This article examines key themes in the political and intellectual life of E. P. Thompson. It argues for the centrality of romanticism to his work; it focuses on his unfinished study of the early Romantics. Thompson drew parallels between socialist hopes and disappointments of his own day and the reactions of the early romantic poets to the failed promise of the French Revolution. This article charts the trajectory of the early Romantics as they moved from political engagement to retreat, and relates this trajectory to Thompson's own politics. Thompson discerned a pattern whereby intellectuals and artists moved through stages from political engagement to disenchantment and then to “apostasy” or default. Disenchantment could be a productive condition; at issue was how the poet handled the “authenticity of experience,” how disenchantment was dealt with in verse. Both Thompson and the Romantics privileged the concept of “experience” which they set in opposition to abstract theory. The article's final section turns to themes that Thompson had intended to address but left unfinished, including shifting views of patriotism and the defeated cause of women's rights. For Thompson the romantic impulse was ultimately linked to utopian desire, to the capacity to imagine that which is “not yet.”

The terrain of British intellectual life in the twentieth century was dominated by two major features: freelance writers and university scholars. At the elite level, as Noel Annan showed, the two types—independent thinkers and academics—can be treated as one class, linked by personal connections and by common attitudes arising largely from the old school tie. However, when intellectuals beyond the elite stratum are surveyed, it becomes clear that the fortunes of these two features of the intellectual landscape differed sharply. The university teachers grew rapidly in number and made themselves into what Harold Perkin calls “the key profession.” But as John Gross has contended, freelance writers, despite a rich heritage from the nineteenth century, seemed, especially in their own eyes, to form an old and decaying mountain range. From 1880 to 1980 freelance writers experienced a pervasive and intensifying sense of crisis in their trade and in their cultural role. John Wain, a successful novelist and critic, stated the matter plainly in 1973: contemplation of the difficulties of “being an author,” he said, always threw him into “a black depression in which I could slash my wrists.”

How can one explain the pessimism of freelance writers, their sense of being increasingly marginalized? Were their complaints simply habitual expressions of a writerly pose common since the romantic period? After all, many of the broad social and cultural trends in Britain between 1880 and 1980 should have been advantageous to independent writers.

In 1849, the working-class poet Eliza Cook (1818–89) expanded her international profile by venturing into weekly periodical publication with Eliza Cook's Journal. Not only was this the first British journal named after a female editor but it also placed an unusual emphasis on music—unusual not least because few women in that epoch were given the opportunity to participate in the broader critical discourses on music. Cook's poetry was already widely disseminated through various musical settings by composers from William Balfe to Henry Russell; in her new journal, music further emerged as central to her philosophy of liberation for all. Placing street musicians alongside opera and salon concerts in an exhibition of remarkably eclectic taste, Cook saw the propensity for music making in all layers of society. She regarded musical culture as a soundscape of experience, emotion, and agency to which she, and all those from the laboring classes, not only had a right to access, engage in, and share but was part of their own innate being. Music symbolized imagination, freedom from the mundane, and limitless human potential. Efforts to secure music for “the people” were thus indissolubly linked to broader political rights for suffrage and equality.

Founded in 1760, the Cambridge Botanic Garden was designed to serve the theological interests of the university by developing a collection of living plants from across the globe. Exploring the construction and layout of the garden, its global network, methods of managing information, and the accessibility of the collection during the professorship of Thomas Martyn between 1762 and 1825, this article casts new light on the motivations for founding and managing a botanic garden in Cambridge. It shows how communication structures adapted as the British Empire contracted in the Americas and expanded into Asia and the Pacific, classifying species in the physical garden later inventoried in a series of published catalogues. It suggests that growing interests in natural theology intertwined the university with the expanding British Empire, developing a collection designed to educate students in the influence of divine providence on the vegetable kingdom.

Using neglected evidence of organized, state-like, internecine violence among English settlers in New England during the 1620s and 1630s, this essay engages with recent archipelagic approaches to the early modern English public sphere and with studies of the English state and political culture in order to argue for the existence of an important, semipublic Atlantic political discourse during the decades preceding the civil wars in the British Isles. It focuses on the distinctive political dynamics of Atlantic fishing stages during the early seventeenth century and on the violent confrontation between the Dorchester and Plymouth companies in 1625 over the control of the Cape Ann stage on Massachusetts Bay. The rumors, news, and formal reports that flowed from such incidents show how diffuse English ideologies assumed the form of opposed groups, armed and mobilized in the manner of free states, and confirmed fears of such violent episodes as threats to orderly governance in a political society conceived in Atlantic imperial terms. By examining the communication of and responses to this perceived threat during the late 1620s and 1630s, the essay reveals how an Atlantic discourse of “liberty,” “orderly commonweal,” and “popularity” influenced English political culture and policy and the institutions of Atlantic governance before the English Civil War.

