Still confining myself to quasi literary productions, I may mention in this connection a series of publications, adapted to the means and capacities of the common people, which, though not specially intended to promote social and political reform, exerted a powerful influence in that direction. Chambers' Edinburgh Journal was commenced in 1832; it consists of papers on literature, science, history and biography, and, being sold at a cheap rate, reached at one period a circulation of nearly 100,000 copies. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, founded in 1825, caused to be prepared, and placed at cheap prices in the hands of the working classes, numerous publications of the same general character, but of a higher order, as those of the Chambers; and it subsequently issued two weekly periodicals, the Penny Magazine and the Penny Cyclopedia, filled with entertaining knowledge, which circulated by thousands through all the workshops of the kingdom, and have found their way to the learned rich and the laboring poor on this side of the ocean. These publications imparted to the common mind of England that knowledge which is power, and, in conjunction with the political press, taught the people the nature and value of their rights, and inspired them with courage to demand and defend them.
So much for periodical literature. Another department of English letters, more strictly deserving the name of "Literature," which has rendered powerful aid to the cause of political reform during the present century, will be noticed in the next chapter.
CHAPTER XXXV.
The Liberal Literature of England—Poetry—Southey—Coleridge—Wordsworth—Burns—Rogers—Montgomery—Moore—Campbell—Herbert—Byron—Shelley—Keats—Hunt—Pringle—Nicoll—Peter—Barton—Hood—Procter—Tennyson—Milnes—Elliott—Horne—Mary Howitt—Eliza Cook—Mackay—Novels—Godwin—Holcraft—The Drama—Bage—Scott—Miss Edgeworth—Mrs. Opie—Miss Mitford—Mrs. Hall—Miss Martineau—Banim—Lever—Lover—Bulwer—Dickens—Essays—Jeffrey—Smith—Brougham—Mackintosh—Macaulay—Lamb—Hazlitt—Carlyle—Talfourd—Pamphlets—Holland House—French Literature and Louis Philippe.
Further notice will now be taken of the liberal literature of England, after the French revolution. We can enter only on the borders of this large field. Since the modern "revival of letters," the Poets of England have furnished their quota of friends of Progress and Reform.
Among the strange theories concerning the regeneration of mankind, to which the great French convulsion gave birth, was a day-dream of Southey, Coleridge, and Lloyd, three young geniuses, then sojourning at Bristol. Having vainly endeavored to make England a republic, by writing a drama on the fall of Robespierre, delivering a course of lectures on the French revolution, and publishing two or three seditious pamphlets, they proposed to leave the kingdom in disgust, bury themselves in the aboriginal forests on the banks of the Susquehanna, and there erect a "Pantisocracy," in which property should be held in common, every man be a legislator, and a model democracy be wrought out, that should consummate the happiness of its founders, while its reflex influence cured all the ills of European institutions. Unfortunately for the human race, the three poets happened just then to fall in with and fall in love with three tempting young Eves of Bristol, the Misses Fricker, one an actress, one a mantua-maker, and one a school-teacher; and giving up their scheme of regenerating the world, they wisely concluded, with Benedick, that it was better to people it, and so all got married. Thus ended their "Much Ado about Nothing."
Lloyd sunk into obscurity, Southey atoned for his Susquehanna sins by spending a long life in hostility to civil and religious freedom, and Coleridge lived and died a moderate friend of liberty and reform. Wordsworth early became acquainted with Coleridge and Southey, participated in their French enthusiasm, and, like them, his first poetic dreams were of freedom. In one of his earliest productions he proposes to invoke the restorative aid of the Royal Humane Society in behalf of crowned heads, as follows:
"Oh give, great God! to Freedom's waves to ride
Sublime o'er conquest, avarice, and pride;
And grant that every sceptered child of clay
Who cries, presumptuous, 'Here their tides shall stay,'
Swept in their anger from the affrighted shore,
With all his creatures sink to rise no more"