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  • Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s by Kenneth R. Johnston
  • Stephanie Russo (bio)
Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s by Kenneth R. Johnston Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 400pp. £30. ISBN 978-0-19-965780-3.

Kenneth Johnston examines the impact of what he calls Pitt’s “reign of alarm” on a generation of British radicals in the 1790s. Much of this engaging book takes the form of short biographies of the careers of these radical writers, such as James Montgomery, William Frend, and Robert Bage, both before and after their run-ins with “state repression and loyalist vigilantism, especially volunteer actions by what we might call concerned private citizens” (15). Many of the biographies that Johnston includes are quite moving and vividly illustrate the repercussions that some writers faced for producing work that looked like either an expression of support for the French revolutionaries or a critique of the Pitt government. The section on Joseph Priestley is particularly effective, as Johnston cannily draws out the gap between Priestley’s extraordinary intellectual output, particularly as a scientist, and his relative obscurity today. Johnston’s examination of the rioting that destroyed Priestley’s home and laboratory in Birmingham in July 1791 has the pace of a political thriller or, perhaps more accurately, a political tragedy. Johnston’s work is aimed at both an academic and a general interest audience, and as a consequence the book is blessedly free of academic jargon. Johnston does not assume knowledge, but rather guides the reader carefully through the material without being patronizing. While this is a dense book, then, and obviously the result of years of scholarship, the sheer amount of material covered never feels overwhelming. [End Page 187]

A sense of loss underpins Unusual Suspects, as Johnston laments the fact that many writers were essentially “scared off” expressing their political opinions, or even writing altogether, as a result of these kinds of repressive forces. While there is no way to measure the volume or the quality of the writing that was (potentially) lost, the sensitivity with which Johnston treats his subjects gives the book an elegiac quality. Of course, not all the writers Johnston examines disappeared into obscurity after their encounters with the authorities, and this is particularly true of the more recognizable figures that Johnston discusses. Many went on to varying degrees of success; although, as Johnston points out, these accomplishments were often “in other fields, or forms, of literature, than the one(s) they started out in” (15). We need to be careful, too, not to assume that because these writers moved to other forms of literature (for example, from the political pamphlet or lecture to poetry) that this means their work is any less political. There is some question over how many of the “lost” generation actually remained lost: Helen Maria Williams, to take only one example, continued to write copiously, long after she was subjected to virulent criticism in England. In many cases, radical writers continued to express their politics in their work, albeit in coded, far more covert ways. Johnston also considers, as well the reader might, how the aftermath of the “reign of alarm” might have actually fostered some of Romanticism’s greatest literary endeavours. For example, he ponders whether the comic “Spy Nozy” incident “might be seen as beneficial rather than harmful, if we take a long enough symbolic view of it” (250), given that this incident enabled William Wordsworth to develop closer links with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Johnston includes the more well-known stories of canonical Romantics, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, and Burns as what he terms a “control group” (xviii). However, given his focus on recovering “minor lives,” one wonders if there really was a need for Johnston to retell these already quite well-known tales. The material on the non-canonical writers is so compelling that the very familiarity of the material covered in the last third of the book is rendered less engaging by contrast (with the possible exception of the lively chapter on Robert Burns). Johnston stresses the amount he had to leave...

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