One of the most powerful depictions of the state of Britain at the opening of the 1810s is Anna Letitia Barbauld’s bleak, prophetic satire, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: A Poem (1812). It continues to be studied and read today because its tone, content, and themes are considered by many modern critics to be representative of the decade’s state of disarray and despair. At the time Barbauld started the poem, Britain had been at war with France since 1793, a conflict only resolved later in the decade with the Battle of Waterloo (1815). The consequences of the war were nothing less than catastrophic – famine and disease spread amidst massive unemployment, food shortages, and soaring food prices; the king, already in mental decline, was further traumatised by the death of his daughter Princess Amelia and entirely incapacitated; and petitions and revolts from the Midlands and the North abounded, all protesting the British Parliament’s defence of an exploitative market system. Napoleon’s Minister of Exterior Relations, Hugues-Bernard Maret, commented jubilantly on the economic decline of France’s enemy over the Channel, and reported that while England had ‘flattered herself with invading the commerce of the world’ and aspiring ‘to the universal dominion of the seas’, her ‘manufacturing cities have become deserted; distress has succeeded to a prosperity, until then increasing; the alarming disappearance of specie, the absolute privation of business, daily interrupt the public tranquillity’.¹ As Emma Clery notes, the ‘passage reads almost like a checklist of Barbauld’s themes and images in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’, and struck readers, in words from the poem, like ‘an earthquake shock’ of ‘unuttered fear’.² But Eighteen Hundred and Eleven also indicates the peculiarity of the 1810s as a time caught amidst a flurry of new ideas, beliefs, and concepts, but without a clear sense of how such newness might be understood, interpreted, or even accepted. It is a decade that neither marks the beginning of a new century nor offers any explicit transition from Romantic into Victorian. It is at once too early and too late to make any definitive statements about the state of the way things were or how they might change in the future; and it is a decade in which many of those who would most significantly transform Britain’s intellectual landscape were born but yet to become active commentators – Charles Dickens, Harriet Jacobs, Søren Kierkegaard, John Ruskin, Walt Whitman, Karl Marx.

Caught in such confusion, Barbauld adopted a form in which the ‘loud death drum’ of the poem’s opening line provided a sinister rhythm for its long, fatidic cry. In doing so, she joined a chorus of visionary protest poets with considerable cultural purchase in the decade: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Joanna Southcott, S. T. Coleridge, and John Thelwall. But their voices were not as indomitable as they had been in the 1790s, and Barbauld was newly intent on provoking her readers out of what she perceived to be complacency and lethargy. Even the title of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven ‘forces readers to pause and stumble after 1800’, argues Orianne Smith, thus ‘drawing attention to the apocalyptic import of the dawn of the new millennium’.³ The apocalypse was extant within the bounds of Britain in the period, swarmed as it was by a plague of greed and ambition. Barbauld’s poem addressed such horrors head on, and reviewers responded in kind. It is commonplace to cite the many furious critical responses to Eighteen Hundred and Eleven in readings of the poem – John Wilson Croker’s scathing attack in The Quarterly Review, based on his incredulity that a ‘lady author’ could write such a ‘satire, which indeed is satire on herself alone’; William Godwin’s censure of the poem as ‘cowardly, time-serving, Presbyterian’; and Henry Crabb Robinson’s lament over the narrator’s prophetic ‘confidence’ and ‘dastardly tone’ in a poem he believed was ‘written more in sorrow than in anger’.⁴ But these reactions also betray the decade’s anxious contradictions and uncertainties. The poem attracted attention in part because it spoke to contemporary desires for innovation in governance and politics, to hear the voice of women writers, and to emphasise the value of moderation and reason. Barbauld offered some of this but also shone a spotlight on the period’s fear of new political ideas and literary voices, and the open question of whether wisdom and discernment are dependent on reason or the affective reception of the divine. These vacillations are embodied in the poem’s ambiguous ‘Spirit’ that haunts the earth:

This ‘Spirit’ has been variously perceived as liberty, truth, virtue, and civilisation, but as Penny Bradshaw writes, it is strongly suggestive of ‘the failure of the Enlightenment in Europe’ and Britain’s obsession with commercialism and colonisation.⁶ At the same time, the cryptic, perhaps supernatural cast of the Spirit complicates the legacy of the Enlightenment, once an expression of freedom, now descended into an ethos of destruction in which humans and the natural world are enslaved and exploited. Bradshaw identifies the dark frustration of the poem with Barbauld’s profound disappointment that the Enlightenment project not only had failed to grant civil rights to Dissenters, women, and slaves, but also had inspired a new round of tyranny and catastrophe that was especially impactful upon them. This ‘Gothic night’, Barbauld wrote, is ‘Where Power is seated, and where Science reigns’, one in which England is stripped of its reputation as ‘the seat of the arts’ and crumbles into ‘gray ruin’ and ‘mouldering stone’.⁷

