face cross-hatched by shadow. We do not know whether he is
about to spring, throw missiles, or do something worse. In the opacity of his inten-
tions and the ambiguity of his position, Junius presents an apt figure for the writers
addressed by this study, neither abstracted into a realm of anonymity nor potenti-
ality but an unassimilated element, off to the side, watching (and waiting). In
returning to this spectral, ghostly figure, Byron not only underscored his attach-
ment to an oppositional ‘Whig’ identity, inflected by the unique character of this
earlier moment of inchoate unrest. He thereby summoned the potential for authors
to re-enter the political arena: to pivot from an uncertain remove and to take a part
back in politics. This book asks how the spectral residues of long-standing partisan
disputes and the perpetually contested and unfinished nature of political activity
more widely animated literary forms. In identifying authors, of various political
stripes and levels of engagement, with the disaffected parties of a changing political
world, it presents a revised account of English literature and its relationship with
politics during this seminal, transitional period. At the same time, in returning to
an extended period of unrest, it reveals some of the ways that variously disaffected
impulses coincided with the changing parties of political activity. The writers
addressed in this book show how estrangement from politics might in turn create
new openings from which to return to the fray and may thus speak anew to our
own age, in which disaffected energies and the parties of political activity remain
in an unfixed, unstable, unpredictable relationship to each other.

11 James Macpherson, A Short History of the Opposition During the Last Session of Parliament
(London: 1779), 2–3.
 Acknowledgements

Appeals to luck are the first recourse of the privileged. I have received a tremendous
amount of support and encouragement, even from my boyish days. At the
University of Leeds, Bridget Bennett and Jay Prosser helped me forge pathways
from my home town to the United States. A fellowship from the British Association
for American Studies took me to the University of Virginia, where Steve Arata,
Alison Booth, Alan Howard, Eric Lott, David Morris, Chip Tucker, and Jennifer
Wicke were champions. Paul Hunter became an early advocate, taking much of
what I would have to say about the eighteenth century on good faith (and provid-
ing excellent lunches at King’s Cross). Jerry McGann first drew me into the vale of
magical dark mysteries.
I am immensely grateful to Jim Chandler for his immeasurable support and our
cloudless friendship. He first steered me towards a project that would draw upon
both my British and American training. Any success I have had is thanks to his
peerless example. Eric Slauter opened multiple doors for me and has my gratitude
for the methodological provocations of his own work and his confidence in my
own. At the University of Chicago, Bill Brown, Tim Campbell, Bradin Cormack,
Heather Keenleyside, Lisa Ruddick, Josh Scodel, Richard Strier, Robin Valenza,
and Chris Warren all made time and space of various kinds available. Elaine
Hadley, trailblazing scholar of politics unusual, has been a particular inspiration;
I feel fortunate to know her also as a person. Lauren Berlant’s pawprints are all
across these pages. Frances Ferguson came on board the project at a crucial stage,
suggesting changes that meant everything. I thank them all for making my time at
Chicago an especially golden one.
At conferences, I have been able to hop, Mr Spectator-like, between multiple
circles, beginning with the welcome faces of James Horowitz and Toni Bowers.
Tobias Menely let me take him on a wild goose chase through downtown Los
Angeles and has remained a guiding spirit. Helen Deutsch let me drive her to New
York (and on a ferry!) and shared love and smarts on Johnson. Claire Connolly
saved me from embarrassing mistakes (and nicely assured me I should not be
embarrassed). Cindy Wall took bright interest in cynicism in rainy Chicago. Jon
Mee clued me into the memorandum discussed in Chapter 1. Kevin Gilmartin,
Mark Knights, Trevor Burnard, Gordon Turnbull, Jim Caudle, and Kathleen
Wilson are the best at what they do and made my work better. These spirits all
make our field a better one, none more so than Sandra Macpherson, master cynic.
David Bartine, Ben Bateman, John Cheng, Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud, Bradin
Cormack, Jessie Reeder (who also performed her reputed wizardry on the
Conclusion), Matthew Sangster, Jordan Stein, and Timothy Stewart-Winter read
critical sections of the Introduction at crucial times. Ala Alryyes gently steered me
towards a better title. A discussion with Sewell Chan at the New York Times office
in London in the dark final days of 2016 inspired the opening contrast between
xiv Acknowledgements

Wordsworthian despair and mental fight. Emily Rohrbach and Nancy Johnson
gave me their indispensable perspectives on Austen—and warm encouragement.
Andrew Walkling appeared as my eagle-eyed saviour in the final stages. Mike
Conlon has been a rare mentor and the steadiest of friends. Stephanie DeGooyer
has been a treasured reader—a gem—a jewel!—my Sternean rhapsodies fall short.
Ashley Cohen (with Aaron) has been my other pole star: locus of the best work and
the best cocktails. Tina Chronopoulos, Kevin Hatch, Jeffrey Kirkwood, Drew
Massey, Sean Massey, Paul Schleuse, and Julia Walker have provided a critical mass
of quick wit and warm company in upstate New York. Heather Welland, Sean
Dunwoody, and Rachel Weil have been such unfailingly great friends I sometimes
forget they are such brilliant historians. Aja Martinez was there from the start to
the final push and continues to inspire me as a scholar, a writer, and a person.
Quite what I have done to deserve trenchant, brilliant, and kind colleagues includ-
ing Joe Keith, Bob Micklus, Praseeda Gopinath, Marilynn Desmond, Olivia
Holmes, John Kuhn, Peter Mileur, Ali Moore, Surya Parekh, Jessie Reeder, Jenny
Stoever, Susan Strehle, and Bridget Whearty never ceases to strike me. Lucky John.
There are friends who make life possible by showing how to live. Then there are
friends who—quite literally—provide material conditions for living. I have been
blessed with both. Dan Davis and Adam Haslett have provided refuge in Brooklyn
and all parts north; Auden himself could not have hoped for better comradeship.
Back West, David Shorter made everything seem so much easier and has remained
a steadfast support and fabulous friend. Ben Bateman has been talking me off,
around, and onto ledges for well over a decade. He makes the impossible seem
possible, and I would not be where I am without him. Michelle Maydanchik made
grad school way too much fun and continues to make everything even better. Matt
DeLaney-Lavigueur and Tim Grinsell inspired me with their recalcitrance (and
kept me out too late). Hannah Dal Pozzo was there from the beginning. From
Leeds to London, Charlottesville to Chicago, Los Angeles to New York and back
again, Jason Anders, Brad Anderson, A-J Aronstein, Armando Arrieta, Catherine
Bates, Ben Caines, the aptly named Frank Cheers, Ryan DeLaney, Adrian
Dimanlig, Faye Dimdore and David Miles, J. P. Drury, Andrew Fagal, Jennifer
Grace and the entire Bateman clan, Byron Harrison and Brian Klinksiek, Jeff
Huening, Hannah Klemm, Patrick Kwan, Michael Moore, Angele Rosenberg,
Jordan Stein, Krista (Krispy) Speakman-Brown, TSW, Liam Stack, Rob Stilling,
Kristen Taylor, Jeremy Tworek, and above all Ben Steverman have provided me
with distraction and inspiration, love and friendship (and, not infrequently, keys).
Selga and Hugh, the best brother, have been the most lovings.
Jacqueline Norton has my immense gratitude for her support and attention
throughout this process, as does everyone at OUP (plus Chris Bessant and Abi
Ward). Parts of Chapter 2 derive from my essay ‘Political Sterne’ in Sterne, Tristram,
Yorick: Tercentenary Essays on Laurence Sterne, eds. Peter de Voogd, Judith Hawley,
and Melvyn New (Delaware University Press, 2015). An earlier version of the
penultimate section of Chapter 6 appears as ‘Byron the Cynic’ in Byron: The Poetry
of Politics and the Politics of Poetry, eds. Roderick Beaton and Christine Kenyon
Jones (Routledge, 2016).
 Acknowledgements xv

My parents have been an unfailing source of support and care. Although my

father Cliff Havard (1954–2010) thought that dedications were corny, I take
inspiration from him and his sister Bethan in dedicating this book to my students.
This study has taken shape against the onset of a global epidemic of disaffection
from the political process and some nasty political shocks. Even amidst creeping
despair, I have remained inspired by those committed to fighting tooth-and-nail
for the vulnerable and excluded. I dedicate this book—whose cover affirms that
cynicism and sentimentalism may coincide, whose contents assert that protests can
become parties, and whose archive vindicates being in for the long haul—to the
next generation committed to causes in which, to adapt Edmund Burke, they have
no party.
 Contents

List of Figures xix

Introduction: Sick of Politics 1

1. Disaffected Parties, 1688–1832 44
2. Tristram Shandy and the Divided Worlds of Politics 88
3. Literary Leviathans: Johnson, Boswell, and the 1790s 123
4. Burke, Edgeworth, and Ireland’s Discontents 156
5. Austen and the Cultural Logic of Late Toryism 197
6. Byron’s Opposition 229
Conclusion 264

Works Cited 275

Index 291
 List of Figures

1. ‘The Royal Chace’ vi

2. ‘Political Electricity; or An Historical & Prophetical Print in the Year 1770’ 45
3. [‘Miseries of Social Life’] 89
4. ‘The Shadow of Opposition’ 230
 Introduction
Sick of Politics

During a 1783 encounter with Samuel Johnson, James Boswell ‘mentioned politicks’.
‘Sir, I’d as soon have a man to break my bones as talk to me of publick affairs,
internal or external’, Johnson responded, adding that he had ‘lived to see things all
as bad as they can be’.1 In the background to this exchange was the pending dissol-
ution of yet another government ministry, amidst competing demands for greater
parliamentary power and strengthened royal prerogative—developments that con-
verged the following year, around debates over corruption in the British Empire,
to create a full-blown constitutional crisis. Three decades later, Lord Byron, with a
cooler political temperature, confronted a frustrating impasse between monarchy,
ministry, and the political opposition. Describing the stalemate in a poetic squib
included within an 1813 letter to a member of his Whig circle, Byron noted the
imprint partisan deadlock had made upon the wider political mood. ‘’Tis said—
Indifference marks the present time’ those lines of verse began.2 ‘No one can be
more sick of—or indifferent to politics than I am’, Byron wrote at the outset of the
following decade, this time describing the bleak political scene associated with a
resurgent ‘Toryism’ at home and the gloom pervading post-Napoleonic Europe.3
At once expressing generalized discontent and hyper-personalized aversion,
Johnson and Byron invoked an all-too-familiar condition that Byron captured suc-
cinctly in a late canto of Don Juan: ‘I am sick of politics.’4 Encompassing various
levels of emotional intensity and a range of mediums (transcribed conversation,
personal correspondence, published and unpublished poetry), these statements
situated both authors at a pronounced distance from politics. At the same time,
they directed commentaries towards the political arena—acerbic, apathetic, and
somewhere in between—or claimed further, second-order removes from political
discussion (‘’Tis said ’ there is indifference surrounding politics: I wouldn’t know).
In professing not to care about politics, Johnson and Byron protested too much.
From the almost partisan zeal with which Johnson voiced his objection to hearing

1 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, eds. George Birkbeck Norman Hill and L. F. Powell, 6 vols.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934–64), 4.173.
2 Byron to Lady Melbourne, 21 September 1813. Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand,
12 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973–82), 3.117.
3 Byron to John Murray, 21 February 1820. Byron’s Letters and Journals, 7.44.
4 Don Juan, 12.25, in Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93), 5.502.
2 Disaffected Parties

about ‘politicks’ to the oppositional commitments swirling alongside Byron’s

postured indifference (including his indifference about pervasive indifference),
these appeals to political disaffection affirmed continuing attachment to political
discussion, if not to political activity.
Where Johnson and Byron experienced uniquely personalized fits of pique and
periods of malaise—asked whether he had been outside that day, Johnson
responded that Boswell ‘may as well ask if I hanged myself to-day’—their works
were animated by competing, often contradictory impulses (as was the literary
work, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, in which this conversation appeared). No less than
these authors’ personal commentaries and public personas, their writings were in
often close proximity to politics and inextricable from the passions and attach-
ments, or impassivity and detachment, associated with political discussion. In
gathering followers and channelling political feeling, their writings even promised,
in some instances, to become ‘parties’ all their own. Determining how we should
read the literature of this period in relation to the changing parties of politics and
evolving structures of political feeling is the core aim of this book. Those relations
were, in the cases of the writers examined here, variously estranged. Commentators
and general observers had, at least since the later seventeenth century, adopted
stances at a conspicuous distance from politics.5 From the middle of the eighteenth
century onwards, the shifting guises of political activity and fluid boundaries of
‘political’ conversation made such an undertaking increasingly difficult. As they
grappled with the desirability, or even the possibility, of removing themselves from
the political arena, amidst recently amplified uncertainty around where political
parties, the political nation, and ‘politics’ as such began and ended, the writers
addressed in detail by this study—Laurence Sterne, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell,
Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, and Lord Byron—effected crucial changes to the
shape and status of literary authorship. The case studies of these authors presented
in this book reveal how variously distanced relationships with politics and with
partisan identities converged with innovations to English literature. Disaffected
Parties contends that we cannot understand Sterne’s seemingly haphazard narrative
technique, Johnson’s investment in ‘authority’ (and Boswell’s efforts to smooth
away its sharper edges), the shapes of individual and collective feeling imagined
by Edgeworth and Austen, or the poise and bite of Byron’s late satires without
understanding the changing physiognomy of politics during the 1760–1830 period.
Beyond merely illuminating these wider developments, these writers’ placement
on the political margins enabled them, I propose, to imagine the parties of politics
anew and to cultivate unique points of view, including ways of seeing beyond pol-
itics altogether. Their works show how stances of apparent removal from politics
could be animated by partisan energies and how feelings that would seem to have
little to do with politics could be conscripted for political ends. The accounts of

