- 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
‘Let Irishmen remain sulky, grave, prudent and watchful’
‘Let Irishmen remain sulky, grave, prudent and watchful’
William Drennan (1754–1820)
- Chapter:
- (p.145) 8 ‘Let Irishmen remain sulky, grave, prudent and watchful’
- Source:
- Unusual Suspects
- Author(s):
Kenneth R. Johnston
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
Parliamentary reform groups in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales were persecuted more ruthlessly than those in England. William Drennan was an Irish obstetrician educated in Scotland. The example of the American Revolution inspired him to seek liberal reforms for his native country. His Letters of an Irish Helot of 1785 led Charles James Fox to offer him a post in the Whig opposition, but he declined. He was one of the organizers of the United Irishmen, and the author of its secret oath. Informers gave a copy of his address to the Irish Volunteers to the government, and he stood trial for sedition in Dublin in 1794. Acquitted thanks to his lawyer, John Philpot Curran, Drennan withdrew from political activity, married a rich English lady, became a minor sentimental poet, and confined his political observations to his correspondence with his sister and brother-in-law, valuably collected as The Drennan Letters (1931, 1999).
Keywords: William Drennan, Constitutional conventions, The British Convention, Scottish Martyrs, Irish independence, Irish Volunteers and Defenders, United Irishmen, 1800 Act of Union
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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
