Introduction

For many years, the revolutionary Romanticism and poetic experiments of the 1790s have been understood as responses to the American and French revolutions, and the intellectual influence of Rousseau. Arguments about language and legal and parliamentary reform hinged on questions of authority, and especially on the legitimacy of claims to sovereignty. As John Horne Tooke's definition of the word 'substitute' in 1805 suggests, for those who were invoking an 'ancient constitution' grounded in the sovereignty of the people, the arbitrary and undemocratic rule of Parliament was itself illegitimate, contravening 'the antient law of the land'. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book aims to establish the long eighteenth-century tradition of enquiry linking language and political rights. It shows that whereas Wordsworth offered a purified 'common language' invented for literary purposes, Maria Edgeworth's experiments with a language of truthful feeling were unambiguously democratic in tendency.