5 Jürgen Habermas identifies the family as the source of a publicity that in turn migrated to the
political arena as part of his fuller treatment of the development of domestic and political spheres in
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans.
Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1962] 1991).
 Introduction: Sick of Politics 3

these authors presented here require that we rethink the relationship between literary
authorship and the political arena—in ways that do not amount, at least in any
straightforward fashion, to escape, retreat, or sublimation—while posing broader
questions about how we conceive of the lines between politics and aesthetics.
Taken together, they allow this book to plot a revised account of the relationship
between politics and literary form, in and beyond this seminal period in the
history of English literature.
Politics has been everywhere in discussions of the Romantic period and in literary
studies more widely. Yet we have risked losing sight of some of the things that
‘politics’ meant and the specific ways that political activity and discussion shaped
literary works. Whether or not it is the case, as Jacques Rancière contends, that if
everything is political then nothing is,6 approaching politics in the narrower sense
emphasized by this book—parliamentary politics, party politics, the kind of
‘politics’ we grumble about and dream of transforming—can help us begin to get
a better handle on fundamental questions (not least Rancière’s own provocative
ontologies of ‘the political’). The 1760–1830 period witnessed dramatic changes to
political structures and widespread political discontent in England, against a
backdrop of global transformation. It saw specific moments of crisis and impasse
coupled with growing disconnect from the past and unease or uncertainty about
the future. Amplifying the partisanship that had been a consistent feature of
national political life for a century, the period examined by this book witnessed a
dramatic upsurge in attention to political affairs—and a growing emphasis on
evading political discussion altogether—bringing ‘politics’ into focus as something
from which to seek distance and towards which to adopt militantly critical or
moderately disgruntled postures, disdainful or detached stances (even as these
gestures also affirmed continuing attachment to supposedly broken political
structures). The creeping realization, at once scandalous and banal, that politics
could be neither escaped nor overcome effected a scepticism, extending to a bitter
cynicism, recognizable as a pervasive feature of modern political life. This mode of
political response first acquired some of its familiar contours, this book proposes,
between the later eighteenth century and the aftermath of the French Revolution:
a period encompassing the heyday of the ‘Johnson Circle’ and of Byron and his
circles, the age of sensibility and the Romantic era. (One aim of this book, however,
is to challenge and problematize these distinctions: Samuel Johnson and Mary
Wollstonecraft once sat down to tea together, after all.) In returning to this period,
however, this book does not set out to find a mirror for recent predicaments—nor,
for that matter, to supply the hollow reassurance that things were ever thus. These
writers confronted at once familiarly broken and freshly uncertain political realities. In
returning to this critical period for the making of English literature, this book
seeks to remap the literary history of this period in relation to changing partisan and
affective structures, and thereby to reorient our ways of thinking about the relation-
ship between literature and politics more widely. This book thus offers a prehistory

6 See Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
4 Disaffected Parties

for modern political disaffection that underscores literature’s importance as a

means of thinking about a diverse array of relationships with politics, in this period
and beyond. This Introduction lays out some of the historical frameworks and
evolving conceptions of politics—including the meanings of disaffection and the
expanded conception of political parties—that organize this book, while looking
to the broader questions posed by the disaffected stance and its bearing on the
status of the literary (and literary ‘form’).
What ‘politics’ was, during this period, was changing, not least to encompass a
broad array of governmental practices, in and beyond Britain. These developments
ultimately converged to pave the way for nineteenth-century liberalism and looked
ahead to an understanding of politics encompassing the administration of collective
life—an at-once rigid and impoverished conflation of the political and the social—
and its ‘neoliberal’ afterlives. During the period between 1760 and 1830, these
developments converged untidily with (and were for the most part subordinate to)
politics in a still relatively contained sense: the parliament-centric conception of
political activity on which I focus in this book. The 1688 Revolution and consti-
tutional settlement were doubly pivotal to this more restricted understanding of
politics. The events of 1688–9, which put in place the political system that endured
more-or-less intact until Reform in the 1830s, also had the unenviable claim, as
I discuss in Chapter 1, of initiating widespread complaining about political activity,
ranging from (prospectively violent) discontent with the post-revolutionary regime
to grumbling about ‘politics’ more widely. The later eighteenth century sent these
tendencies into overdrive. As politics came to encompass an expanding and shifting
realm of activity, ‘politics’ became the object of inordinate, even obsessive public
concern. Deepening a trend set in motion a century earlier, the post-1760 period
witnessed the sheer volume (in both senses) of political discussion increase, as the
expansion of middle-class print culture converged with the churn of growing
political discussion, creating a situation in which politics was everywhere and
nowhere all at once.7
The resulting confusion was particularly apparent to Laurence Sterne. A Political
Romance (1759), his coterie satire addressing recent events in the York Church,
included a lengthy parody of the emerging tendency to read anything and every-
thing in ‘political’ terms. The ‘Key’ Sterne appended to his satire imagined the
preceding work being discovered in the street and taken up by members of a

7 For the increases in attention towards political activity and in sceptical attitudes about ‘politics’
during the later eighteenth century, see John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession
of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). In both Great Britain and Ireland,
R. B. McDowell notes, ‘the increasing importance of the newspaper press, the reporting and publica-
tion of parliamentary debates, the swelling tide of pamphlets, and the formation of political clubs and
societies, all evince a growing political consciousness’ in the decades after 1760. This coupled with an
increased appetite to understand the workings of politics (and to keep watch on the activities of poli-
ticians) such that the ‘pressure of public opinion on parliament’ dramatically mounted. See ‘Colonial
Nationalism and the Winning of Parliamentary Independence, 1760–82’, chap. 8 in A New History of
Ireland, vol. 4, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, eds. T. W. Moody and W. E. Vaughn (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1986), 196–7. See also George Rudé, Revolutionary Europe, 1783–1825 (London: Collins,
1964), 13, 57.
 Introduction: Sick of Politics 5

‘Political Club’ who proceed to read this controversy over ecclesiastical preferment
(presented, à la Swift’s Tale of a Tub, as a dispute over an old coat) in the light of
their own hobby-horsical preoccupations. Sterne thereby gestured towards an over-
whelming, confounding increase in political discussion, while pointing to the ways
that parliament-centred political activity clashed with a newfound self-consciousness
about the differing ways in which (and the varying scales at which) things could be
‘political’—an impulse that contemporary readers, not unlike recent generations of
literary critics, were inclined to indulge.8 Following the initial publication of his
comic novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman in 1760, an
anonymous pamphlet depicted the fictional patrons of a London coffee-house
(one of them tellingly named ‘Mr. Profound ’) proclaim that Sterne’s ostensibly
domestic novel comprised ‘one compleat system of modern politics’.9 Sterne was
himself attuned to this trend, as A Political Romance attests. Yet for all the ways that
recent developments had scrambled the various scales of ‘political’ activity, Sterne
also remained sharply attuned to the relationship between his writings and politics.
When he supplied Tristram with the same birthdate as the anniversary of the 1688
Revolution, he gestured to an elusively indeterminate yet insistently stated rela-
tionship between the ‘Life and Opinions’ of his hero and the origins of modern
politics, on the one hand, and the proliferating guises of political discussion and
activity, on the other. This book asks what it would mean, following Sterne’s invi-
tation, to read works including Tristram Shandy in proximity to politics and at the
same time to hold them at a remove from politics: an apparent contradiction,
albeit one we inhabit every day, which this book addresses most directly in its
attention to cynicism as a stance (or ‘attitude’) defined by its being at once inside
and outside, on the verge of taking a part while defiantly refusing to be taken in.
In attending to the ways that authors like Sterne located their writings at a com-
plex, disaffected remove, this book attends to a broader—or at any rate different—
array of responses to politics than those addressed in existing studies of political

8 For Sterne’s wider reflection on the interrelated scales of ‘political’ activity—from the interpersonal
or ‘office’ politics of close-knit communities to larger local, national, and geopolitical contexts—see
my ‘Only Disconnect? Laurence Sterne, Politics, and the Public’, in Social Networks of the Long
Eighteenth Century, ed. Ileana Baird (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2014).
9 Explanatory Remarks on the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy; wherein, the Morals and Politics
of this Piece are clearly laid open, by Jeremiah Kunastrokius (London, 1760), 44. The Seven Years’ War
was one referent for the increased discussion of politics in the Political Romance: some members of the
‘Political Club’ read the allegory of the coat for its relevance to the spoils of that geopolitical conflict. The
pamphlet of Explanatory Remarks similarly depicted Tristram encountering debates over that conflict
(with ‘Mr Profound’ determined to read the Siege of Namur in Tristram Shandy as depicting the recent
defeat of Admiral Byng at Fort St. Philip’s in Minorca and Toby’s wound as ‘the distress the nation was
thrown into thereupon’ [45]). As Daniel O’Quinn has emphasized, anxieties around the unprece-
dented amount of print commentary devoted to recent geopolitical affairs (apparent in the confused,
news-obsessed title character of Arthur Murphy’s 1758 play The Upholsterer) became an explicit locus
for reflection in the period. See Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770–1790 (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 6–11. See also Keymer, ‘Paper Wars: Literature and/as Conflict
during the Seven Years’ War’, in The Culture of the Seven Years’ War: Empire, Identity, and the Arts in the
Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, eds. Frans de Bruyn and Shaun Regan (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2014) and Carol Watts, The Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the
Imagining of the Shandean State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).
6 Disaffected Parties

engagement and literary production in the later eighteenth century and Romantic
age. Aside from an overview, in the first chapter, of some of the changing shapes
taken by political disaffection over the long eighteenth century as a whole, this
book does not set out to present an exhaustive survey of malcontented, critical,
and satirical voices during a period that witnessed such voices proliferate in and
beyond literature. Nor do I seek to establish a comprehensive genealogy for disaf-
fected and cynical attitudes towards politics.10 This book similarly looks elsewhere
than the elevated and idealized political horizons that have tended to dominate the
study of Romantic authors (not least in its attention to how writers encoded a
sense of inevitable failure into even their most idealistic political gestures). Andrew
Franta has argued that the conviction, emphasized by writers including Percy
Shelley, that poetry might ‘redefine the form that political action takes’ extended
to a belief in ‘poetry’s capacity to reach a future audience unbounded by the terms
of present political opposition’.11 Drawing similarly upon detailed attention to
print culture and associated questions of reception, I differ from Franta and aligned
critics in emphasizing the ways that writers remained self-consciously bound,
albeit from a distance, with existing parties and forums of political discussion, even
in their efforts to imagine altogether different political horizons, register their
recalcitrance, or more subtly dislodge the status quo. This book seeks in particular
to propose new approaches to how we think about the partisan identities of literary
writers, particularly when those identities were strained, muted, or seemingly
incoherent.
As I have already noted, this book looks to a period which itself saw increasing
attention to the ways that writings could be ‘political’ and in which politics became
an increasingly fixed and unavoidable object of attention. The political realignments
following the French Revolution and associated transformations of governance
profoundly reshaped and arguably reduced the relevance of partisan political
activity. The convergence between these respective developments—the increasing
attention to and in some respects expanded scope of politics alongside the narrow-
ing or at least reorientation of ‘parties’ and of partisan engagement—provides rich
terrain in which to re-examine what it means for a work of literature to engage
with ‘politics’ or to evade that engagement.12 In attending to authors who ostensibly