In the familiar line “Time makes ancient good uncouth”, James Russell Lowell enunciated what can almost stand as a natural law of endowed charities. Over the decades, as social values change and new institutional arrangements develop, obsolescence becomes the inevitable destiny of masses of these benefactions in perpetuity, especially those with specific and rigid trusts. And broadly speaking, the more ancient the good, the more uncouth it will seem in the light of latter-day needs.

The goodly company of Victorian reformers numbered in its varied ranks a small group of individuals whose particular concern was the condition of Britain's charities. Here, they suspected, was a national resource that might be made to contribute more productively to the new age. Early in the century Henry Brougham had professed to see in properly administered endowments the basis for an adequate system of elementary education, and had inspired the exhaustive survey of the nation's nearly thirty thousand charitable trusts. The inquiry lasted for two decades, cost more than £250,000, and filled about forty volumes — the “Domesday Book of Charities.” Parliament took nearly fifteen years to act on the report, and in the end granted to the Charity Commission (the agency that emerged from it all) less ample powers of initiative and supervision than the more eager reformers had demanded. As a general thing, only when the administration of an endowment became so scandalous as to raise questions of breach of trust or when its objects were so antiquated as virtually to immobilize the charity was the state inclined to intervene.

In contrast to their predecessors, who emphasized constitutional conflict and opposition in the parliaments of early Stuart England, revisionists emphasized harmony and cooperation. There was a problem with this new, anti-Whig orthodoxy from the outset, however, and that was the problem of trust. Defying the revisionist model of harmonious relations between Crown and Parliament, the M.P.s of early Stuart England perversely refused to trust James I and Charles I. Revisionists adopted two strategies to deal with this problem of trust. Conrad Russell exemplified the one strategy: he acknowledged the existence of distrust but treated it as a deep mystery requiring ingenious explanations. Surveying the reign of James I, Russell discovered “profound distrust, but it is hard to show how this distrust was implanted.” Perplexed by this enigma, Russell observed, “One of the most crucial, and one of the most difficult, questions of the early Stuart period is why this distrust developed.” For Russell, then, it was not natural for M.P.s to distrust the king. It was, instead, an unnatural attitude that had to be “implanted” or “developed.” In time, of course, Russell solved the mystery of distrust by providing a series of explanations: distrust resulted from the pressures of war, friction between the localities and the center, the functional breakdown of an inadequately financed government, court factionalism, and the growth of Arminianism. In Russell's view, the underlying problems that gave rise to distrust had more to do with circumstances and structures than with people, least of all James I and Charles I. A second strategy for dealing with the problem of trust is best exemplified by Kevin Sharpe: he solves the problem neatly by denying its existence. Steadfastly adhering to the revisionist model of harmony and cooperation, Sharpe claims that M.P.s did in fact behave the way that model predicts they should have. “In the early Stuart period,” writes Sharpe, “compromises between king and parliaments…were common because fundamental beliefs were shared and there was an atmosphere of trust.” Sharpe admits that there was an “erosion of trust” in the latter part of Charles's reign. “But,” he insists, “there is little evidence that it unfolds in the parliaments of early Stuart England.”

On 4 September 1537, Sir Thomas Wharton wrote Thomas Cromwell triumphantly proclaiming the Tudor triumph in the north of England. “In the late Lord Dacre's day,” Wharton declared, “there was a cry of ‘A Dacre, a Dacre,’ and afterward, ‘A Clifford, a Clifford,’ and even then, ‘A Dacre, a Dacre.’ Now [there is] only ‘A King, a King.’” In addition to proclaiming royal supremacy in the north, Wharton also was noting a pattern of persistent change in officeholding in the far north, from Dacre to Clifford, and back to the Dacres. The shifts of fortune among the northern nobility under the Tudors have received considerable attention from scholars. Most importantly, Mervyn James has argued for a gradual Tudor revolution in the north, in which the government slowly replaced traditional noble elites with royal appointees. In several case studies Richard Hoyle has challenged James's interpretation of the behavior of particular nobles, and George Bernard has mounted an often persuasive jeremiad against James and others who have seen an essential conflict during the Tudor period between Crown and nobility. Both Hoyle and Bernard question James' assumption of a natural hostility between king and nobility, arguing, in Hoyle's words, for a relationship that “operated to their mutual and reciprocal benefits.