Abstract:

"Imaginations, inventions, devices, or intentions," which anyone might "express, utter, or declare": according to the Treasonable and Seditious Practices Acts, in 1795 Britain these were hangable offenses. For over four centuries "treason" named an act of war, an attack or planned attack on the monarch, murder of a royal official, or counterfeiting. But the "Gagging Acts" extended the definition to language, adding the terror of capital punishment to the government's campaign against writers, lecturers, printers, editors, and booksellers. With a view of the Acts as different not in degree but in kind from the government's other juridical statements, William Godwin recognized the danger: "There is no case to which this bill may not be stretched; there is no offence, present or future, definite or indefinite, real or fictitious, that it may not be made to include." Gagging Acts is about the trials of literary expression amidst this absolutist turn.

When the legislation succeeded in silencing early 1790s radicalism, silence itself, its conditions, valences, its uncontainability, became the muse of Romantic-era writers. From Olaudah Equiano's abrupt ending of his best-selling book tour, to William Cowper's nervous queries to his lawyer, what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called "the cadaverous tranquility of despotism" came to prevail over the loud radicalism of the early 1790s. Romantic critical history, tracing the arc from the electricity felt in Britain after the storming of the Bastille to the political retreat supposedly signaled by works such as Lyrical Ballads , has under-reported the significance of this repression. But it is everywhere. Its history is archived in the forms of Romanticism. It is in the structure and style of the Romantic lyric, in the status of silence as a key Romantic discourse, and in the phrase that haunts Lyrical Ballads : "I cannot tell."