Poetry of the Anti‐Jacobin

During the 1790s, the impact of the French Revolution resounded through British intellectual life, in a debate initiated by Richard Price's enthusiastic A Discourse on the Love of our Country (1789) and Edmund Burke's antipathetic Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) as to the merits or demerits of events across the Channel. On the radical side, the likes of Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Helen Maria Williams produced notable contributions to this ‘Revolution Controversy’.1 A new generation of poets also became identified with the pro-Revolutionary, or ‘Jacobin’, side: most notably Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom the Whig politician Lord Grey labelled ‘interesting young enthusiasts in the Democratic cause’.2 A number of periodicals, the most significant of which were the Analytical Review and the Critical Review, also propagandized for the radical interest. It is against this body of earnest, philanthropic, initially pro-French opinion that the satirical, Tory and vehemently patriotic journal the Antijacobin (1797–8) was aimed.