10 ‘Each year,’ David Mazella has observed, ‘we seem to progress toward ever-greater degrees of
cynicism, disbelief, or disenchantment.’ As Raymond Williams argued about the disappearance of ‘the
country’, the tendency to believe we are ever more cynical may be traced back decades, if not centuries
(with the appeal of refreshing escape to the ‘country’ providing, I will suggest, an important barometer
for this concern). David Mazella, The Making of Modern Cynicism (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 2007), 1; Raymond William, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University
Press, [1973] 1975).
11 Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 11, 16.
12 For seminal approaches to Romantic literature that approach politics—typically the evasion and
erasure of class-based politics—through ideology critique, see, inter alia, John Barrell, The Idea of
Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1972); Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems:
 Introduction: Sick of Politics 7

eschewed political engagement, we place added pressure on these questions. By

emphasizing the misalignment between writers and available political roles, as well
as their estrangement from politics more widely, that is to say, we open up other
ways of thinking about the ‘politics’ of literature (a notion whose various
complexities this Introduction will unpack further). Johnson’s and Byron’s disaf-
fected removes from politics, like those of all the writers considered here, did not
amount either to a straightforward retreat from the political arena or the pursuit of
an idealized alternative: whether the harmonized collective feeling associated with
the rise of ‘sensibility’ or the ‘party of humanity’ discussed by Blakey Vermeule in
her elegant study of that title.13 By taking estrangement not as a terminus or badge
of failure but as a starting point for rethinking possible relationships with politics,
we bring to light the alternative political orientations latent within stances of
apparent disengagement, even as the outcome is unlikely to be a politics we
ourselves want to get behind or believe in. While we might not want to look to the
writers I examine here, that is to say, as guides either to buried political possibilities
within this period or to the ways that estrangement might open up new political
vistas, we can look to their works as sites at which the relationship between disaf-
fection and the parties of politics becomes productively confused—giving rise to
new ways of looking at politics or beyond its frustrations altogether.
The experience of disconnection from politics has been of particular concern
recently, especially as this bears on questions of personal and public feeling. Critics
and activists have described the ‘political depression’ that might result from ‘the
sense that customary forms of political response’, including forms of direct action
and critical analysis that move outside conventional channels, ‘are no longer working
either to change the world or to make us feel better’.14 Even the feelings of repudi-
ation associated with detaching from politics, Lauren Berlant has noted, might
maintain a binding force, serving to ‘confirm our attachment to the system and
thereby confirm the system and the legitimacy of the affects that make one feel
bound to it, even if the manifest content of the binding has the negative force of
cynicism or the dark attenuation of political depression’.15 Disengagement from
politics, including from available oppositional stances, has, at the same time, prompted

Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Although I am concerned with a more
delimited realm of ‘political’ activity, partisanship, and fine-grained changes in political mood, my
discussion nonetheless builds upon the pioneering historical-materialist work of these earlier critics.
This scholarship has had particularly fruitful implications for thinking about politics and aesthetics:
see, for example, the discussions of Keats in Jerome J. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary
Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Nicholas Roe,
John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); and James Chandler, England
in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998).
13 See James Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Blakey Vermeule, The Party of Humanity: Writing
Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
14 Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 1.
15 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 227.
8 Disaffected Parties

some thinkers to emphasize the alternative social and political possibilities made
available by marginal, antagonistic, even avowedly hostile stances: those ‘recalcitrant
or inassimilable elements’ that resist containment by state power and nationalist
narratives of progress; uncooperative, ‘willful’, or otherwise critical attitudes; and
more extreme calls for absolute withdrawal (or ‘subtraction’) from the field of
established political activity.16 This book asks how these questions take on a new
cast when we look to a period in which politics was not yet fixed into static (not
to mention stagnant) partisan dynamics or constrained by rigid (not to mention
morbid) governmental regimes. The authors addressed here draw our attention to
a period in which the lines between political engagement and estrangement were
often uncertain. In arguing for the significance of this dynamic political landscape
to the making of English literature—and its potential relevance more widely to our
thinking about politics—this book returns to view a period in which disaffected
elements in the political margins jostled alongside, thereby becoming inextricable
from, the changing parties of political activity. The authors and the wider political
landscape addressed by this study contribute to an expanded prehistory for con-
temporary concerns with the growth in cynical and disaffected attitudes, then, but
also seek to reformulate the relationships between estrangement and engagement,
cynicism and critique.17 By calling attention to the alternative perspectives and
reimagined parties that might coincide with political disaffection, this book thereby
seeks to enrich accounts of the relationship between literature and politics and, in
so doing, to infuse the recent disaffective turn, in critical practice and political life,
with a greater sense of possibility.

16 David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1993), 5. Lloyd’s powerful call to ‘trace an alternative cultural politics in the
resources of recalcitrance’ (2) particularly informs my attention to Ireland. For willfulness and ‘sub-
traction’, see Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014) and Alain
Badiou, ‘We Need a Popular Discipline: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative’,
Critical Inquiry 34 (2008). Anne-Lise François accounts for a ‘recessive action’ that dovetails with
some of my concerns here in Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2008).
17 Cynicism may describe an atmosphere of pervasive inertia and alienation: ‘a generalized feeling
of discontent’ or tendency towards ‘moral nihilism’ that may, Louisa Shea notes, be considered a con-
stituent element of modernity. The Cynic Enlightenment: Diogenes in the Salon (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2010), 134. See also Mazella, The Making of Modern Cynicism; Peter
Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987); Timothy Bewes, Cynicism and Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1997); Keiran Curran,
Cynicism in Post-War British Culture: Ignorance, Dust and Disease (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015). With
Mazella, Shea attends to an alternative literary history of cynicism bound up with the volatile legacies
of the ancient Greek Cynics. I take up cynicism in these terms as a critical ‘attitude’ with respect to
Byron in Chapter 6. Alex Woloch locates in the heyday of critical theory a lingua franca of ‘despair
[. . .] bitter irony, disgust, disheartenment’ in tandem with political developments that ‘punctured the
era with frustration, anger, and bewilderment’. Although this moment coincided with a sharp right-
ward turn in the United States and Britain, criticism and theory from this period, in a dark irony,
‘often seemed to avoid the painful political developments most close to home (even while ostensibly
turning more politicized)’. Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2016), xii. Criticism insulated itself, that is to say, from a mounting array of pres-
ently unfolding developments to be critical about—a situation that may no longer hold in our
present moment of heightened self-awareness about limited political efficacy and a turn against
‘critique’. See Critique and Postcritique, eds. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2017).
 Introduction: Sick of Politics 9

D I S A F F E C T I O N , P O L I T I C S , L I T E R AT U R E

‘Disaffection’ first acquired widespread political significance in the seventeenth

century, during a fraught period in English history. Fears that ‘affection’ might be
corrupted, imperilling established power, were of long standing, as Shakespeare’s
plays repeatedly evidence. John Milton made reference to ‘disaffection’ in his
published defences of divorce, where the term referred to a breach within the
marital state—‘the unaccountable and secret reasons of disaffection between man
and wife’—underscoring its association with an indeterminate zone of affiliation,
obligation, and absent or inactive affection (an emphasis on alienated affection
that persists within divorce law). Rachel Weil has shown that ‘disaffection’ acquired
currency as a political designation during the mid-century period of civil war and
regime change, when almost incessant conflict and shifting demands for allegiance
placed a premium on being ‘well affected’ to the government (or at least appearing
so). As Weil notes, the deployment of this term by the state became a means to
construct the ‘disaffected’—together with ‘delinquents’ and other ‘malignants’—as
threats to contain and groups to target.18 The early eighteenth century saw disaf-
fection towards politics begin to take more familiar and anodyne guises, even as
the attendant complaining and discontent remained bound up with questions of
loyalty and allegiance. ‘Disaffected’ attitudes, ranging from violent antipathy to
the post-1688 constitutional settlement and rejection of Britain’s newly imported
Dutch ruler William III, down to hostility towards the political establishment and
general grumbling about the present state of things, became increasingly familiar
responses to political activity. While these disaffected elements were not, by and
large, hostile to the government in the sense of organizing for its removal—with
the exception of the ‘Jacobite’ supporters of the exiled James II and his son—the
relative proximity of revolutionary upheaval made these currents of discontent
inextricable from more thoroughgoing scepticism and even the prospects of more
dramatic change. ‘I heartily wish you were what they call disaffected’, Jonathan
Swift implored Alexander Pope in 1735, calling attention to his use of a resonant
term still carrying the frisson of violent rebellion.19 The writers I address here were
at greater historical distance from 1688, as well as varying levels of distance from
the front lines of political activity. After 1789, they confronted an altogether new
set of challenges to the establishment, associated with ‘Jacobin’ supporters of the
French Revolution. Politics nonetheless continued, in many respects, to mean
post-1688 politics, and the late seventeenth-century Revolution remained a con-
tinuing locus for ambivalence and agitation as well as more violent antagonism.
When Swift had the wreckage of Gulliver’s first voyage and thus the first of his
Travels commence on 5 November, the anniversary of William’s landing in Torbay

18 Rachel Weil, ‘Thinking About Allegiance in the English Civil War’, History Workshop Journal 61
(2006). Milton quoted in David Sigler, Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism: Gender and
Psychoanalysis, 1753–1835 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 61 (emphasis added).
19 Quoted in Dustin Griffin, Swift and Pope: Satirists in Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 131. I address both writers’ oscillation between radical rejection of the status
quo and appeals to higher ideals in Chapter 1.
10 Disaffected Parties

and thus of the 1688 Revolution, he invoked these unsettled legacies (a precedent
on which Sterne built in Tristram Shandy). That date would acquire newly height-
ened significance after the French Revolution, but that significance was also newly
bifurcated. The year 1688 was invoked both by radicals as a precedent for events in
France and, more pervasively, by an expansive counter-revolutionary movement as
a bulwark against change: evidence that, in contrast with revolutionary explosions
elsewhere, politics in England was fixed and settled.
These overarching contexts, together with more localized sources of controversy
and contention, frame the case studies examined in the subsequent chapters.
Backing away here from the historical particulars will permit us to pose some wider
questions about ‘disaffection’: as an attitude or orientation towards politics, as a
more generalized stance or subject position, and in terms of how these may coincide
at the level of literary form. As applied to the authors examined here, ‘disaffection’
signals partial detachment, often ambivalent or ambiguous, from political activity
and discussion, which took shape in relation to a frequently uncertain and shifting
political situation—and in proximity to diverse sources of unease and discontent.
Disaffection also describes a more general condition whose contours, including in
some of its familiar contemporary guises, prove surprisingly challenging to deter-
mine.20 Examining these complexities in some detail will help clarify why the
relationship between different formulations of disaffection remained uncertain for
the period examined by this study, in ways that might further enrich our appreci-
ation for the divisions still animating current usage of the term. The first definition
for ‘disaffection’ in the Oxford English Dictionary emphasizes emotional withdrawal
bordering on antipathy: ‘Absence or alienation of affection or kindly feeling; dis-
like, hostility’. This break with or within affection need not necessarily signal a
breakdown. As Martin F. Manalansan IV emphasizes, accounting for a scene of
contemporary disaffection in such a way that helps bring out tensions animating
the term, ‘disaffection’ need not represent an affective impasse or emotional dead
end but might instead present a ‘crossroads’ at which the possibilities of movement
or moving on—despite appearing ‘unmoved’—become apparent.21 The political con-
text brings this crossroads into relief. As a response to politics and political activity,

