ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 returns to E. P. Thompson; it moves between his writings on history and literature and his life as an activist as interrelated to his vision of a socialist future. In his writings on the 1790s, he addressed what he considered a major historical loss: the separation of the radical movement from the Romantics in mutual resistance to the values of industrial capitalism. Thompson discerned a recurrent pattern of political disenchantment and disavowal among intellectuals in the age of revolution, as well as during the twentieth century. In The Making of the English Working Class and his publications on the Romantics, he addressed Wordsworth and Coleridge’s progressive disenchantment with the cause of the French Revolution to the point of disillusion turning into “default” or “apostasy.” He referred to the trajectory of the early Romantics in comparison to that of contemporary writers who shifted with the postwar political winds. Thompson’s reiterated critique of abstract theory as juxtaposed to the concept of experience also found a source of inspiration in Wordsworth’s translation of lived experience into poetic language. In conclusion, some speculative musings are offered on what Thompson left unwritten in his unfinished book on the early Romantics.
