The cambridge companion to british roman 35

The living pantheon of poets in 1820 issued in the Peterloo Massacre George III’s long reign and the decade-long Regency did come to an end in 1820, but when Shelley’s “old, mad, blind, despised and dying king” finally died, he was followed by George IV, one of the “Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow / Through public scorn, – mud from a muddy spring.”3 Upon taking the throne, the new George tried to divorce his old wife, sparking public outrage, street demonstrations, and an unprecedented pamphlet war; but widespread protest produced no change in the government, but instead marked the end of one era of radical resistance, with 1820’s failed Cato Street Conspiracy to assassinate the whole cabinet turning many against Reform as violent resistance was used to justify the repressive policies that provoked the resistance in the first place If 1819 seemed to open England to change, 1820 – which might have appeared, with a new king, a moment of transition – instead saw the confirmation of the powers that be We would not, then, expect 1820 to be immortalized as the prior year was in Shelley’s “England in 1819,” or as the Regency’s opening in 1811, marked by economic distress giving rise to Luddite resistance and key events in the war with Napoleon, was immortalized in Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven Yet there did appear in London during 1821 Eighteen Hundred and Twenty: A Poem, probably by Alexander Hill Everett, an American diplomat then serving in The Hague, whose career, leading him to Spain, Cuba, and China, reminds us of that era’s globalization, brought on by imperial efforts and the Napoleonic world war Mixing an odal appeal to Spain’s liberal revolution (which Shelley also celebrated in his 1820 “Ode to Liberty”) with a couplet satire on the post-Napoleonic Restoration, the poem lampoons ultra-legitimatist monarchs, in part by suggesting that they see all the tribulations of their day arising from two early modern figures – Luther, identified with freedom of religious thought, who “from his desk at Wittenberg unfurled / The standard of revolt o’er half the world,” and Faust, who with still deeper and more dangerous skill, Serving the purpose of the power of ill, Brought from the lower region’s last recess That fatal engine of all our woe – the press (pp 26–7) The devilish printing press is seen as inundating the world with uncontrolled information, a “flood of heresy and knowledge,” so that “Knowledge – the apple with our ruin fraught, / Is now the cheapest fruit that can be bought” (p 27) While here the main concern seems to be the journalistic pursuit of religious and political controversy, Coleridge had earlier lamented 13 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008