20 In what follows, I discuss the first two parts of the definition for ‘disaffection’ from Oxford
English Dictionary, second edition (1989). Rather than making a claim for a stable disaffected stance
(or attendant affective subject), I am concerned with the tensions that continue to animate various
usages of the term and that Martin F. Manalansan IV, for example, exploits in characterizing one
contemporary site of ‘disaffection’ as ‘emotional distance, alienation, antipathy, and isolation’ and in
making the term synonymous with ‘indifference’ while also the site for prospective resistance or
recalcitrance. As Manalansan’s inclusion of ‘antipathy’ in his characterization of the impassive disaf-
fected stance and his allusion elsewhere to militancy suggest, moreover, ‘disaffection’ may always have
a latent combative streak. See ‘Servicing the World: Flexible Filipinos and the Unsecured Life’, in
Political Emotions: New Agendas in Communication, eds. Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich, and Ann
Reynolds (New York: Routledge, 2010). The recently updated definitions for ‘disaffection’ in Oxford
English Dictionary, third edition (2017) begin to expand the term’s range of applications in a manner
consistent with my concerns here to include ‘[a]lienation from or dissatisfaction with an authority,
government, system of organization’ (or ‘a feeling of dissatisfaction or alienation’ more generally) and
‘disenchantment or discontent with the status quo’ as well as specific acts of rebellion, demonstration,
complaint, and grievance.
21 See Manalansan, ‘Servicing the World: Flexible Filipinos and the Unsecured Life.’
 Introduction: Sick of Politics 11

disaffection in the sense of becoming apathetic, indifferent, checked-out, or cynical

has become close to a familiar—even normative—response to political activity.
The term obviously has a further meaning, or parallel application, to aggression, or
rebellion, by guerrilla forces or marginal populations. Where the former ‘disaf-
fected’ stance appears to foreclose the potential for political action altogether,
‘disaffection’ in this sense appears only as action (as with the violence associated
with the French Revolution, especially after the 1798 uprising in Ireland). The use
of the term to describe aggression towards established power becomes more audible
in the second Oxford English Dictionary definition: ‘Political alienation or discontent;
a spirit of disloyalty to the government or existing authority.’ While the inclusion
of ‘hostility’ in the previous definition similarly establishes points of connection
with outright rebellion, that presumptively individualized condition, characterized
by the withdrawal—or withholding—of positive feeling, remains without clear con-
tent. Where the latter definition points directly to the barricades, the withdrawal
of emotion or antipathy of the former definition provides only a ghostly echo of its
violent, collectivist manifestations.
‘Disaffection’ thus points in several apparently distinct directions, its respective
sides only connected in their estrangement (or ‘alienation’) from the established
channels of political activity and expression. This book, while attuned to prospectively
violent challenges to the state, remains most concerned with the volatile relation-
ship between the opposing faces of the term. These respective definitions, whether
taken separately or together, raise complicated questions in their own right, leaving
unsettled as they do the affective contours of the disaffected stance, its individual
or collective basis, and its relationship to action. Does the ‘[a]bsence or alienation
of affection or kindly feeling’ imply only the withdrawal of feeling, or might this
alienated stance have positive affective contours of its own? How does this absence
in turn relate to negative, even vehement feelings of ‘dislike, hostility’? This equivo-
cation also appears in the second, explicitly ‘political’ definition, which might appear
to promise active, critical engagement but has an emphasis on alienation and
estrangement that equallys suggest the repudiation of action (with antipathy
towards ‘the government or existing authority’ surfacing only by way of a diffuse
‘spirit of disloyalty’). In putting these accounts side by side, moreover, we are left
with the further question of how they fit together. The ‘[a]bsence of [. . .] feeling’
in the former definition would seem to describe experience at an individual level,
the discontented ‘spirit’ of the latter indicating the prospects of larger-scale shifts
in a polity. What might ‘disaffection’, described as the deficit or disconnect of
‘kindly feeling’, have to do with political disaffection, understood as a broad-based
mobilization away from support for existing governing structures? Might even sup-
posedly loyal or non-political stances become infiltrated with disaffected, oppos-
itional elements? And how might individual and collective conditions fit together,
other than through their respective abandonment of ‘politics’ in its given forms?
The relationship between differing guises of disaffection became uniquely volatile
in the period examined by this study. Expressions of indifference towards politics
reflected a creeping sense that change was not possible, at least within the estab-
lished channels (or in any case, not likely). Disaffection from established political
12 Disaffected Parties

structures might, in principle, lead into engagement in revolutionary, rebellious

movements, outside established guises of political activity. Yet aside from the rare
eventuality in which disengagement from established forms looped back into
engagement through others, the respective faces of the ‘disaffection’ encountered in
the Romantic age (as exemplified by Byron, whose estrangement even from emer-
gent revolutionary causes left him disaffected with his own disaffection) had few
points of contact beyond their shared distance from available parties. Amidst more
confused periods of brewing political unrest and widespread discontents, however,
these responses appeared in a different light. The earlier decades of the period
addressed by this book were one such period, as this Introduction will go on to
discuss in greater detail. During this complex transitional period, in which the
parameters of political activity and the contours of estrangement from or antipathy
towards politics remained unclear, authors found themselves implicated with
rebellious, unstable, incendiary, or simply unpredictable elements of the wider
body politic. Even the embrace of avowedly loyal or ostensibly disengaged stances
could not insulate authors from unassimilated elements and wayward impulses
that hovered at the political margins. These elements were not simply external to
established parliamentary political channels. They came together, during a moment
when political structures and identities were under challenge, from both within
and without, with the established political parties in unpredictable, unprecedented
ways. Matters were further transformed, but also to some degree contained, after
1789 with the onset of a further ‘revolutionary’ age.
This book thus makes the gambit signalled in its title. By returning to view the
interplay between the various and shifting parties of political activity and dissatisfied
or simply disengaged stances towards the established political system, this book
asks how these might finally connect up with each other. Neither in a stable rela-
tionship with (themselves often unstable) parties nor able to stand fully outside the
shifting ‘political’ arena, authors remained at a volatile remove from political activity.
We need not make appeals to an obscured political purpose or lost potential for
political involvement on their part to recognize that the political significance of
their writings cannot be fully stabilized. In asking how writers, despite their various
kinds of disinterest towards the political arena, came close to disaffected parties at
its margins, we may thereby revise some of the ways that we think about political
estrangement generally. The fraught site of reconnection with politics adumbrated
in the works examined here, in which disengagement from some channels for
political activity led into potential re-engagement through others, allows us at
any rate to break down a fixed or stable opposition between literature and the
political arena. That this distinction remained fluid, at least for the earlier part of
this period, can be seen from Explanatory Remarks, the pamphlet alluded to above
that introduced the unlikely hero of Laurence Sterne’s infamous comic novel into
a contemporary coffee-house, which discerned a latently political agitation in
Tristram Shandy that has been lost to subsequent readers and critics approaching
Sterne’s works through the lens of his sentimental reputation. This agitation might
be said to infiltrate all of these writings, even in the cases of authors whose political
commitments impelled them to support and uphold the authority of the state.
 Introduction: Sick of Politics 13

The works examined here accordingly reveal some of the abiding ways that the
‘literary’ entails an uncertain or unsettled relationship with the ‘political’ (and
perhaps even an enabling one). They also permit us to reflect more widely, in ways
that have no necessary bearing on politics, on what we might call a literature of
disaffection. The familiar account of Jane Austen as an author who disappears
completely into her works—and whose works detach themselves altogether
from the vicissitudes of their age—has given way to both sensitive and polemical
discussions (even, in some cases, both at the same time) of her fiction’s political
investments. Anne-Lise François has addressed the similarly challenging question
of how we may account for Austen’s withdrawal without erasing her own authorship
or the relationship of her novels with the world they describe.22 Disaffection closely
resembles familiar ways of conceptualizing aesthetic and literary form, but it also
makes room, in this way, for complex stances of emotional withdrawal and critical
reflection. As Alex Woloch has illuminatingly written, the experience of encoun-
tering politics for the first time may itself be ‘strangely intertwined with rejection
and withdrawal [. . .] shot through with bitterness [. . . as] the affirmation implicit
in reasoning itself is resolved in other terms altogether: turning away, daydream-
ing or abstraction, casting down eyes, cultivating various forms of detachment or
retreat’.23 Woloch’s concern in his study of George Orwell with writing’s ‘(tenuous)
detachment from, and thus opposition to, the world it represents’24 comprises a
powerful meditation on how writing engages with politics, to the point of direct
convergence, on one side, or disappointed failure, on the other. We may adopt this
emphasis on tenuousness and indeterminacy here to draw a distinction with literary
works and authorial stances defined by their a priori detachment. The ‘dis-’ prefix
proves crucial here, in articulating a continuing hinge-point rather than constitu-
tive apartness or absolute negation. The ‘dis-’ that continues to bind disaffection
with feeling can in turn be differentiated from disinterested spectatorship and related
appeals to ‘disinterest’. Adam Smith’s influential formulation of the ‘impartial’
spectator, like the general point of view articulated by David Hume, pointed to the
standardization of aesthetic response. For Immanuel Kant, ‘disinterest’ could charac-
terize a faculty of aesthetic contemplation with no bearing on questions of interest,
purpose, or emotional investment: whose ‘optics’, to use a word favoured by
Byron, have nothing to do with other ways of seeing.25 As various commentators

22 See the discussion of Mansfield Park in Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience.
‘What has attracted generations of comfortable English matrons, clergymen, antiquarians—in general,
those retired from public life’ to Austen’s novels, one critic has observed, ‘is more than a set of
religious, social, or political values. Her appeal is to the need for retirement itself [. . . and she maintains]
the illusion that nothing is happening in the rest of the world—that nothing can happen in the world
to change things very much.’ Avrom Fleishman, A Reading of Mansfield Park (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1967), first emphasis added.
23 Alex Woloch, Or Orwell, x. 24 Or Orwell, 257.
25 In both Kant and Byron those aesthetic orientations coincided in complex ways with their
detached, partially removed spectatorship of politics and history. As Surya Parekh reminds me, ‘disin-
terest’ also characterizes Kant’s embrace of a partial remove, at once proximate to and at a distance
from historical events: the ‘disinterested’ spectator capable of looking beyond matters of immediate
interest to take an interest in the future of humanity, from a situated historical vantage point. In ‘An
Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?’ Kant reflected upon the
14 Disaffected Parties

have shown, this account of the Kantian aesthetic, building upon a foundation in
moral sense philosophy, nonetheless remains animated by questions of feeling
and opens back in turn onto political and social considerations. Jacques Derrida,
for one, saw ‘auto-affective’ appeals to reflective judgement as inevitably divided
against themselves by supplemental commitments. Even ‘disinterest’ becomes
expropriated by outside investments on Derrida’s reading, to become a ‘dis-interest’
taken over by interests of and for the other—reintroducing the ‘interest’ suppressed
or otherwise finessed into generality by Kant, Smith, and Hume.26 The affective
surpluses and displaced investments that intervene within even the most program-
matic appeals to aesthetic autonomy thus break down putative divisions between
alienation and affect and similarly confuse the distinctions between disinterest
and disaffection. Disinterest, understood in these terms as animated by displaced
commitments and even by wayward affective investments, thus belies appeals to
aesthetic autonomy from the outset.
Rather than collapsing artistic production back into interested, affectively
charged, and politically invested discussion, however, we may continue to emphasize
its removal and even identify disinterest as an ideal to which disaffected responses
to politics might aspire. Asking how close disaffection might come, that is to say,
to the emptying out of specific attachments and investments—to which appeals to
disinterest, however suspiciously or unsuccessfully, aspire—provides one means of
asking how literature might become a means to step outside politics altogether.
This book’s concluding discussion of Byron tests this claim, in asking how the
unimpeded ‘optics’ (contrasted explicitly with worldly ‘opinions’) that Byron
claimed to have adopted in his Vision of Judgment coincided with his claims to have
detached himself from England, personally and politically, affectively and ethic-
ally: a retreat he identified with a ‘clearer’ atmosphere and with feeling like the
dead. In allowing these terms to complicate one another, we may, at a more down-
to-earth level, view disinterest as a limit-case of disaffection, a means of asking how
far the affective alienation associated with the latter term might carry us towards
aspirational detachment. This conjunction, in turn, brings out the proximity of
disinterest and disaffection to a wider spectrum of terms—indifference, disillusion-
ment, discontent, dissatisfaction—with similarly valuable implications for think-
ing about the status of literary form and the diverse affective and social-political
currents animating appeals to aesthetic or philosophical detachment. Taken to
its furthest extreme, dissatisfaction with the status quo might occasion outright

prospect of human progress but recognized that ‘we are not capable of placing ourselves in [. . .] the
standpoint of Providence which is situated beyond all human wisdom [. . .] because, in the final analysis,
the human being requires coherency according to natural laws, but with respect to his future free
actions he must dispense with this guidance or direction.’ Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational
Theology, trans. and ed. Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 300. I take up related questions with respect to Byron’s pursuit—through a stance simi-
larly detached from England’s very different public sphere and political culture—of a progressive,
‘Whig’ point of view. See the discussion of his ‘optics’ in The Vision of Judgment in Chapter 6.
26 See Sean Gaston, Derrida and Disinterest (London: Continuum, 2005). Gaston identifies expro-
priation in an early use of ‘disinterest’ by Francis Bacon and notes that the notion of being divested of
something internalized (or private) by an outside force also informed Thomas Hobbes’s use of the term.
 Introduction: Sick of Politics 15

rejection of the given world. Yet the grumbling, irritability, affective saturation,
and absence of feeling altogether associated with feeling ‘sick’ of politics might
equally contribute to a sense of malaise and dis-ease with more equivocal and
suggestive implications.27
‘Disaffection’ as I discuss the term here nonetheless remains immanent to a field
of political communication: closer to what writers did in coffee-houses (and what
academics do on Facebook) than the wider horizons at which they otherwise
strained. Aside from its bearing on more abstract concerns with estrangement and
a priori detachment, the term belongs, at the same time, to a rich lexical field
including such terms as discontent, dissatisfaction, dissension, and dissent. The use
of ‘Dissent’ as a name for nonconforming religious practice (nomenclature that
associated those various constituencies with incipient disloyalty and suspected
rebellion) exemplifies the continuing proximity of the case studies presented
here to this historically operative field of political debate and the responses, from
grumbling dissatisfaction to more incendiary demands, to which this gave rise.28
Disaffection accordingly functions in this book, beyond these more speculative
questions about emotional withdrawal and aesthetic autonomy, to capture the ways
authors remained in some proximity to politics; this term also belongs to a broader
vocabulary for characterizing day-to-day political unrest. Rather than turning up
evidence of a single emotional tone or (dis)affective stance, then, excavating disaf-
fected responses, particularly in light of the complexities that attend even abstracted
discussions of the term—which wavers between the absence of positive feeling or
the presence of antipathy, the emptying out of affect, equivalent to the stripping
away of attachment and interest, or a more complex act of dispossession and
divestment, which creates the opening for new kinds of commitment—ultimately
reveals that their political valences cannot easily be stabilized. The ‘withdrawal
in disgust’, which Woloch sees veering dangerously ‘close to apathy’ in modern
contexts,29 remained in the mix for the period considered here, simply put, with
an array of impulses. That is not to suggest that efforts at withdrawal, emboldened
by aesthetic form, were not possible. The chapters that follow become progressively
more interested in asking how far and to what ends works of literature might step
outside from politics, society, and the world as such. Yet as those discussions and

