‘Thy Power to Declare’: Thelwall, Coleridge and the Politics of Collaboration

Abstract

Given the increasing attention paid in recent years to the subject of literary collaboration, it is odd that so little notice has been taken of the history of the word. For even a brief glance at the OED undercuts surprisingly persistent scholarly misconceptions about the history of authorship. Far from disappearing with the rise of the so-called ‘regime’ of the author as ‘solitary genius’ in the late eighteenth century, as historians of authorship still too frequently assume, collaboration first appears in English at the heart of the Romantic period, imported from France by Henry Crabb Robinson in 1801, when he wrote in his diary of ‘a body of poor students called collaborateurs who assist the more wealthy but less advanced’. A year later, Jeremy Bentham anglicised the word, referring to his French editor and translator, Stephen Dumont, as a ‘collaborator of Mirabeau’s’. Through Dumont, Bentham himself collaborated with Mirabeau, part of the long-term exchange between French and English Enlightenment thought that laid the groundwork for Romanticism. Robinson too was a collaborator, one of the tireless band of chroniclers, cataloguers and confessors who together produced Romanticism as a ‘spirit of the age’. According to the OED, the specifically political definition of the word collaboration, as ‘traitorous cooperation with an enemy’, did not arise until the 1940s, in the context of the German occupation of Vichy France. Research reveals, however, that at its very origins collaboration already carried those same wartime connotations of national shame and betrayal, by virtue of the historical moment, transnational circumstances and subversive class dynamics of its first English use. To import a French word into English in order to invert hierarchies of wealth and authority was an inescapably political act at the turn of the nineteenth century; it implied, if not outright treason, then at the very least a dangerous rapprochement between nations at war. Just such a rapprochement did, however, occur in exactly 1801–02, in the shaky lead-up to the Peace of Amiens, the all-too-brief truce in the French Revolutionary Wars which, in the words of the English Jacobin John Thelwall, ‘tranquillized, for awhile, the passions of Europe’ and ‘gave to all parties, in this country, time to recover a portion, at least, of their bewildered senses’. In that hiatus Thelwall emerged from political exile to begin his long reconciliation of working-class activism with bourgeois reform; and his friend William Wordsworth was able to cross the widening channel between the French love of his revolutionary youth and the loyal English