Abstracts
Abstract
The aim of this article is to take a fresh look at Romanticism’s arch ‘infidel’, Thomas Paine. My approach is to place his key work The Age of Reason (1795) in the context of what Derrida in Spectres of Marx calls ‘spectropolitics’. Derrida coins this term to describe the way in which ‘effectivity phantamolizes itself,’ and I want to use Derrida’s insight to explore the specifically visual dimension of Paine’s ‘phantomal’ image. I will show that there are three components to the spectropolitical transformation of Paine: his demonization in the 1790s as the diabolical seducer of the common reader; his ‘resuscitation’ in the post-war period by Richard Carlile and other ‘apostles’; and the ironic conjunction between this contested ‘apotheosis’ of Paine and his Deistical debunking of Christian revelation as vulgar spectacle. I focus my discussion around George Cruikshank’s print The Age of Reason (1819) in order to show that caricature was a major spectropolitical force in the Romantic period and the apposite cultural medium for negatively ‘phantamolizing’ Paine, though this tactic always ran the risk of further enhancing his ‘cult’ status in radical martyrology. The larger critical aim of the article is to open up a new area in Romantic studies: to redefine Romanticism in terms of ‘spectropolitics’ gives popular visual media such as caricature a primary rather than secondary critical function, and it allows us to rethink and revalue the ‘phantasmagoric’ transformation of Romantic politics and culture.
Appendices
Works Cited
- Annet, Peter. A Collection of Tracts of a Certain Free Enquirer Noted by His Sufferings for his Opinions. London: n.p., n. d [1750].
- Bainbridge, Simon. Napoleon and English Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
- Barrell, John and Jon Mee, eds. Trials for Treason and Sedition, 1792-1794. 8 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006.
- Barrell, John. Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793-1796. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
- Behrendt, Stephen. Shelley and His Audiences. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.
- Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. London: Fontana, 1977
- Berman, David. A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell. London: Croom Helm, 1988.
- Bindman, David. ‘The English Apocalypse’. In Frances Carey, ed. The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come. London: British Museum Press, 1999, 208-69.
- Brewer, John. The Common People and Politics 1750-1790s. London: Chadwick-Healey, 1986.
- Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. London: Penguin, 1969.
- Canuel, Mark. Religion, Toleration and British Writing 1790-1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
- Carlile, Richard. A Letter to the Society for the Suppression of Vice, on Their Malignant Efforts to Prevent a Free Enquiry after Truth and Reason. London: R.Carlile, 1819.
- Carlile, Richard. The First Trial of William Hone. William Hone, 1818.
- Carlile, Richard. The Life of Thomas Paine, Written Purposely to Bind with His Writings. London: R. Carlile, 1821.
- Carlile, Richard. The Trial of Mrs Susannah Wright for Publishing, in His Shop, the Writings and Correspondence of R. Carlile. London: R. Carlile, 1822.
- Carlyle, Thomas. Selected Writings. London: Penguin, 1988.
- Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
- Chandler, James. England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.
- Clark, David Lee, ed. Shelley’s Prose: or, The Trumpet of a Prophecy. London: Fourth Estate, 1988.
- Connolly, Tristanne J. William Blake and the Body. Basingstoke:Palgrave, 2002.
- Constitutional Remarks Addressed to the People of Great Britain, Upon the Subject of the Late Trial of Richard Carlile for Republishing Paine’s Age of Reason. London: J. Hatchard, 1819.
- Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the New International. New York and London: Routledge, 1994.
- Donald, Diana. The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Age of George III. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996.
- Foner, Philip S., ed. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine. 2 vols. New York: The Citadel Press, 1969.
- Foote, G. W. Infidel Death Beds. London: Progressive Publishing, 1886.
- Gatrell, Vic. City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London. London: Atlantic Books, 2006.
- George Cruikshank’s Omnibus. London: Tilt and Bogue, 1842.
- George, M. Dorothy. English Political Caricature 1798-1832: A Study of Opinion and Propaganda. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959.
- Gilmartin, Kevin. Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- Haywood, Ian, and John Halliwell, eds. “Romantic Spectacle”. Special issue of Romanticism on the Net 46 (May 2007)
- Haywood, Ian. The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People 1790-1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
- Heard, Melvyn. Phantasmagoria: The Secret Life of the Magic Lantern. Hastings: Projection Box, 2006.
- Historical and Critical Memoirs of the Life and Writings of M. de Voltaire. Dublin: L. White, 1786.
- Hone, William. The First Trial of William Hone. London: William Hone, 1818.
- Hume, David. Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. 4 vols. London: A. Millar, 1760.