27 Rather than rejection of the given, dissatisfaction hereby creates space for what Rei Terada terms
a ‘counter-aesthetics’ that attends to responses that are ‘not nothing’ perceptually or, perhaps, politically.
Rei Terada, Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2009). For a nuanced discussion of the alternative relational and affective
possibilities organized by ‘sickness’, see Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction:
Environment and Affect (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
28 ‘Dissent’ had its ‘legislative inception’ in the 1662 Act of Uniformity. The association of this
term with opposition, if only to secular morality and the established church, thus remained baked into
this identity. See Daniel E. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 7–8. As White notes, the association of Dissent with reformist causes through-
out the later eighteenth century—from ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ and American independence to support
for the French Revolution and abolition of the slave trade—contributed to the ‘broad association of
Dissent with political dissidence’ that ‘could all too easily be branded sedition’ amidst the ‘heated
atmosphere’ of the early 1790s (9–10).
29 Woloch, Or Orwell, x.
16 Disaffected Parties

their growing focus on literary form emphasize, even the most crystalline disaffected
stances and lofty removes took shape in response to the discontents of a given
moment: a fact underscored as much by the repeated contemporary variations on
the title of Edmund Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents as by
the continuing use of ‘discontents’ to translate Freud’s epochal study.

I N S TA B I L I T Y, C R I S I S , R E VO LU T I O N

The period addressed by this book was characterized by a pervasive ‘sense of

instability’ and impending crisis.30 In the years that led up to the Declaration of
Independence, revolution appeared at least as likely, if not more likely, within
Britain as in the American colonies. A seemingly endless litany of destabilizing
events—the 1763 Cider Excise protests, the ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ movement, the
colonial crisis and American War, the 1780 Gordon Riots, the 1783 India Bill and
ensuing constitutional crisis, the repeated dissolution of government ministries—
collided with an explosion of political discussion. Equally crucial were newly emer-
gent guises of extra-parliamentary political activity, in particular those associated
with the opposition movement around populist figurehead John Wilkes, which
both helped create and capitalized upon the ferment of the 1760s and ’70s. These
various developments contributed to an ongoing sense of unrest and the prospect
of dramatic, even revolutionary transformations.31 Political upheaval in this period
also coincided with wider challenges to social organization (not least those focalized
by the spectacles of fashionable ‘macaroni’, Anglo-Indian ‘nabobs’, and oversized
women’s wigs). These changes to both domestic politics and national society were
inextricable from Britain’s shifting imperial role. The social developments that took

30 The general sense of tumult, dislocation, and confusion in the later eighteenth century, Paul
Langford notes, created an ‘almost permanent sense of instability and crisis’ within England and the
repeated expectation of change. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 331. See also O’Quinn, Entertaining Crisis.
31 Abolition was an especially notable way that the constituencies, tactics, and targets associated
with political activity in England were changed during this period. For the coalescence of the abolition
movement during the 1780s and its setbacks in the 1790s (partially in reaction to the Haitian
Revolution), see Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism
(Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) and Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains:
Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (New York: Mariner, 2006). I discuss the
tension between James Boswell’s pro-slavery views and his sentimental Tory authoritarianism (which
proved far more compatible with Britain’s burgeoning Indian Empire) in Chapter 3. With some not-
able exceptions, the exclusion of slaves from political recognition and social belonging places them at
a further remove from the marginal, estranged domain that concerns this book. Sterne, Johnson, and
Byron included flashes of anti-slavery sentiment in their writings and Sterne had a brief correspondence
with Ignatius Sancho, while Johnson’s Jamaican-born servant Francis Barber maintained a prominent
role in his household and worked on his dictionary. See ‘ “The House of Bondage”: Sentimentalism
and the Problem of Slavery’, chap. 2 in Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and
Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Michael
Bundock, The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel
Johnson’s Heir (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); ‘Byronic Abolitionism’, chap. 8 in Jared
Hickman, Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016).
 Introduction: Sick of Politics 17

shape alongside these interrelated changes to the domestic polity and Britain’s
burgeoning global Empire have attracted rich discussion.32 Harriet Guest has
shown how women employed their marginal public role to create alternative spaces
to the side of politics, as the ‘small change’ that jostled around a political world still
organized around individual men.33 Gillian Russell has unfolded the ways that
fashionable sociability centred around women galvanized attention in its own right
as an alternative to the male-dominated realms of the theatre and the traditional
‘public sphere’.34 Daniel O’Quinn has attended in fine-grained detail to the sym-
biosis between theatrical and political culture in their engagement with the Indian
Empire and American crisis, with particular attention to the implications for
patrician governance and conceptions of the wider social body.35 These discussions
provide counterpoints for this book’s concerns with politics in a narrower sense
and with a more tightly delimited realm of literary authorship. Although this book is
not concerned with the theatre, my discussion in Chapter 1 of a disturbance at Drury
Lane—in which the 1770 performance of a sentimental comedy became a proxy
war for factions of audience members over the ‘political’ status of authorship—
builds on critical accountings of how theatrical spaces figured social anxieties and
emergent fractures within the body politic. This book similarly builds upon atten-
tion to how ‘Bluestockings’, debating societies, and feminized sociability created
new public opportunities and political openings for women during this period
(and remains cognizant of the ways that male literary authority was built in part
upon the suppression of these female voices).36 Women writers have a central role
in the account of authorship developed in this book: not despite their political
marginality but as its result. The equivocation and distance that their gender built
into their relationship with politics made women authors not outliers, for my
purposes here, but exemplary of the marginal, interstitial realm occupied by literary
authorship more widely. Austen and Edgeworth occupied a different space to their
more visible female counterparts, in particular those precursors and contemporaries
who helped expand and reimagine what counted as politics and the limits of the
‘political’ arena. While concurring with Guest that women were ‘not necessarily at

32 For the transformation of the British Empire in this period, see C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian:
The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989); P. J. Marshall, The Making
and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America c.1750–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005); Sudipta Sen, A Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India
(London: Routledge, 2002); James M. Vaughn, The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III: The
East India Company and the Crisis and Transformation of Britain’s Imperial State (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2019).
33 Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000).
34 Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007).
35 Daniel O’Quinn, Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800 (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) and Entertaining Crisis.
36 For the role that the suppression (and derision) of women played in establishing the standing of
Sterne and Johnson as authors, see Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly,
Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and
‘Boswell’s Treatment of Johnson’s Temper: “A Warm West-Indian Climate” ’, Studies in English
Literature, 1500–1900 14 (1974).
18 Disaffected Parties

a remove’ from political discussion, I also emphasize the ironic centrality of certain
women authors to a realm defined by its exclusions, both willed and otherwise,
from political engagement.37 This book builds, more widely, upon critical atten-
tion to the social dynamism of the later eighteenth century, calling attention to the
political uncertainty of the pre-1789 decades (and even, to some degree, their
political fluidity). Russell’s powerful argument that the unprecedented significance
given to the status of women early in the reign of George III has fallen out of our
histories of the wider period, while not directly relevant to my own discussion of
these decades, thus finds a close parallel in my own emphasis on the neglected
political unrest of this same period.38
This study takes further orientation in this regard from Marilyn Butler, whose
seminal study Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries expanded the purview of
literary criticism concerned with political upheaval to the decades preceding
the French Revolution.39 This book, adopting Butler’s time frame, follows her
study in approaching this extended period, since dubbed the ‘long’ Romantic age,
as one of continuing unrest. Drawing upon the wider Atlantic and global perspectives
emphasized in recent scholarship, I combine an emphasis on these earlier decades
with attention to the global ‘age of revolutions’: an extended period of conflict and
political restructuring in and beyond the European Atlantic world.40 Attending to
this temporally and geographically expanded revolutionary age helps further
situate and thereby decentre the French Revolution. The year 1789 has been
understood, particularly within literary studies, as marking a decisive break. The
outbreak of revolution in Europe unleashed wildly original ways of thinking about
politics and society and, in the coming decades, transformed conceptions of the
body politic and wholly new ideas about ‘society’ (not to mention new horizons for

37 Unbounded Attachment: Sentiment and Politics in the Age of the French Revolution (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014). My approach here thus builds upon but also diverges from the
important angles on these questions in Guest’s invaluable study and its precursor Small Change,
which demonstrate the importance of privatized, feminized feeling to national political cohesion
and the ways the language of sensibility uniquely equipped women writers to traverse public and
private spheres.
38 Edgeworth and Austen, Russell proposes, were ‘haunted by the complicated allure of the woman
of fashion’ and thus by their belatedness to the ‘revolution’ of sociability that her study identifies in
this earlier period. See Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London, 230. Clifford Siskin dis-
cusses the forgetting of earlier histories of female authorship in The Work of Writing: Literature and
Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
39 See Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background,
1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), especially chap. 1 ‘The Arts in an Age of
Revolution: 1760–1790’. For a literary-critical approach to political writings from these decades that
precedes Butler’s study, see James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke
(London: Routledge, 1963).
40 Emma Rothschild proposes that the ‘ “age of revolutions” began in the 1740s, in contemporary
descriptions, and lasted until the 1790s’; she identifies the overthrow of Mughal power in Bengal
between 1757 and 1765 and subsequent upheaval in the Americas as initiating the second, lengthier
phase of this unified period of global conflict. See The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century
History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 1–14, 311n.6. Although this study overlaps
with the more typical account of the ‘age of revolutions’—encompassing the Seven Years’ War and
American Revolution through to the 1790s and their fallout in and beyond Europe—I attend to the
period surrounding the fall of Walpole in the 1740s and its broad-reaching social and political-economic
transformations in Chapter 1.
 Introduction: Sick of Politics 19

individual freedoms and collective ‘liberty’) took hold within Britain, in tandem
with wider governmental shifts. Aside from the question of whether and how we
can meaningfully speak of a Romantic movement within Britain—Butler, for one,
was sceptical—the French Revolution has come to stand for a perception that
literary production was newly conditioned by political ferment and excitement.
Yet this prevailing assumption proves misguided, this book proposes, in two related
ways. In the first place, Britain witnessed a dramatic counter-revolutionary turn
during the Romantic age: the prevailing political atmosphere from the 1790s onwards
in Britain was not so much revolutionary as, in Butler’s term, reactionary.41 Second,
scholarly preoccupations with the actual and perceived proliferation of radical
activity in Britain and the heightened political temperature more widely—while
valuably opening up attention to the myriad ways that the French Revolution ‘politi-
cized’ everything, from the contents of private conversations to wayward sexuality—
have risked obscuring the political turbulence within Britain during the directly
preceding decades.
Aside from its social ferment and geopolitical realignment, the political discontent
of the 1760–90 period—presciently termed an ‘Age of Revolution’ by Butler—was,
in important respects, far more widespread than after the fall of the Bastille.
Although their consequences, at least within Britain, have been viewed as ephem-
eral, the events of the 1760s through the 1780s sowed the seeds for radical political
possibilities, in parallel with the revolution in sociability that Russell and others
have identified with the same period. These radical possibilities were partially
realized, with the turn of the nineteenth century, by the ensuing push towards
Reform. Yet the French Revolution also had a dampening effect on these earlier
political energies, whose more radical potential was in part contained—and even,
as I suggest in the Conclusion, deliberately suppressed from the historical record.42
This book accordingly adopts a diagonal approach to the Romantic age, displacing
the centrality of the French Revolution to attend to a broader array of developments
both within and beyond the preceding decades. It thus emphasizes the neglected
importance of the politically inchoate pre-1789 period for thinking about the
relationship between literary production and political unrest. The 1760s and ’70s
witnessed wholesale challenges to the established political system. Taking place within
a global context, those developments in turn had international implications. The
discontents given voice by a dynamic transatlantic opposition movement asso-
ciated with Wilkes bore fruit, among other places, in the creation of the United

