Public opinion from Burke to Byron

Abstract

The full title of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France may be unfamiliar even to those who are most familiar with the text to which it is attached. The title page of the 1790 edition reads: Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event. In a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris . It is the second clause of Burke's title that concerns me here. For if the bulk of this bulky text is devoted to the author's reflections on “the important transactions” taking place on the continent, Burke begins the Reflections by contemplating matters that lie closer to home, namely, the activities of a number of London societies, in particular the Society for Constitutional Information and the Revolution Society, whose public support of the revolution in France Burke sees as a threat to his own good name. More importantly, however, the activities of these London corresponding societies come to exemplify for Burke the threatening possibility that at the end of the eighteenth century England was fast becoming a society ruled by publicity. Nearly thirty years later, in the course of a critique of what he calls “the triumphs of the new Schools,” Byron offers an assessment of the new conditions of literary publicity that bears a striking resemblance to Burke's critique of the corresponding societies.