The romantics

This is the last volume of essays from the pen of English social historian Thompson (Witness Against the Beast, New Pr., 1993), a scholar of exceptional acuity and a graceful writer who died in 1993. The essays here?on Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the reformers William Godwin and William Thelwall?focus on the 1790s and early 1800s, when their subjects confronted the gap between the high ideals of the French Revolution and the sordid reality of a self-seeking Directorate and tyrannical Napoleon. Wordsworth, argues Thompson, was invigorated by his republican faith in “the worth of the common man…in universal brotherhood.”