ABSTRACT
The starting point for Chapter 5 is the four-volume An Historical, Geographical, Commercial and Philosophical View of the American United States (1795) that the Rev. William Winterbotham compiled while serving four years in Newgate prison. Winterbotham, a Baptist minister, was the only person prosecuted on the basis of a sermon. The chapter brings together the practiced space of Newgate prison, as a site of literary production and radical sociability, and the imagined space of America. It was at Newgate that Winterbotham crossed paths with Robert Southey who was looking for a publisher for his Jacobin verse-drama Wat Tyler. In 1795, the poet believed that he was bound for the American back-country along with Samuel Coleridge and a young group of literary friends to establish a utopian community founded on principles of Pantisocracy. As confidence in the French Revolution was shaken, America came more clearly into view as representing republican hopes and an asylum for persecuted radicals and Dissenters. The chapter considers the intersection of Winterbotham’s view of America with that of Pantisocracy, and the idealized vision of America’s independent citizen-farmer that exerted a powerful influence on the romantic and democratic imaginations.