Might one way to conceptualise the 1810s be as an extended Gothic night? Shelley thought so, and his impassioned but despairing sonnet about the decade, ‘England in 1819’, brutally exposes the ravages of monarchy, materialism, war, poverty, orthodoxy, and nationalism in the decade. For Shelley, the 1810s are a graveyard of undead ideologies from which he longs for a chimeric phantom to erupt and explode:

Barbauld and Shelley’s poems, then, bookend the decade as a portentous twilight in which history blindly if wildly wanders between two worlds equally desolate and miserable. While it would be reductive to reduce any ten-year period to one definitive claim, the chapters that comprise this volume nevertheless reveal how many of the decade’s writers and thinkers are caught, like Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, in a storm by which they are driven forwards into a future to which their backs are turned.⁹ It was also a decade of literal darkness following the eruptions of the Soufrière Saint Vincent volcano in the Caribbean in 1812 and Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, the latter one of the most cataclysmic events of the century. Mount Tambora’s explosive eruption launched fiery ash thirty miles into the air and twenty-five miles across land into the sea, the pyroclastic flows searing crops and aquatic life, poisoning fresh water, and wiping out whole villages and communities. Eleven thousand people died instantly, and over a hundred thousand more from subsequent harvest failures. Whirlwinds and tsunamis raged as temperatures across Europe plummeted, monsoons flooded Asia, famine spread across China, and India was overcome by a cholera epidemic. These events led to the branding of 1816 as the ‘year without a summer’, and in Britain, typhus, disease, crop failure, and starvation fulfilled many of Barbauld’s prophetic warnings. In Chapter 1, Dewey H. Hall reads the aftermath of the Mount Tambora eruption as politically, materially, and ecologically entangled with the 1816 purchase of the Parthenon sculptures by the British Parliament from the Earl of Elgin, Thomas Bruce. In doing so, Hall creates an 1810s ecology of things – marble, ash, crops – that reveal a shared suffering between both human and more-than-human bodies deemed less important than the purchase of fine art to secure Britain’s global aesthetic reputation.

But the Britain of the 1810s continued to spiral even further into gloom through a series of local disasters: the horrendous conditions in which cotton workers and agricultural labourers worked were confronted by the 1810 general strike in Manchester as well as recurrent Luddite uprisings; the British Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, was shot and killed in the lobby of the House of Commons in May 1812, and his murderer John Bellingham hung a week later; only days after the execution, an explosion at Felling colliery in Tyne and Wear killed almost a hundred people, and tragically happened again the following year; and in August 1819, the Peterloo Massacre left Britain reeling when a crowd of protestors were violently set upon by the English cavalry police. As Mary Fairclough argues in Chapter 2, Peterloo was especially significant as an example of what she calls ‘action at a distance’, or virtual collectives bound by a shared national feeling the radical press took as an impetus for broader reform. In her reading of Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy (1819), Fairclough focuses on the poem’s celebration of solidarity via the collective and the assembly, a grassroots vision of democracy free of the constraints imposed on physical gatherings and a foundation for future political change. Glimpses of hope such as these were discernible in other accomplishments in the 1810s – the widespread use of gas lights in cities, the development of steam-powered ships and locomotive railways, the opening of the ‘Old Vic’ (originally the Royal Coburg Theatre) in 1818, the discovery of the Great Comet in 1811. And yet they offered little solace to those like Barbauld for whom the atrocities of the Napoleonic wars and the everyday collapse of the natural environment were irredeemable.

