Joseph Johnsons's World: Ancestral Voices, Invisible Worms, and Roaming Tigers

Abstract

In October, 2001, only a few miles north of the burning debris that had been the World Trade Center, two conferences, one focusing on rationality, the other on ecology, bravely, some might say blindly explored the survival of Enlightenment ideals at the start of the new millennium, the beliefs, civilities, and excesses of rational beings and their environments. Speakers at both conferences acknowledged the gifts and blessings that humans had once found in themselves, in nature, and in culture, and those they didn't. Although 9/11 was clearly a subtext, it never entered either conversation. However, like others to whom the event was literally unspeakable, I had begun to hear in new ways, to understand the ghostly language of Wordsworth's lamentable time in Book X of Prelude, and of Coleridge's harrowing Fears in Solitude, the crash of onset, the undetermined conflict. Texts obscured for many years by political and philosophical readings revealed urgent new themes, new to me, of fear, futility, he lplessness, and confusion. I began to recognize the terror, the mystery of evil, the ancestral voices, the roaming tigers, and the invisible worms that the Romantic generations experienced. I realized during these Enlightenment conferences that, along with the visionary and political awakening, Romanticism recorded the experience of those who lived, as we do, in great peril from one thing or another, in England, the Continent, and America from about 1770 to 1830 and beyond. Many who knew fear as an aesthetic or literary experience, limited to gothic novels or to the Arabian Nights, encountered it unbidden, encountered the physical and emotional boundaries that human beings are periodically forced to cross. Moreover, from such fear, especially of invasion, of indifferent powers, of false accusation and unjust tribunals, nature--then and now--offered no refuge. new post-Enlightenment geology, astronomy, chemistry, anatomy, biology, all the natural histories of the 1790's revealed a natural world that was equally menacing, moving with blind oblivious tendencies, as Wordsworth said, a natural world that was larger, older, and more mysterious than anyone had ever conceived, and in which human beings were an afterthought, random victims of disease, weather, or, as Malthus, one of Johnson's authors, argued, victims of their own appetites, hostilities, and competitive instincts. To the political crisis, emotional turmoil, and intellectual challenge, our moment and theirs responded with new communities--geographical, ideological, ethnic, economic, theological, even linguistic communities. Gradually, individuals were connected, whole populations identified, and communities defined by the conflicts they engaged in, by what they were opposed to, and by the relationships they made almost exclusively through publishing. Newspapers, journals, reviews, and books served those generations, from 1770 to 1815, just as the internet serves ours. Information and knowledge spread quickly but fitfully, and what was published was often confused with what happened, with what people knew or believed with what was true. Their colonial expansion was our space exploration; their electricity was our quantum physics, their photosynthesis, our DNA. Because of publishing and the dissemination of contemporary knowledge, like us, they walked in both light and shade, with access to information that could save or destroy, and with an understanding that seemed as limitless as the capacity for cruelty and suffering. In his role as a catalyst of people and of ideas, someone who brought into being those creative oppositions on which progress depends, someone who knew what mattered and found the right people to express it for him, Joseph Johnson was an ancestral voice, a publisher for critical and unstable times, then and now. I first began thinking about Joseph Johnson in 1970, when Paul Zall sent Wordsworth Circle one of his many installments in a series we inexplicably called The Cool World of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which was neither cool and only tangentially about Coleridge. …