New Left Review I/174, March-April 1989
Merryn Williams
Frankenstein Monsters
The poetry and prose of the Romantics (Richard Holmes writes in Shelley: The Pursuit) was born of a ‘disturbed and excited political period . . . which flashes up through the years towards our own’. Certainly, we have come a long way since 1789. And yet there are uncanny resemblances between our situation and that of Wordsworth, Coleridge and the Shelley circle. A great revolution which went wrong, men thrown out of work by machinery, foreign wars distracting a people from its real problems, a government doing its best to whittle away civil liberties, small groups of intellectuals who felt deeply alienated from society and spent much time discussing communes, free love and a revolution in personal relationships. One could go on.
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