Search Results

The effects of Pitt’s domestic policy of Alarmism impacted the development of literary genres. Robert Bage, a Midlands industrialist (paper mills), wrote satirical ‘novels of purpose’ in the 1780s. Encouraged by England’s early enthusiasm for the revolution, he expanded his liberal views in Man As He Is Not (1795) and Hermsprong (1796). All six of his novels were published anonymously, and well reviewed. But in the intensified atmosphere of Alarm after passage of the Gagging Acts in 1795, Bage found himself the object of invidious local gossip, as his authorship came to be more widely suspected. Excise taxmen repeatedly confiscated his paper stock, forcing him into court actions to recover it. Anna Barbauld and Walter Scott included Bage in their later collections of British novelists, but with damning qualifications. Bage’s novels stand up well in comparison to Jane Austen’s, though he is much more explicit than she in political and economic critique.

Charles Lamb was a novice poet when he visited Coleridge in Somerset in 1797; he regretted missing ‘the famous Thelwall.’ With Coleridge’s young charge Charles Lloyd, Lamb co-authored a volume titled Blank Verse, satirized by The Anti-Jacobin as being by ‘Frog and Toad.’ (Lamb hated The Anti-Jacobin’s George Canning.) Lamb had pledged his life as security for his sister Mary, who had stabbed their mother to death in 1796. He had to avoid suspicion because penalties might have fallen on her. He worked his entire life for the East India Company, but said he ‘wrote Treason for pay’ on The Albion newspaper, edited by John Fenwick. His ‘What Is Jacobinism?’ of 1801 points the way toward his later career as one of the three great Romantic essayists. Lamb’s caution makes his radicalism hard to discover, though he freely associated with ‘unusual suspects’ who De Quincey said were ‘tabooed’ for a time.

The effects of Pitt’s government’s domestic policy of alarmism, directed at proponents of parliamentary reform, on the development of English Romantic literature, may be viewed as inconsequential collateral damage, or as highly significant distortions of otherwise promising literary works and careers. The effects of Alarmism are as far-reaching and difficult to document as those of McCarthyism in 1950s America. William Pitt himself participated directly in these culture wars through his creation and protection of The Anti-Jacobin of 1797–8. Alan Liu found Unusual Suspects to be an important ‘census of the disappeared’ when reviewing an earlier version of it in Romanticism, History, Historicism (2009). The impact of Alarm on literary works and careers is undeniable, but hard to quantify conclusively. Some works and careers are being recuperated, two centuries later, but Pitt’s defeat of the parliamentary reform movement in the 1790s also spelled defeat for many promising literary careers.

Summarises the roots of alarm over the misuse of natural resources in the United States and their connection to both European and American imperial expansion, both informal and formal from the 1890s to 1910, and to American ideas of an inland empire of a rationalized settler society type comparable with settler nations developing in the British Empire. Analyses opposition to conservation, while stressing the degree of consensus over the issue. Explains the different types of “empire”: insular, formal and informal, and continental; qualifies the idea of an Open Door policy and its implications for resource use, and advances the concept of neo-mercantilism as an aspect of conservationist concern. Argues that conservation evolved over time, widened in scope and became central to the Progressive agenda by 1909. The relationship of conservation to transnational themes such as efficiency and waste is critically assessed.

This chapter investigates attention’s affective shapes, focusing on how attention’s unusual relationship to terror and fear shifted as controversies about political alarmism emerged in the 1790s. Cowper’s “The Needless Alarm” and Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude” worry in verse the unexpected proximity between alarmism and poetry. Both poems consider what Cowper calls “the sounds of war,” pushing apart the gap between sound and sense in order to consider the relation between poetic language and the “empty sounds” of propaganda and alarmism. But whereas Cowper imagines the poet’s own widening attention as fearless, Coleridge finds the simple act of attention inextricable from alarm. And whereas Cowper’s poem finds hope in a mode of listening to sound without thinking of it as the sound of something, Coleridge’s poem, itself more difficult to read, instead registers satirically the frightening impossibility of reading without suspicion.

Don Ihde examines the “congenital dystopianism” shared by environmentalists, environmental philosophers, and philosophers of technology. Each group employs a “rhetoric of alarm” that connects the use of technologies with environmental degradations. Ihde calls attention to how excessive rhetorical strategies have locked us into a false dichotomy: either technological-environmental utopianism or dystopianism. The problem is that we have not yet fully diagnosed either what our technologies can or should do, or what the environmental crises actually are. So long as we continue to accept either utopian or dystopian forecasts we are unlikely to bring either technologies or ecosystems into appropriate focus. Techno-environmental problems are complex, ambiguous, and interwoven; they rarely lend themselves either to an easy techno-fix or simple solution. The hardest problem of them all is how to turn major actors in the economy green: large scale development projects and multinational corporations. The challenge for a proactive philosopher is to get on the ground floor of technological research and development in order to help figure out how to green the economy itself.