41 Revolutionary energies and political reaction were in many ways inseparable, transmuted back
and forth into each other. For an eloquent discussion of the political atmosphere following the French
Revolution, which remains attuned to its pitfalls as a guide to the actual threat of revolutionary activ-
ity, see Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism. The fears, in the wake of 1789, that the violence unleashed
overseas amidst transformations of existing power regimes might take root nearer home were rein-
forced by continual revelations of brewing plots—both real and imagined—and given further fuel by
repressive government responses, as the paranoid atmosphere of the period created the ‘sense that
everything had suddenly been or could suddenly become politicized’ (4, 14).
42 Robert E. Zegger, for example, identifies the ‘rampant discontent’ of the 1760–90 period as
both antecedent and point of origin for early nineteenth-century radicalism in John Cam Hobhouse:
A Political Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973), 9, 6–23.
20 Disaffected Parties

States of America. As Pauline Maier noted, ‘disillusionment’ in America with the

perceived defeat of radical possibilities in Britain between 1768 and 1770 directly
fuelled the revolutionary cause.43 Within Britain, these burgeoning discontents
collided with ‘micropolitical’ developments, including sudden and dramatic
changes of ministry.44 By unseating the radical response to the French Revolution
from its crowning role in discussions of political unrest over this wider period,
we return to view a wider array of challenges to existing political structures (and a
wider array of ‘parties’). Democracy, moreover, did not begin in 1789. Although
stories about Reform often begin with Tom Paine and Jeremy Bentham, parlia-
mentary reforms and more radical shake-ups were discussed throughout the
1760–1830 period and took shape amidst constitutional debates with their own
deep histories. For well over half a century before the Reform Act of 1832, debates
about parliamentary representation and reforms to the profoundly undemocratic
constitution and electoral system had rumbled (and also, at times violently,
erupted). Although widespread participation for the poor and working classes
would not come until Paine’s Rights of Man, demands for political reforms, includ-
ing for more regular parliaments and an expanded franchise, together with myriad
political clubs, societies, and diverse forums for extra-parliamentary organization
and agitation were all in operation before 1788.45 These developments had their
own precursors, which themselves built upon precedents dating back to the later
seventeenth century.46

43 ‘John Wilkes and American Disillusionment with Britain’, William and Mary Quarterly 20
(1963). Gordon S. Wood also notes the challenges to the ‘whole political system’ in the 1760s and ’70s
and their significance to the brewing conflict in the American colonies in The American Revolution: A
History (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 21. Steve Pincus has recently located the upheaval in
Britain and America during the decades preceding the American Revolution within a shared ‘British
imperial political culture’ and amidst larger currents of transimperial discontent. See The Heart of the
Declaration: The Founders’ Case for an Activist Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016),
17, 68–79.
44 Compare Nathan K. Hensley, whose account of developing literary forms similarly ‘touch[es] on
micropolitical debates within the British parliamentary system’, in tandem with wider governmental
and conceptual shifts. See Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2017), 8.
45 See George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983);
Ian R. Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform: The Parliamentary Reform Movement in British Politics,
1760–1785 (London: Macmillan, 1962); Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 547–8, 713;
R. J. White, The Age of George III (New York: Anchor, 1969), 133. James A. Epstein has emphasized
the continuing significance, even after Paine’s Rights of Man, of ‘popular constitutionalism’, including
the ‘continued vigor of arguments that base political and social claims on historical precedent and the
predominance of closely related strategies of constitutionalist action’. See Radical Expression: Political
Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 9.
Compare E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), 80–101.
46 During the decades directly preceding the start date of this study, England had witnessed an
energized political culture in tandem with dramatic increases to the scale of political discussion. As
Kathleen Wilson notes, in her seminal study of eighteenth-century political culture, the ‘vibrant,
national and predominantly urban’ extra-parliamentary political activity of preceding decades was
reined in after 1760 by the reintegration of the ruling class and sidelining of dissident politics (even as
followers of John Wilkes, among others, helped keep radical possibilities alive). See The Sense of the
People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995). For the scope of political activity and diversity of political debate in the decades follow-
ing 1688, see especially Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain:
 Introduction: Sick of Politics 21

None of this need suggest that we should replace the break represented by the
French Revolution with a date from the preceding decades, which could itself be
pushed further back into the eighteenth century (and even earlier still). The 1790s
were, indeed, transformative: scholars have rightly devoted considerable attention
to their unprecedented dimensions and complex aftermath, and in the chapters
that follow I engage with their implications for thinking about questions including
the ‘people,’ the press, sentiment, and ‘Dissent’. This book sets out, however, to
supplement the French Revolution with attention to plural, overlapping sources of
unrest and discontent, including more mundane varieties of disillusionment with and
grumbling about ‘politics’ with much deeper histories. These ongoing challenges
and contestation meant that political instability was, to some degree, the norm,
rather than the exception, for much of the long eighteenth century.47 The French
Revolution maintains its unique status as a source of political upheaval. Yet, ironically,
this supposed watershed may be seen as having effected a reactionary turn—in
concert with larger shifts in governmental control and affective regulation—that
served to contain the teeming discontents of the recent decades and the uncer-
tainty of the preceding century, at least as much as its events heightened the sense
of ‘revolutionary’ possibility.
This book, then, returns to view a fuller history of the political upheaval in and
around the Romantic age and recovers a deeper history for the increasing sense of
discontent with ‘politics’ as such. It aims in doing so to advance richer ways of
thinking about the relationship between politics and literary authorship. Butler
again proves an invaluable guide in this undertaking. The discussion in Romantics,
Rebels, and Reactionaries of the ‘pervasive mood of rejection of current society’
during the later eighteenth century helps to establish an alternative baseline for the
politics of literary authorship during this period: one of unease and unrest, not
acquiescence to authority and political stability.48 In addition to locating literary
production in the pre-1789 decades in closer proximity to political unrest, these
remarks point to specific ways of thinking about the status of the literary. Butler
herself echoed and amplified these observations in a contemporary study in which

Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). The demands of the
‘Association’ movement of the early 1780s—which included calls for a return to triennial parliaments
and the prospect of annual elections—looked back to debates surrounding the opposition to extending
the duration between parliaments to seven years in the early eighteenth century. As Knights notes,
those voting in 1715 amounted to ‘almost 20 per cent of the adult male population—a higher per-
centage than after the 1832 Reform Act’ (12).
47 This book thus builds upon continuing historiographical challenges to the premise that the
eighteenth century, following the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, was an ‘age of stability’: compare
J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (London: Macmillan, 1967).
Plumb’s assertion that ‘[b]y the middle 1720s the English political system had begun to assume the air
not only of stability but also of historical inevitability; it had become a child of Time and of Providence,
an object of veneration, the Burkeian fantasy, and a halo of glory was forming about those muddled,
incoherent events of 1688, events that had so very nearly spelt anarchy and ruin to the English nation’
(16) has faced increasing challenge; belief in providential design (as opposed to ‘muddl[e]’) behind the
events of 1688 was already seen as fractured, I have suggested elsewhere, by Laurence Sterne: see my
‘Arbitrary Government: Tristram Shandy and the Crisis of Whig History’, ELH 81 (2014), 611n.51.
48 Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, 22.
22 Disaffected Parties

she astutely noted that the ‘most consistent feature of eighteenth-century literature’
was ‘its alienation from power, its oppositional bias, its search for alternatives to
the status quo’.49 Unavailable for three decades, the recently published study that
features these arresting remarks recovered a distinctive oppositional strain in works
by eighteenth-century writers including James Thomson and William Collins. In
their efforts to excavate England’s mythological past, Butler demonstrated, these
writers sought to preserve and revivify the ‘Patriot’ tradition of virtuous resistance
(associated with the ‘country’ in an earlier, specifically partisan sense). That ‘Patriot’
tradition in turn had vigorous afterlives, including in the arguments that shaped
the American Revolution.50 This book follows Butler, as I have noted, in situating
the imaginative outpouring following the French Revolution alongside the unrest
of preceding decades. We would similarly do well, I have also proposed, to keep
the ongoing constitutional debates and radical energies that had circled around
politics throughout the eighteenth century in view when approaching the long
Romantic age. This book calls for renewed attention in particular not only to the
epoch-shaping role of the 1688 Revolution but also to its ongoing contestation
(including, but not limited to, conservative and ‘Jacobite’ challenges to the legit-
imacy of the resulting constitutional settlement).51 Appeals to the radical, or
merely unresolved, legacies of 1688, together with appeals to an enduring ‘Patriot’
opposition, intersected with the broader challenges to the status quo that Butler
saw infusing literary production throughout the eighteenth century, particularly
its later decades. Looking beyond the French Revolution to the diverse ways in
which the fundamentals of politics were contested, both throughout the preceding
century and with particular urgency in the decades preceding the fall of the Bastille,
we may locate the continuing political discontents addressed in this book against
other horizons than outright (violent) rebellion, revolutionary breaks in time, or
apocalyptic transformation, calling attention instead to the inchoate political agi-
tation that may exist in the absence of sweeping reforms or widespread challenges
to things as they are.52

49 See Mapping Mythologies: Countercurrents in Eighteenth-Century Poetry and Cultural History

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 10. This study was completed in 1984, making it
contemporary with Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, but first published in this posthumous edition.
50 In The Heart of the Declaration, Steve Pincus argues for a coherent ‘Patriot’ ideology, which
endured from the early eighteenth century, both in Britain and in the American colonies.
51 Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) has
been central in resuscitating the importance of the debates associated with the Revolution. In Bloodless
Revolutions: 1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005),
Anthony Jarrells draws upon the now discredited—yet increasingly current by the early nineteenth
century—account of 1688–9 as a non-violent transition to argue that the Romantic period witnessed
a similarly benign transition wherein literature rose in place of the people. For challenges to the non-
violent accounts of the Revolution, which suggest that its violence rivalled that of the French
Revolution and that less controversially emphasize the bloodshed in Ireland, see Pincus, 1688 and Tim
Harris, The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London: Penguin, 2007).
52 For apocalypticism in the Romantic period, see especially Steven Goldsmith, Unbuilding
Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) and Iain
McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For the conjuncture between militant apocalypticism
and political radicalism, which remained in proximity both to generalized discussion of politics and to
 Introduction: Sick of Politics 23

L I T E R AT U R E O N T H E S H O R E S O F P O L I T I C S

Butler’s characteristically acute insight about the alienated, oppositional bent of

eighteenth-century writers captures an important truth about the evolving status
of the literary on which this book seeks to build by posing still-broader questions
about the relationship between literature and politics. Literature may occupy vari-
ous removes from politics, from the Horatian retreat presented by the country to
the safely insulated spaces of domesticity—tendencies that converge in Sterne’s
dedication to Tristram Shandy, written from a ‘retired thatch’d house’ and inviting
prime minister William Pitt to retreat with his book to ‘the country’.53 By contrast,
authors may keep their political commitments front and centre, upholding partisan
agendas and ideological principles alongside and even directly through their writ-
ings. This book addresses a more diverse group of writers than Butler’s account of
Patriot poets, including Whigs and Tories, men and women, writers born in the
early eighteenth century and others with long Victorian afterlives. These writers
nonetheless stood, like Butler’s poets, in between the respective extremes of
withdrawal or engagement. Their estrangement, to be distinguished from total
disengagement, kept them at a partial and provisional remove from the political
arena; at the same time, their writing largely kept them at a distance from political
commitment, at least by way of established channels. This intermediary domain
differs, if only in degree, from the extremes of disenchantment, contemptuous
detachment, and outright rebellion reached by other writers between the Augustan
and Romantic ages.54 This space of retirement might appear analogous to the pleasant
‘loop-holes of retreat’ from which William Cowper ‘peep[s]’ at the world in The Task:
the domesticated, quasi-rural remove from which he can ‘behold / The tumult’
from a ‘safe distance’ and remain ‘still’.55 As a realm that provides compensation