- Hume, David. Essays Moral and Political. Edinburgh, 1756.
- Israel, Jonathan. Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
- Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
- Keane, John. Tom Paine: A Political Life. London: Bloomsbury, 1996
- Larkin, Edward. Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
- Leader, Zachary, and Ian Haywood, eds. Romantic Period Writings 1798-1832: An Anthology. London: Routledge, 1998.
- Life after Death; or the History of Apparitions, Ghosts, Spirits or Spectres. London: n.p., 1758.
- Lorimer, John G. ed. The Christian’s Armour Against Infidelity Glasgow: n.p. 1857.
- Marsh, Joss. Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
- Martin, Michael, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Atheism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- McCalman, Iain, ed. An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
- McCalman, Iain. Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
- Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasms: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
- Mee, Jon. Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
- More, Hannah. A Country Carpenter’s Confession of Faith: With a Few Plain Remarks on the Age of Reason. In a Letter from Will Chip, Carpenter, in Somersetshire, to Thomas Pain, Staymaker, in Paris. London: F. and C. Rivington, 1794.
- Myrone, Martin. Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination. London: Tate Publishing, 2006.
- Nash, David. Blasphemy in Modern Britain: 1789 to the Present Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999.
- Neale, Erskine. The Closing Scene; or, Christianity and Infidelity contrasted in the Last Hours of Remarkable Persons London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1848.
- O’Connell, Sheila. The Popular Print in England 1550-1850 London: British Museum Press, 1999.
- Patten, Robert L. George Cruikshank’s Life, Times and Art. Volume 1: 1792-1835. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992.
- Pearson, Roger. Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom London: Bloomsbury, 2005.
- Porcupine, Peter [William Cobbett]. The Life of Thomas Paine London: J. Wright, 1797.
- Priestley, Joseph. An History of the Corruptions of Christianity 2 vols. London: J. Thompson, 1793.
- Priestley, Joseph. An Answer to Mr. Paine’s Age of Reason London: Joseph Johnson, 1795.
- Priestley, Joseph. Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion 2 vols. London: Joseph Johnson 1782.
- Priestman, Martin. Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780-1830 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
- Reid, William Hamilton. The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Metropolis; Including, The Origin of Modern Deism and Atheism; The Genius and Conduct of those Associations; Their Lecture Rooms, Field-Meetings, and Deputations; From the Publication of Paine’s ‘Age of Reason’ till the Present Period London: Woburn Press, 1971.
- Robertson, J. M. A History of Freethought Ancient and Modern To the Period of the French Revolution 2 vols. London: Watts and Co., 1936.
- Royle, Edward. Thomas Paine and Nineteenth Century Freethought Nottingham: Thomas Paine Society, 2003.
- Royle, Edward. The Infidel Tradition from Paine to Bradlaugh London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1976.
- Scrivener, Michael. Poetry and Reform: Periodical Verse from the English Democratic Press 1792-1824 Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992.
- Sherwin, W. T. Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Paine London: R. Carlile, 1819.
- Swindells, Julia. Glorious Causes: the grand theatre of political change Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
- The Complete Wizard; Being a Collection of authentic and entertaining Narratives of the real Existence and Appearance of Ghosts, Demons and Spectres London: T. Evans, 1770.
- The Deist, or, Moral Philosopher. Being an Impartial Inquiry after Moral and Theological Truths. Selected from the Writings of the Most Celebrated Authors in Ancient and Modern Texts London: R. Carlile, 1819.
- The Spectator, Complete in Two Volumes; with Notes Critical and Explanatory 2 vols London: Andrew Miller, 1800.
- The Speech (At Length) of the Hon. T. Erskine, at the Court of King’s Bench, Westminster, June 24, 1797; on the Trial of T. Williams, for Publishing Paine’s Age of Reason London: J. S. Jordan, n.d. [1797].
- Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class London: Penguin, 1975.
- Wakefield, Gilbert. An Examination of the Age of Reason By Thomas Paine London: Kearsley, 1794.
- Wardroper, John. The Caricatures of George Cruikshank London: Gordon Fraser, 1977.
- Warner, Marina. Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
- Whately, Richard. Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte Edited Ralph S. Pomeroy. Berkeley and London: Scolar Press, 1985.
- White, Daniel. Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
- Wiener, Joel. Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Life of Richard Carlile London: Greenwood Press, 1983.
- Wilson, David A. Paine and Cobbett: The Transatlantic Connection Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988.
- Wood, Marcus. Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790-1822 Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
- Worrall, David. The Politics of Romantic Theatricality, 1787-1832: the road to the stage Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007.
- Worrall, David. Theatric Revolution: drama, censorship and Romantic period subcultures Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.