However justified Barbauld’s fury in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven might have been, for some readers it felt excessive and defeatist, especially those for whom texts like Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Felicia Hemans’ The Domestic Affections, and Other Poems (1812) offered the same sharp critique without the insistence on despair. No doubt Barbauld was censured as much for assuming a male, Miltonic, epic voice in which to denounce established institutions like Parliament, the Church of England, and traditional universities as she was for the content of her poem. As Smith notes, her seer-like prophet poet role was familiar to readers in the 1810s due to a millennial surge of apocalyptic writing, and many women writers looked back to the female prophets of Civil War England to take on urgently a role authorised by religious and biblical precedent.¹⁰ But for contemporaries such as William Wordsworth, the flaw in Barbauld’s satire was not so much its mantic fieriness as its lack of sympathy and discernment. Wordsworth was unquestionably and harshly critical of Barbauld, as a letter to his wife in which he described her as ‘the old Snake Letitia Barbauld’ confirms.¹¹ Robinson too recalled that Wordsworth was contemptuous towards Barbauld, claiming that he had dismissed her poetry as ‘insignificant’ and ‘trash’, and asserted that ‘Mrs B has a bad heart’.¹² The word ‘heart’ is revealing here, one that signified a reply of ‘warmth and softness’ to the ‘coldness and hardness’ of Enlightenment reason, and an essential religious core that comprised both intellect and emotion.¹³ As John Beer argues, the heart’s meaning as a ‘centre of being’ and ‘touchstone of one’s humanity’ was biblical for Wordsworth, who would have been familiar with its scriptural depiction as lifted up to God even in its broken or pierced state.¹⁴ In Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, Barbauld describes Britain’s heart as paralysed and shrivelled by terror, sick with ‘heart-witherings of unuttered fear’ in which the nation’s soul and its affections bleed out into a ‘sad death’ (ll. 50–53). Wordsworth’s derision of Barbauld, then, is in part because he took issue with her emotional register and absence of faith: she seemed to him to be a bad Christian, her ‘higher powers of mind’, he wrote to Robinson, ‘spoiled’ by ‘being a Dissenter’.¹⁵

Dissent during this period is often equated with politics rather than Christian faith. As Felicity James argues, the positive influence of Dissent on education, abolitionism, animal rights, and suffrage has attracted much critical interest in recent years; and Clery comments that Barbauld stands apart from her male contemporaries because of her ‘acute consciousness of the tradition of poetic prophecy as a political genre’.¹⁶ A Presbyterian closely associated with one of the major dissenting academies at Warrington, Barbauld was a confirmed defender of religious Dissent. In her (anonymous) pamphlet, An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (1790), she condemned Parliament’s support for the continued exclusion of Dissenters from public office by suggesting that this imposed ‘mark of separation’ might actually be an ‘honourable distinction’ given their superior literary, philosophical, and moral discoveries and education.¹⁷ Dissenting communities not only incited political change, but also promoted a common-sense worship compatible with secular ethics and morality. Dissenting religion, stated Samuel Palmer, prioritised the ‘right of private judgment, and liberty of conscience, the acknowledgement of Christ alone as head of his church, and sufficiency of the holy scriptures as the rule of faith and practice’.¹⁸ Congregationalists, Quakers, Unitarians, Methodists, and Presbyterians alike explored theology and doctrine from a social and political perspective, even as they debated how to square this with a faith founded on the individual and affective experience of God. By the time of the publication of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, however, Barbauld’s Christian faith looked to many non-Dissenters as no more than a rational and secular politics. A writer who had once considered devotion an aesthetic of the ‘imagination and the passions’, Barbauld now dismissed ecclesiastical ritual as the ‘odious pomp’ of tradition.¹⁹ Like many Dissenters, Barbauld sought to free Christianity from its ancient past and redraw religion as a ‘light’ to sustain ‘Freedom’s holy flame!’ (l. 70), so focusing her reader on moral action over the contemplative worship of God.