‘enfranchised public opinion’ in the early nineteenth century, see, respectively, Jon Mee, ‘Apocalypse
and Ambivalence: The Politics of Millenarianism in the 1790s’, South Atlantic Quarterly 95 (1996) and
Kevin Gilmartin, William Hazlitt: Political Essayist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 135–40.
53 The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, Vols. 1–3, The Life and Opinions of Tristram
Shandy, Gentleman, eds. Melvyn New and Joan New (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978),
1.[9]. Retreat to natural scenes acquired more programmatic significance in the Romantic age, appar-
ent in John Thelwall’s reported observation to Samuel Taylor Coleridge that the Somerset countryside
made one forget the need for treason and in the retirement imagined by Leigh Hunt and his circle, as
luxuriated in by Keats.
54 I address Swift and Pope in Chapter 1. Disenchantment with the revolutionary cause by
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other ‘apostates’ made them pointed targets for opprobrium but was also
of a piece with a larger national trend. For the ways frustration with the ‘languishing parliamentary
reform movement’ occasioned disenchantment in the radical press—and provided the wider context
for the ‘bitter detachment’ increasingly apparent in William Hazlitt’s responses to Britain’s unreformed
constitutional monarchy—see Gilmartin, William Hazlitt: Political Essayist, 289, 273. As Marilyn
Butler notes, the ‘rebelliousness’ of the Romantics, consolidated by their Victorian-era reputations,
was ‘outrageous and total, the individual rejecting not just his own society but the very principle of
living in society [. . . T]he Romantic and post-Romantic often dismisses political activity of any kind,
as external to the self, literal and commonplace.’ See Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, 30.
55 William Cowper, The Task (London: 1817), 94. Christopher Reid adopts Cowper’s remarks on
newspaper accounts of parliamentary debates as the title for his study of parliamentary speechmaking
and the changing arenas of its reception. See Imprison’d Wranglers: The Rhetorical Culture of the House
24 Disaffected Parties

for marginalization within or outright exclusion from the political arena, this remove
may similarly overlap with the ‘juxtapolitical citizenship’ that Lauren Berlant iden-
tifies with the binding force of sentimentalism.56 The middle ground foregrounded
here nonetheless differs from those realms of muffled comfort or affective satur-
ation. This book remains concerned instead with the ways that politics continued
to attract the attentions and energies of writers, at times despite their conscious
desires to the contrary, such that the ‘Indifference’ that Byron absorbed from his
age, for example, appeared less as a pat response than an unknown quantity.57
Authors occupying the limited remove emphasized here, amidst the changing
parameters of ‘political’ activity and discussion, could not help but become caught
up, to some degree, in politics, their purported disinterest frequently betraying
a continuing interest, their apparent withdrawal papering over more conflicted
and antagonistic, confused and indeterminate modes of political response—and
engaging the ‘affections’ under erasure within ‘disaffection’, thus recalling the
origins of the term as one for broken attachments, blocked sympathies, and more
unpredictable conjunctures of action and feeling.
This book accordingly locates literature at a complex remove from the evolving
parties of political activity. To the degree that they are concerned with partisan
alignment, the case studies of authors presented here emphasize how literary
authorship may render questions of partisan identification and political allegiance
uncertain, ambivalent, or indeterminate.58 By situating parliamentary politics
amidst a wider field of political activity and discussion, this book argues for an
expanded approach to political ‘parties’. Chapter 1 discusses in detail a 1770 visual
print in which a version of a two-party system remains in the mix with myriad

of Commons 1760–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Cowper’s combination of the
poetry of sensibility with evangelical piety made him (in the words of biographer William Hayley) the
‘poet of affection’. Recent critics, including Tobias Menely, have emphasized Cowper’s politicized
channelling of wayward currents of feeling. See The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Hayley quoted 147.
56 See Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press), especially 160–7.
57 Kevis Goodman has similarly rerouted our understanding of ostensibly absent feeling in The
Task. In her compelling discussion of the ambiguities attending Cowper’s ‘loop-hole’, Goodman
argues that the ‘affective dissonance’ attending engagement with politics-at-a-distance in that poem—
including the ‘indolent vacuity of thought’ that nestles alongside experiences of informational over-
load—betrays uncertainty, if not unease, about the potential for subjective access to the historicity of
the present. See ‘Cowper’s Georgic of the News: The “Loophole” in the Retreat’, chap. 3 in Georgic
Modernity and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 67–105. For a
valuable account of ‘indifference’ as related to Jacques Rancière’s account of aesthetic indeterminacy,
see Elizabeth Adan and Benjamin Bateman, ‘Emergent Precarities and Lateral Aesthetics: An
Introduction’, Minnesota Review 85 (2015), 110.
58 For a seminal account of a writer’s ambivalent relationship to politics, see John Wallace, Destiny
his Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). Valuable
discussions of literature and partisanship during the first half of the eighteenth century, a period in
which the complexity and multiplicity of partisan identities makes for particularly rich consideration
of partisan alignment, include Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture,
1681–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Bertrand A. Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The
Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722–1742 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1976);
Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Toni Bowers, Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories
and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
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 Range, Elevation, &c., of 12, 10, and 8 inch Guns, 32 Pr. Carronade Gun, and 10,
and 8 inch Iron Howitzers.
P. B. = Point Blank.
Elevation in degrees; Range in yards; Flight in
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Length. Weight. Charge.
Ordnance.
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5 25 4 200 470 730 960
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Range, Elevation, &c., of 12, 10, and 8 inch Guns, 32 Pr. Carronade Gun, and 10,
and 8 inch Iron Howitzers.
(Part 2 of 2)
Elevation in degrees; Range in yards; Flight in
Nature of seconds.
Length. Weight. Charge.
Ordnance.
8° 9° 10° 11° 12° 13° 14° 15°
feet. in. cwt. qrs. lb. oz.
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The above Ranges for the 12 and 10 inch Guns are with hollow shot, weighing respectively 112
lb. and 84 lb.
The 8 inch Gun carries either hollow shot, plugged, 48 lb.; or shell, 46 lb.
Vide also Naval Gunnery. Table of Tangent Practice, 8 inch Gun.
 56 Pounder Gun, and 68 Pounder Gun.
Weight, Ranges, &c.
Above
Gun. Shot. Charge. P B 1° 2° 3° 4° 5° 6° 8° 10° 12°
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 8 Inch Gun.
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RICOCHET FIRING.

1. When adopted in the field, the guns should seldom be elevated

above 3 degrees, as the objects fired at are generally cavalry and
infantry, and the lower the angle the longer will the shot preserve its
force, and have effect.
2. In the ricochet of a fortification of any kind, the elevation should
seldom exceed 10 degrees to throw the shot over the parapet a little
higher than the level of the battery; and, on the whole, the best
elevation to enfilade a work is from 6 to 9 degrees, measured above
the crest of the parapet with corresponding charges.
3. The charge, and elevation being known for any range, when the
gun and parapet are on the same level, the same charge, and
elevation may be used so long as the difference of level does not
exceed one-twentieth of the horizontal distance between them, the
elevation being given by the tangent scale, and the gun laid at the
parapet, whether above or below its own level.
 Ricochet Practice with Iron Ordnance.

Round Shot.

68 Pr. 24 Pr. Gun, 18 Pr. Gun, 12 Pr. Gun,

Carronade.* 9 Feet. 8 Feet. 8½ Feet.
Range in Eleva- Eleva- Eleva- Eleva-
Charge. Charge. Charge. Charge.
yards. tion. tion. tion. tion.
lb. oz. deg. lb. oz. deg. lb. oz. deg. lb. oz. deg.
400 12 6¼ 9 6½ 8 4½
10 7¾ 6 6½
8 11
600 1 12 7 6 6 1 5¼ 12 4¾
1 8 8¾ 1 8 4 12 7 10 6
1 6½ 8 7¾
800 2 3¾ 1 8 4¼ 1 4½
1 8 5½ 1 7 12 6½
* Note.—When Shells are fired from the 68 Pounder Carronade,
the Elevation must be decreased about half a degree.

Part 2 of 2

Common Shell.

10-inch Howitzer 8-inch Howitzer 24 Pr. Howitzer

Shell, 92 lb. Shell, 46 lb. Shell, 16 lb.
Range in Eleva- Eleva- Eleva-
Charge. Charge. Charge.
yards. tion. tion. tion.
lb. oz. deg. lb. oz. deg. lb. oz. deg.
400 2 8 6¼ 1 8 6 9 4¾
2 8½ 1 9½ 6 7½
600 3 6½ 1 8 8¼ 1 4¾
2 8 8¼ 1 4 10 12 5¼
9 7½
800 4 6¼ 2 8 6¼
3 8 7½ 2 6½
 MORTARS.

Practical rules.
To find the Charge for a given Range at 45° elevation.
13 inch Mortar.—To the range, in yards, add half the range,
multiply the sum by ·03 for the charge, in ounces.
10 inch Mortar.—When the range is under 1350 yards, add to the
range 160, and multiply by ·02; and if the range is over 1350 yards,
add one-fifth of the range, and multiply by ·02 for the charge, in
ounces.
8 inch Mortar.—To the range, in yards, add 20, and the sum
multiplied by ·015 will give the charge, in ounces.
5½ inch Mortar.—To the range in yards, add 150, and multiply by
·08, for the charge, in ounces.
4 ⅖ inch Mortar.—To the range in yards add 300, and multiply by
·06, for the charge, in drams.
To find the Time of flight, the range being given. Divide the square
root of the range, in feet, by 4·5 for the time of flight, in seconds.
To find the Range, the Time of flight being given. Multiply the time
of flight, in seconds, by 4·5, and square the product for the range, in
feet.
To find the length of Fuze,[8] for a given range. Multiply the time of
flight, in seconds, by ·22, for the 13, and 10 inch mortars, and by ·24
for 8, 5½, and 4⅖ inch mortars, for the length of fuze, in tenths.
 Mortar Practice at 15°, 25°, and 45° Elevation. 1838.
13 INCH IRON. 10 INCH IRON. 8 INCH IRON.
Weight 36 cwt. Weight 16 cwt. 2 qrs. Weight 8 cwt. 1 qr.
*Shell filled 200 lb. Shell filled 92 lb. Shell filled 46 lb.
Burst. powder 6 lb. 12 oz. Burst. powder 2 lb. 10 oz. Burst. powder 1 lb. 14 oz.
Blowing Blowing Blowing
2 oz. 1½ oz. 1 oz.
powder powder powder
Eleva- Eleva- Eleva-
Charge. Fuze. Range. Charge. Fuze. Range. Charge. Fuze. Range.
tion. tion. tion.
degs. lb. oz. in. yds. degs. lb. oz. in. yds. degs. lb. oz. in. yds.
45 2 1½ 1·9 450 45 1 ½ 1·9 450 15 14 ·8 500
2 3 2· 500 1 2 2· 500 1 1· 550
2 4¾ 2·1 550 1 3¼ 2·1 550 1 2 1·1 600
2 6 2·2 600 1 4¾ 2·2 600 45 9½ 1·9 450
2 7¾ 2·3 650 1 6 2·3 650 10¾ 2· 500
2 9½ 2·4 700 1 7½ 2·4 700 12½ 2·1 550
2 11¾ 2·45 750 1 9 2·45 750 13¾ 2·2 600
2 14 2·5 800 1 10 2·5 800 14½ 2·3 650
3 ½ 2·55 850 1 11 2·55 850 15½ 2·4 700
3 3 2·6 900 1 12 2·6 900 1 2·45 750
3 5½ 2·65 950 1 13 2·65 950 1 ½ 2·5 800
3 8 2·7 1000 1 14 2·7 1000 1 1¼ 2·55 850
3 10 2·75 1050 1 15¼ 2·75 1050 1 2 2·6 900
3 12 2·8 1100 2 ½ 2·8 1100 1 2¾ 2·65 950
3 14 2·85 1150 2 1¾ 2·85 1150 1 3½ 2·7 1000
4 2·9 1200 2 3 2·9 1200 1 4 2·75 1050
4 5 3· 1300 1 4¾ 2·8 1100
4 15 3·2 1500 1 5¼ 2·85 1150
5 10 3·4 1700 1 6 2·9 1200
* The Shells were filled with sand.

Part 2 of 2
5½ INCH BRASS. 4⅖ INCH BRASS.
Weight 1 cwt. 1 qr. 10 lb. Weight 3 qrs. 19 lb.
Shell filled 16 lb. Shell filled 8 lb.
Burst. powder 10 oz. Burst. powder 5 oz.
Blowing powder ½ oz. Blowing powder ½ oz.
Eleva- Eleva-
Charge. Fuze. Range. Charge. Fuze. Range.
tion. tion.
degs. lb. oz. in. yds. degs. lb. oz. in. yds.
15 6 ·7 350 15 4 8 ·8 450
7 ·75 400 4 12 ·85 500
 7 8 ·8 450 25 4 1·1 540
8 ·85 500
25 5 8 1·1 480
45 4 8 300 45 2 6 1·65 300
4 12 350 2 9 1·7 350
5 1·75 400 2 12 1·75 400
5 4 1·8 450 3 1·8 450
5 8 1·85 500 3 4 1·85 500
5 12 1·9 550 3 8 1·9 550
6 1·95 600 3 12 1·95 600
 Greatest Charges, and Ranges.

lb. oz. yds.

13 Inch, Sea 20 0 4200
10 ” 10 8 4000
13 Inch, Land 9 0 2900
10 ” 4 0 2400
8 ” 2 0 2000
5½ ” 9 1200
4⅖ ” 4·5 1000
Distance from the parapet of a battery, the parapet being 8 feet
high, for Mortars at the following elevations:—

Elevation 45 30 20 15 10 degrees.
Distance 12 13 21 30 40 feet.
 PA R T V.
STORES, IMPLEMENTS, COMBUSTIBLES, ETC.,
REQUIRED IN BATTERIES.[9]

BALLS, LIGHT.

