Romantics and Revolutionaries

The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age
by E.P. Thompson
The New Press, 1997 225 pp. $25

This posthumous collection of essays and reviews by E.P. Thompson makes a companion to the last book he completed, Witness against the Beast—a study of William Blake’s poetry in the light of his possible ancestry among the radical Protestant sect of Muggletonians. There was a great deal in that volume about the Muggletonian creed, and somewhat less about its disciple and allegorist, the author of the greatest English lyrics of imaginative liberty. The depth of the archival engagement drove out, or excluded as a matter of economy, a comparable range of critical inquisitiveness, and yet the result was to give ...