In doing so, Barbauld set Protestant Dissent against another dissenting tradition, Roman Catholicism. Modern criticism tends to fixate on negative portrayals of Catholicism, especially through its association with the Gothic and, later in the century, with decadence. But practising Catholics arguably identified with an even more radical religious politics than Protestant Dissenters because of their dependence, not on individual feeling, but on a ‘corporate and collective’ worship. As Michael Tomko argues, Catholicism was founded on ‘an inherited tradition that reaches back to the apostles’ and also on the cumulative and collaborative writings of the Church Fathers, Catholic philosophers, and theologians, as well as martyrs and saints, many of whom were women.²⁰ Granted freedom of worship in the Second Catholic Relief Act (1791), Catholics remained without political rights in the 1810s in part because of an internal division in Catholicism regarding the government’s role in appointing bishops (the same issue that inaugurated the Oxford Movement in John Keble’s 1833 Assize Sermon, ‘National Apostasy’). A proposed new Catholic Relief Bill was thus halted in 1813, and the Catholic commitment to the mystical realities of the Holy Spirit, the Resurrection, the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the materiality of grace remained subject to accusations of magic and supernaturalism. It was for this reason that the Vicar Apostolic of the London District, William Poynter, refused a local priest a licence to perform an exorcism in 1815 because ‘the power & sacred rites of the Church might & would be exposed to ridicule, especially in this Country’.²¹ Highly educated in theology, canon law, scholasticism, and European languages, Poynter put his energy into writing a lay edition of the New Testament begun in 1813 and lauded by John Henry Newman as an essential part of the history of the Catholic Bible.²² A year later Pope Pius VII re-established the Society of Jesus, which not only legitimised Jesuits worldwide but encouraged their participation in cultural as well as moral reform. While Britain’s Catholic Emancipation Act forbade Jesuits from accepting novices, the Society contributed much to the beginnings of the British Catholic Revival that flourished in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Whether Catholic or Protestant, Christian traditions that foregrounded contemplative practices like prayer, lectio divina, silent meditation on God’s presence, and regular receiving of the Eucharist secured the faith as an effective counter to the proto-fascistic politics of Napoleon. Germaine de Staël’s 1810 On Germany, for example, openly venerated the Christian inner life as a safeguard against and counter to empire, nationalism, autocracy, Hellenism, and neoclassicism: although Napoleon had the book burned immediately, it was republished in 1813. In Chapter 3, Josh King illuminates the connection between religion and politics further by examining churchyard policy in the 1810s through a reading of Wordsworth’s The Excursion: Being a Portion of The Recluse, a Poem (1814). For King, the poem helps us to reflect on the period’s crisis of burial grounds in England, where overcrowded Anglican churchyards provoked controversial plans to privatise cemeteries away from church and parish. Dispossessing and relocating communities away from their homes, these plans become a target for Wordsworth, who argued for a sacred commons inclusive of human and more-than-human, that is, in King’s words, a ‘local interspecies community’. Interaction and collaboration thus became political, religious, and aesthetic ways of mediating the decade’s drive towards individualism that marks not just the privatising of common land and destruction of rural parishes, but also the erosion of moral obligation. Bakary Diaby explores these same contradictions in Chapter 4, on the ‘aesthetic life of racism’ in the 1810s, a period in which the expansion of European imperialism exploited ‘race’ as a biopolitical ‘ordering concept’ for human subjectivity, labour, language, and culture. Diaby argues for figuration as a way of addressing how the Black body served as an aesthetic ‘regulative instrument’ and reconsiders the public exhibition of the Khoisan woman Sarah (Saartjie) Baartman, publicly exhibited in England in 1810 despite the passing of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807. If the spectacle of Baartman’s abuse in Europe confirmed illiberal associations of ‘Blackness and alterity’, Diaby suggests, it also deemed the human a malleable and shifting figuration that served to contest the confluence of human with (European white) ‘man’.

In Chapter 5, Patricia Comitini also explores the tensions inherent to shifting notions of human action and identity in her mapping of the changed implications of benevolence and philanthropy in the period. Comitini explores Lady Dunn’s The Benevolent Recluse; A Novel (1810) and Harriet Waller Weeks’ The Memoirs of the Villars Family; or, The Philanthropist (1815), two novels most modern readers would dismiss as clumsily written and plotted, to reveal their ideological purpose as literary defences of a conservative and nostalgic philanthropy. Despite their conservatism, both novels challenge the association of realism with individualism and democratic progress to unveil the new wealth of capitalism as inherently feudal. Notions of goodwill and humanitarianism are thus shown to be predicated on the promise of return and exchange, a gift relationship that counters ‘democratic levelling and capitalist relations’. Like King, Comitini makes clear that the 1810s were a time of remapping and rethinking religious, political, aesthetic, and philosophical ideas in relation to a new century that had fully arrived, but for many still felt nascent, confused, and disordered. This is uniquely apparent in the decade’s description as a ‘Regency’ era. Parliament passed the Regency Act in 1811 a year after George III’s final mental collapse after which the Prince Regent, George, Prince of Wales, assumed governance of the country. He was soon associated with extravagance and indulgence – in his aesthetic tastes in art, fashion, and culture (such as his extraordinary refurbishment and expansion of the Brighton Pavilion); in his many affairs and intrigues; and in his immoderate consumption of food and drink – excesses soon broadly identified with the period of his rule. Such bourgeois profligacy was targeted by the consummate Regency author, Jane Austen, whose sharply scathing critiques of society betrayed the rash intemperance of the rich as catastrophic for them and even more so for everyone else. In Chapter 6 Rita Dashwood draws out this critique in the context of the period’s vogue for collecting. Her discussion of Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Emma (1815) suggests that Austen redirects the pursuit of heirlooms and museum pieces to the collection of people. Emma Woodhouse, for example, ‘collects’ impoverished women on the margins of gentility seemingly for reasons of amusement but, Dashwood argues, also to portray women through their chivalric influence over others. Analogously, in Chapter 7, Kate Singer queers the Regency by aligning excesses of wealth, travel, land, and desire not with the Prince Regent or Lord Byron but with Anne Lister and her lesbian gatherings at Shibden Hall. Class-crossing and gender-crossing, Lister was a queer Don Juan even as she challenged the idea of the singular libertine male hero through her lived and written depictions of intimate and supportive queer communities. Ruth M. McAdams, in Chapter 8, also challenges preconceptions of the term ‘Regency’ by associating it directly with flagellation pornography. McAdams examines two flagellation texts, the 1810 Venus School-Mistress and The Rodiad (published in 1871 but which falsely claimed its first appearance in 1810), as politically conservative commentaries that define the decade as static and paralysed between a refusal to look back or forward. As such, McAdams states, both texts eroticised practises of disciplinary beating and flogging at a time in which the reading public was bombarded with scandals of royal and aristocratic abuses of power that confirmed sexuality as an ‘engine of injustice and inequality’.

