The works we are reading this semester are in bold red type.

American Revolution 1765-1783

  • Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

Storming of the Bastille in Paris and imprisonment of King and Queen, July 1789

  • Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, November 1789
  • Blake, Songs of Innocence, 1789 and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790
  • William Wilberforce, from “Speech to the House of Commons,” 13 May 1789
  • Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France, 1790
  • Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, November 1790
  • Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, Occasioned by His “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” November/December 1790
  • Joseph Priestley, Letters to Burke, January 1791
  • Anna Letitia Barbauld, Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade, 1791
  • Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, February 1791/February 1792; Society for Constitutional Information publishes The Rights of Man as a pamphlet in May 1792
  • Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792
  • Charlotte Smith, Desmond, 1792

September Massacres in France, 1792 

Royal Proclamation Against Seditious Writings in England, 1792        

British Prosecution and Conviction of Paine of treason in absentia, December 1792

Execution of the French King and Queen in January 1793

Richard Watson, Appendix to a Sermon, January 1793

Declaration of War between France and England in February 1793

  • William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, February 1793
  • William Wordsworth, “Letter to Landaff”, February 1793
  • Blake, America: a prophecy and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 1793

Sedition Trials of 1794/ Suspension of Habeas Corpus/ Exoneration of Hardy, Tooke, etc., November 1794/ Terror in France

  • Godwin, Cursory Strictures on the Charge Delivered by Lord Chief Justice to the Grand Jury, October 2, 1794
  • Blake, The Songs of Innocence and Experience and The First Book of Urizen 1794
  • Godwin, Caleb Williams, 1794
  • Coleridge, Sonnets in Morning Chronicle, December 1794 and January 1795, “Conciones ad Populum,” February 1795
  • Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “To the Poor”

Passage of the Two Acts (November, 1795)

  • Coleridge, “The Plot Discovered” (November 26, 1795)

French Military Expansionism of 1797: invasion of Switzerland; Imprisonment of the publisher Joseph Johnson in 1798-99 for selling Gilbert Wakefield’s anti-war pamphlet; Wakefield (an elderly dissenting minister and classical scholar imprisoned for two years; end of tolerance for “literary” debate

  • Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, 1798
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Fears in Solitude,” published with “Frost at Midnight” and “France: an ode,” April 1798
  • Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 1798, with an expanding preface in 1800 and 1802 Anon, The Woman of Colour, 1801
  • Coleridge, “Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin, The Morning Post 1802