- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- List of Plates
- Preamble: ‘Who are these people?’
- 1 Usual and Unusual in 1790s Britain
- 2 Before and After Lives
- 3 ‘Dr Phlogiston’
- 4 The Radical Moravian
- 5 ‘Frend of Jesus, friend of the Devil’
- 6 No Laughing Matter
- Part IV Other Voices, Other Places
- 7 Our Paris Correspondent
- Suspect Nations
- 8 ‘Let Irishmen remain sulky, grave, prudent and watchful’
- Generic Suspicions
- 9 The Novelist Who Was Not
- 10 The End of Controversy
- 11 The Great Apostate: Judas, Brutus, or Thomas?
- Part VI The Romantic Poets, the Police, and the State of Alarm
- 12 ‘A gang of disaffected Englishmen’
- 13 ‘Whispering tongues can poison truth’
- 14 Wordsworth, <i>The Prelude</i>, and Posterity
- 15 More Radical than Thou
- 16 Radical in a Lamb’s Cloak
- 17 ‘A Man for a’ That’
- 18 Blake’s <i>America</i>, the Prophecy that Failed
- Coda
- Appendix 1 Trials for Sedition and Treason, 1792–1798
- Appendix 2 Wakefield’s Juvenal (1800)
- Bibliography
- Index
- Plates
‘A gang of disaffected Englishmen’
‘A gang of disaffected Englishmen’
Spy Nozy and the Somerset Gang
- Chapter:
- (p.228) (p.229) 12 ‘A gang of disaffected Englishmen’
- Source:
- Unusual Suspects
- Author(s):
Kenneth R. Johnston
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
James Gillray’s ‘New Morality’ cartoon of August, 1798, illustrating George Canning’s poem of the same name in The Anti-Jacobin, is in effect a police line-up of many of the suspects, both ‘usual’ and ‘unusual,’ of the 1790s pro-parliamentary reform movement. It represents writers and intellectuals as leading a procession of British politicians in transports of enthusiasm for ‘French principles.’ The Home Office sent an agent to Nether Stowey in Somerset to investigate reports that Coleridge and Wordsworth, joined by the radical orator John Thelwall, were prospecting landing sites for a French invasion, supported by Thomas Poole, benefactor of a local Poor Man’s Benefit Club. Coleridge wrote a comic send-up of the incident for his Biographia Literaria (1817), by which he hoped to re-start his literary career after the defeat of Napoleon. He called the agent ‘Spy Nozy,’ claiming that he had misconstrued Coleridge and Wordsworth’s conversations on Spinoza.
Keywords: Unusual suspects, Lost generation, 1790s, Alfoxden House, John Thelwall, Thomas Poole, ‘Spy Nozy’ (Spinoza), Coleridge
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- List of Plates
- Preamble: ‘Who are these people?’
- 1 Usual and Unusual in 1790s Britain
- 2 Before and After Lives
- 3 ‘Dr Phlogiston’
- 4 The Radical Moravian
- 5 ‘Frend of Jesus, friend of the Devil’
- 6 No Laughing Matter
- Part IV Other Voices, Other Places
- 7 Our Paris Correspondent
- Suspect Nations
- 8 ‘Let Irishmen remain sulky, grave, prudent and watchful’
- Generic Suspicions
- 9 The Novelist Who Was Not
- 10 The End of Controversy
- 11 The Great Apostate: Judas, Brutus, or Thomas?
- Part VI The Romantic Poets, the Police, and the State of Alarm
- 12 ‘A gang of disaffected Englishmen’
- 13 ‘Whispering tongues can poison truth’
- 14 Wordsworth, <i>The Prelude</i>, and Posterity
- 15 More Radical than Thou
- 16 Radical in a Lamb’s Cloak
- 17 ‘A Man for a’ That’
- 18 Blake’s <i>America</i>, the Prophecy that Failed
- Coda
- Appendix 1 Trials for Sedition and Treason, 1792–1798
- Appendix 2 Wakefield’s Juvenal (1800)
- Bibliography
- Index
- Plates