As will be apparent from the chapters noted thus far, this volume reappraises the 1810s without repeating conventional histories of the decade, nor by reproducing readings of texts that have been frequently considered by other critics. In Chapter 9, for example, Fuson Wang addresses the early feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft through an examination of Lucy Aikin’s Epistles of Women (1810), a poem that dynamically imagines a matriarchal aesthetics and ethics to which questions of disability and neurodiversity are central. The niece of Anna Barbauld, Aikin shared her aunt’s outrage and impatience with the period’s curbing of women’s voices, and responded through what we might now call an ‘intersectional vision’ that questioned Wollstonecraft’s over-investment in fitness and strength. As Wang reveals, Aikin’s literary and religious education granted her poem an intellectual reach that allowed her to defend the weak and the suffering as those who are both closer to God and indicative of a more compassionate mode of being. Ontology and epistemology thus converge to drive a rethinking of what it means to be both physically and affectively sentient. As Ashley Miller argues in Chapter 10, the decade is steeped in literary, medical, and scientific debates about the vitalism and eventual decay of mind and body. Writers for whom literature and science prove mutually illuminating – Miller’s examples are Humphry Davy, Shelley, and Keats – are fascinated by the material afterlife of the dead and, like Wordsworth, turned to the graveyard as a site for contemplation of the decaying corpse as well as the spirit and soul. How the mind and body work together, thrive, decompose, and possibly live on is pivotal to the narrative of one of the period’s most famous texts, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, also a product of literary and scientific discussion. In Chapter 11, Anna Mercer looks more closely at Frankenstein by tracing evidence of creative collaboration in the novel’s manuscripts as well as in the Shelley circle’s consistent commitment to a politics of renewed and revolutionary hope and change. For Mercer, the novel is ‘an embodiment of the gusto and enthusiasm’ of ‘young second-generation’ Romantic writers for whom the 1810s promised bracing intellectual exchange, affable fellowship, and the chance to articulate and negotiate previously unconceived ideas.

If the 1810s begins in the dark, shadowy hours of Barbauld’s apocalyptic landscape, then, it ultimately emerged as one in which writers collaborated, experimented, rehearsed, and explored modern knowledge and wisdom that was hopeful as well as despondent. Austen, Keats, Hemans, Wordsworth, and Coleridge as well as Walter Scott, George Dyer, Amelia Opie, Thomas Moore, Mary Russell Mitford, James Hogg, Maria Edgeworth, Leigh Hunt, and William Hazlitt produced some of the most important literary texts of the century in this period, and many of them are discussed in the chapters collected here. Many are not, of course, and any reader of this volume will see absences and gaps in discussions of a period that was replete with newness and novelty even as it renovated and restored traditions, concepts, and beliefs that were by then considered archaic. In Chapter 12, Stacey McDowell exemplifies this by focusing on the ottava rima, a form revived by way of the vogue for improvisation in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Italy. McDowell explores how ottava rima’s challenge to the ‘expected rhymes’ championed by Alexander Pope invited an active and anticipatory close listening experience epitomised in the metre and rhymes of Keats’ Isabella; or The Pot of Basil (1818). A popular form in the decade, ottava rima allowed Keats to satirize the contemporaneous critical attacks on his work in Blackwood’s and The Quarterly, both of which condemned his free and unpredictable enjambed style. McDowell’s chapter brings us back to Barbauld, also attacked by The Quarterly for attempting something new. Like Keats, Barbauld tuned into a period in which the expected was considered passé but the unexpected rebuffed. The contributors here address this tension by assessing the period’s historical and cultural importance through insights into social and interspecies relations, virtual communications, sexuality and identity, religion and politics, and ever-changing perceptions of race, disability, gender, and environment.

