ESSAYS

Essay on The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

How is 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' a 'Didactic' Text?

Mary Alcock's poem "Instructions, Supposed to be Written in Paris, for the Mob in England" (1799, 1989) and William Wordsworth's The Prelude Book Ten (1994) deal with the same socio-political period but in remarkably different ways. Each poet concentrates on the ethics arising from political insurrection, more particularly during the early years of the French Revolution, but each draws differing inferences as to the moral validity of the violence used in the name of socio-political freedom.

The notion of revolution, as Stephen Bygrave asserts in his Romantic Writings (1996: 9), was of vital importance to the formation of the Romantic poetic vision:

"(The Romantic) period encompasses the American Revolution (independence having been declared in 1776), the French Revolution (from 1789), and wars of national independence in Poland, Spain, Greece and elsewhere." (Bygrave, 1996: 9)

More than anything, then, the Romantic period has been seen as one of polarity and contrast and this is certainly reflected in the two poems by Alcock and Wordsworth that, not only reflect the personal ideologies of the individual writers but are, to some extent at least, representative of the divisions in the society at large.

In this essay I would like to look at the ways that the Romantic ideology is facilitated in a textual manner; how each poet betrays their socio-political affiliations through the very language and poetic structures they employ and what that says about our notions of the political in the Romantic era.

The tone of Mary Alcock's poem is markedly different to many of the Romantic voices at the turn of the eighteenth century. Whereas poets such as Coleridge and Wordsworth and, later Shelley and Byron, extolled the virtues of the French Revolution, claiming that it represented the highest achievement of Enlightenment thinking on the relationship between freedom and politics , Alcock paints another, perhaps more conservative picture of the events of 1789:

"Of Liberty, Reforms and Rights I sing,
Freedom, I mean, without or church or King;
Freedom to seize and keep whate'er I can,
And boldly claim my right - The Rights of Man."
(Lonsdale, 1989: 462)

Here the poet not only provides us with a contrary view to the accepted revolutionary fervour of the eighteenth century Romantic writer but also usurps the conventions of revolution for her own ends; reversing poetic and cultural leitmotifs in order to question notions of morality and ethics.

The first line of Alcock's poem reflects not only Virgil's opening in the Aeneid ("Of arms and the man I sing"[Virgil, 1972: 103]) but also an early broadside ballad that concerns itself with the Jacobin uprising of 1746. The poem's structure, rhythm and cadence reflects many of the popular ballads of the eighteen century that would have been used as revolutionary propaganda (Shepard, 1962).

Alcock compounds this ironic use of structure with an overt reference to Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man (1994), an important text in the formation of the revolutionary ideal and also references a number of the key cultural motifs of revolutionary America and France: liberty, taxes, reform and the judiciary. In Alcock's poem, the term 'liberty' serves as a mechanism through which the idealism of the French Revolution is questioned. She employs the word as not only meaning freedom to be but also freedom to do as one chooses, irrespective of law and order:

"Such is the blessed liberty in vogue,
The envied liberty to be a rogue;
The right to pay no taxes, thithes or dues;
The liberty to do whate'er I choose."
(Lonsdale, 1989: 462)

As Stephen Bygrave asserts in his essay "Versions of British Romantic Writing" (1996: 69) the women writers of the Romantic movement, to a great extent, represented a far more personal and pragmatic vision of the changing face of both society and psychology than their male counterparts. Whereas, as Bygrave also states, writers such as Shelley, Wordsworth and Byron sought to transcend the everyday experience with the imagination, female poets and novelists such as Alcock, Anna Barbauld and Mary Robinson (Bygrave, 1996: 69) displayed a far more practical assessment of the turbulence of their times.

This notion is more than adequately highlighted in "Instructions, Supposed to be Written in Paris, for the Mob in England", where the overriding sense is not one of the Kantian 'categorical imperative' of the revolution but the pragmatism of daily ethical thinking, as displayed in these lines:

"There shall not long remain one British peer;
Nor shall the criminal appalled stand Before the mighty judges of the land;
Nor judge nor jury shall there longer be,
Nor any jail, but every prisoner free."
(Lonsdale, 1989: 462)


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