Light Balls are thrown from mortars at night, to discover the

operations of the enemy’s working parties, &c.
Light balls burn from 10 to 20 minutes.

Composition.
lb. oz. lb. oz.
Saltpetre, pulverized 6 4 Rosin, pounded 1 14
Sulphur, ground 2 8 Linseed oil, boiled 0 7½
BALLS, SMOKE.

Smoke balls are fired from mortars to suffocate the men in mines,
&c., or to prevent them continuing their work. They are also used to
conceal manœuvres, &c., from an enemy.
Smoke balls burn from 25 to 30 minutes.

Composition.
lb. oz. lb. oz.
Corned mealed powder 5 0 Swedish pitch 2 0
Saltpetre, pulverized 1 0 Tallow 0 8
Sea coal 1 8

To construct hollow Globes, or Cases for Light Balls, &c.

 The canvas, or paper, may be formed in the following manner, viz.:
—With radius of half the intended calibre, describe the circle a b c d
(vide Figure 20, Practical Geometry), and divide the same into four
equal parts. From b with radius a b describe arc a e, from a with
radius a b describe arc b e, and from e with radius e a describe arc a
b. Eight pieces, as e a b, will form a ball nearly, the edges being
brought close together.
CARCASSES.

Carcasses, a species of shell, are filled with composition, the

flame from which is extremely powerful, and nearly unextinguishable.
They are much used in bombardments of towns, setting fire to
shipping, &c., and are discharged from guns, mortars, and howitzers,
similarly to common shells; from which, however, they differ, in being
made thicker, to enable them to withstand the intensity of fire; and in
having three fuze holes instead of one.
Carcasses burn from 8 to 10 minutes.
Common shells may be made to produce effects similar to
carcasses, by filling them with a proportion of Valenciennes
composition, and bursting powder.
All carcasses have three holes; and, from guns and howitzers, are
fired with sabots.

Carcass Composition. Valenciennes Composition.

lb. oz. lb. oz.
Saltpetre, pulverized 6 4 Saltpetre, pulverized 6 4
Sulphur, sublimated 2 8 Sulphur, sublimated 2 8
Rosin, pounded 1 14 Rosin, pounded 1 4
Antimony, pounded 0 10 Antimony, pounded 0 10
Tallow 0 10 Linseed oil, 6 oz. 14 drams.
Turpentine 0 10

Weight, and Dimensions of Carcasses.

Nature of Carcass. Exterior Weight, Weight,
Land Service. Diameter. empty. filled.
inches. lb. oz. lb. oz.
13 Inch 12·84 220 0 234 8
10 Inch 9·84 97 0 104 0
8 Inch 7·86 52 4 57 0
5½ Inch 5·59 15 8 17 1
4⅖ Inch 4·45 8 4 9 1
42 Pr. 6·85 28 14 30 10
32 Pr. 6·1 23 3½ 24 8
24 Pr. 5·54 15 6 16 9½
18 Pr. 5·04 13 12 14 7½
12 Pr. 4·4 8 6 8 13
 CARTRIDGES FOR GUNS, HOWITZERS, ETC.

Charge Dimensions.
Nature of Ordnance. of Circumference.
powder. Length.
Superior. Inferior.
GUNS, IRON. lb. oz. ft. in. ft. in. ft. in.
68 Pounder 18 1 8·6 1 1
56 20 1 10· 1 3· 1 3·
” 16 1 10· 1 1
” 14 1 10· 11·3 11·3
” 10 1 10· 9· 9·
” 6 1 10· 7·2 7·2
42 14 1 11·1 1 9·4 1 9·4
32 10 1 9·8 1 7·9 1 7·9
24 8 1 6·3 1 5·6 1 5·6
18 6 1 7· 1 4·5 1 4·5
12 4 1 4·5 1 2·5 1 2·5
9 3 1 2·2 1 1· 1 1·
6 2 1 1·1 1 1·5 1 1·5
12 Inch 12 1 6·5 1 6·5 1 2·
10 12 1 5·5 1 3· 1
8 10 1 7· 1 1·5 10·
GUNS, BRASS.
{Medium 4 1 4·5 1 2·5 1 2·5
12 Pr.
{Light 3 1 1·5 1 2·5 1 2·5
9 2 8 1 1·1 1 1· 1 1·
{Heavy 2 1 2·2 11·5 11·5
6
{Light 1 8 11·2 11·5 11·5
{Heavy 1 9·7 9· 9·
3
{Light 12 9· 9· 9·
HOWITZERS.
{10 Inch 7 1 1·8 1 3·8 9·7
Iron.
{ 8 4 1 1·7 1 1·2 7·
Brass. {24 Pr. 2 8 1 0·2 10· 6·3
{12 1 4 10·8 8·5 5·8
 { 5½ inch 2 10·3 5·9 3·8
{ 4⅖ 8 7·6 5· 3·
CARRONADES.
68 Pr. 5 10 1 8·3 1 9· 1 9·
42 3 8 1 5· 1 7·1 1 7·1
32 2 10 1 6· 1 5·5 l 5·5
24 2 11· 1 3·9 1 3·9
18 1 8 10· 1 1·8 1 1·8
12 1 8·8 1 1·2 1 1·2
6 12 7·5 10·1 10·1

When the circumference of the Cartridge is not uniform, each

Cartridge is made of two pieces, and the dimensions given are for
one piece only.
FUZES, OLD PATTERN.

The wooden cases for holding the Fuze composition are made of
well-seasoned beech. The interior diameter of the cup is equal to
three times that of the bore, and its depth is equal to 1½ of the said
diameter. The thickness of wood at the bottom of the bore is equal to
two diameters.

Fuze composition. Blind fire for Night.

lb. oz. lb.
Saltpetre, pulverized 3 4 Mealed powder 16½
Sulphur, sublimated 1 0 Wood ashes 9½
Pit-mealed powder 2 12
Fuzes, being bored for Field guns, or cut to the length required for
the range of Garrison guns, are made to fit the Shell correctly by
means of a rasp and cutter; after which they are carefully driven into
the Shell with a mallet and setter, leaving only the cup of the Fuze
out of it. The Fuze is uncapped when placed in the piece.

13 inch Fuze burns 40 5½ inch Fuze burns 20

Seconds. Seconds.
 10 do. do. 35 do. 4 do. do. 15 do.
8 do. do. 30 do.
All natures of Fuzes, when driven with the above composition,
burn one inch in five seconds; but when driven with mealed powder,
they burn two inches in the same time.
BOXER’S FUZE.

The composition bore is made excentric with regard to the exterior,

and two powder channels are bored upon that side in which there is
the greatest thickness of wood. A hole is bored through the mealed
powder at the top, and into the fuze composition, to insure the
ignition of the fuze composition from the priming. Two rows of holes,
two inches apart, are made into the powder channels, and the
bottom hole in each row is continued to the axis of the composition
bore. The small side holes, with the exception of the bottom ones,
are filled with pressed powder, and a small portion of clay. The
powder channels contain rifle powder, and the bottom side holes
have a piece of quick match placed in them. Beyond this quick
match, the powder channels in the fuze for common shells are filled
with putty; but in the Shrapnell fuze the corresponding portion
contains quick match, which is continued from one channel to the
other through a groove made in the bottom. A piece of quick match
is tied into the cup, and it is recommended that this quick match is
laid over the side before the shell is set home. The bursting powder
is contained in a tin cylinder,[10] and is admitted through a hole at the
bottom of the socket. There is a small hole in the side of the shell,
through which the balls, and composition, which is run between
them, are admitted. It is recommended that the bursting powder be
placed in the tin cylinder before going into action, and the plug
covered with serge, inserted in the fuze hole. The bursting powder
can be speedily removed from the shell, if necessary; and, from its
being separated from the balls, it will not be liable to injury, even
when subjected to the action of travelling.
A simple boring-bit is supplied to each gun, in case the borer,
specially made for the fuze, is lost, or damaged.
 Captain Boxer’s 5½ inch fuzes are to be adopted for all natures of
guns and howitzers, one inch in length for Shrapnell shells, and two
inches in length for common shells.
FUZES, METAL.

Fuzes, for the Naval service specially, are formed of gun metal,
and are screwed into a gun metal bouched screw hole in the shell.
Metal fuzes are of three natures, viz., 3-inch, 4-inch, and short-
range Fuzes. The first is driven with mealed powder, and will burn
seven seconds; the second is driven with fuze composition, and will
burn twenty seconds; and the short-range fuze is also driven with the
composition, and will burn two seconds. These fuzes are driven and
primed precisely the same as wooden fuzes; but instead of being
capped with canvas, have a screw metal cap.
The fuzes are screwed into the shells, the holes of which are
bouched with metal to receive them; they are screwed into the left
hand, so that unscrewing the cap in the same direction prevents the
possibility of the fuze being loosened by that operation.
The diameter of the fuze holes for all natures of shells, fitted to
receive metal fuzes, is exactly the same.
A 3-inch metal fuze will burn seven seconds, and is calculated for
ranges not exceeding 1,900 yards. A 4-inch metal fuze will burn ten
seconds, and is not to be used at a greater distance than 2,400
yards.
Bickford’s Water Fuze, which burns about two or three feet in a
minute, may be advantageously used for exploding gunpowder
under water, for the destruction of booms, vessels, &c.
GREASE.

The composition used for greasing wheels is composed of equal

parts of tallow and coarse sweet oil melted together, and it is made
up in kegs of 28 lb. each. In warm weather the proportion of tallow
must be increased.
GRENADES, HAND.
 A Land service Hand grenade weighs 1 lb. 13 oz., and may be
thrown from 40 to 60 feet. The diameter of the Fuze composition is
·2 of an inch, length 2·25 inches, and weight 3 drams.
Fuze Composition.
Saltpetre, 3 lb. 4 oz.; Sulphur, 1 lb.; Mealed powder, 2 lb. 12 oz.
On service the Grenades are charged with 1½ oz. of powder.
GUN COTTON.

Although there appears no prospect of Gun cotton being used in

the British service as a substitute for gunpowder, it is advisable that
every Artillerist should be cognizant of its merits and demerits; for
circumstances may arise when this new impulsive power may be
advantageously employed. The exploding cotton is thus prepared:—
Common well-cleaned cotton is dipped for about half a minute in
highly-concentrated nitric acid (made by the distillation of ten parts of
dried saltpetre, and six of oil of vitriol), and then instantly placed in
water, which must be often renewed, in order to free the cotton from
the acid with which it is impregnated. Care must then be taken that
all the knotty particles of the cotton are properly disentangled, and
that it is thoroughly dried. After the explosive preparation is ready for
use, the smallest portion explodes when struck on an anvil with a
hammer, like fulminating-powder; when kindled with a glowing body,
it takes fire just like gunpowder; and, when used in a gun, its
operation, though in a far greater proportion to its weight, is similar to
that of gunpowder. Gun cotton is employed in the same manner as
gunpowder: a piece of it is rammed down the barrel, then a bit of
wadding, and after that a ball; a copper cap ignites and explodes the
cotton.
To Dr. Otto, professor of chemistry in Brunswick, we are indebted
for the foregoing description of the preparation of the explosive
cotton; and the intrinsic value of this impulsive agent has been
ascertained by Colonel Mordecai, at Washington, in 1845, 1847,
1848. The following are the results of this scientific officer’s
experiments for the purpose of determining the fitness of Gun cotton,
as a substitute for gunpowder in the military service:—
 1. Explosive cotton burns at 380° Fahrenheit, therefore it will not
set fire to gunpowder when burnt in a loose state over it.
2. The projectile force of explosive cotton, with moderate charges,
in a musket or cannon, is equal to that of about twice its weight of
the best gunpowder.
3. When compressed by hard ramming, as in filling a fuze, it burns
slowly.
4. By the absorption of moisture, its force is rapidly diminished, but
the force is restored by drying.
5. Its bursting effect is much greater than that of gunpowder, on
which account it is well adapted for mining operations.
6. The principal residua of its combustion are water and nitrous
acid; therefore the barrel of a gun would be soon corroded, if not
cleaned after firing.
7. In consequence of the quickness and intensity of its action,
when ignited, it cannot be used with safety in the present fire-arms.
8. An accident on service, such as the insertion of two charges
before firing, would cause the bursting of the barrel; and it is
probable that the like effect would take place with the regular service
charges, if several times repeated.
GUNPOWDER.

The component parts of Powder are 75 parts of nitre, 10 of

sulphur, and 15 of charcoal.
Cylinder powder is made from charcoal that has been burnt in iron
cylinders; and Pit powder from charcoal burnt in common pits.
Gunpowder, when ignited, expands with a velocity of about 5,000
feet per second; and the pressure of the fluid is about 2,000 times
that of common air.
One pound of Powder measures 32 solid inches.
A cubic foot of Government powder weighs about 58 pounds.