By the time Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven had been read, reviewed, and reflected on, Britain had tentatively started to adapt to a new century mired in the aftermath of war. Barbauld wrote to her friend Susannah Taylor in 1810 that it was almost impossible to ‘rejoice’ at victory over Napoleon when confronted by ‘the horrible waste of life, the mass of misery, which such gigantic combats must occasion’.²³ At the same time, the widespread belief that in writing Eighteen Hundred and Eleven Barbauld ended her career in despair and humiliation is simply untrue. As Michelle Levy and Emma Clery argue, Barbauld’s anti-war fury was part of a broader protest campaign in which many writers expressed their horror at the insanity of war and the dystopia it created. This politics of peace, driven by dissenting Christianity, had enormous appeal for both British readers and those overseas: the American weekly The Bureau: or Repository of Literature, Politics and Intelligence, for example, reprinted Barbauld’s line ‘There walks a Spirit o’er the people earth’ in their 1 August 1812 issue.²⁴ In 1814, however, the Scottish poet and essayist Anne Grant published an attack on Barbauld in her poem Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen, in which she assumes the role of prophet to advance a conservative and counter-revolutionary politics.²⁵ Grant answered Barbauld’s wandering spirit with her own ‘undaunted spirit, free and bold, / Fired by the classic tale of patriots old’, a vision of ‘Britannia’ as a ‘lenient’ military and commercial force ‘Wherever her unwearied sails expand’.²⁶ This colonial vision could not be more different from Barbauld’s radical prophecy of a Britain in ruins waiting to be collectively and hopefully rebuilt. By 1817, Barbauld indirectly responded to Grant and her other critics by returning to the subject of a failing and hypocritical government and monarchy in two political poems, ‘To Miss Kinder, on Receiving a Note Dated February 30th’ and ‘On the Death of Princess Charlotte’.²⁷ The latter, also discussed here by Mary Fairclough, was one of many elegies published for Princess Charlotte, an extremely popular royal who promised hope to a nation let down by the consistently unwell George III and hedonistic Prince Regent turned King George IV. Her death in childbirth aged only twenty-one overwhelmed an already disconsolate and grieving Britain.

I close with this reference to Barbauld’s elegy for Charlotte because it is so characteristic of the push and pull of this wavering and ambivalent decade. Her portrayal of Charlotte’s grieving father evokes the period’s transition from bewilderment and devastation to understanding and reflection, moving as it does from the ‘electric shock’ of her death to empathy for her father, now stranded alone ‘In strange tranquillity’. Barbauld’s invitation to the reader to ‘forbear’ the former Prince Regent, now ‘struck / By heaven’s severest visitation’, at once suggests that we ‘think of him, and set apart one sigh’ even as it critiques his personal lack of sympathy and weeping.²⁸ It is ultimately her critique that endured not least because it was printed by her brother, John Aikin, as part of a series of rebukes to the Prince Regent in The Annual Register … for the Year 1818 (1819). Here, Barbauld reassumed her mantle as the voice of English Protestant Dissent by indirectly condemning the tearless monarch’s impotent refusal to halt the passing of the 1817 Treason and Seditious Meetings Acts (the ‘Gagging Acts’). Likewise, the rhythm of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’s ‘loud death drum’ might at first have affronted readers, but its brooding and steady tempo could soon be heard everywhere – in Wordsworth’s ‘The White Doe of Rylstone’ (1815), Austen’s Persuasion (1816), Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Kahn’ (1816), Byron’s ‘Darkness’ (1816), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), even in Percy Shelley’s bursting phantoms. The chapters that follow help us to hear the various resonances of this tempo both then and now, and, like Barbauld, meet the iniquities of war, despotism, and enmity by registering and feeling its terrors even as we reignite freedom’s holy flame in the ‘seat’ of knowledge and art.²⁹