Revolution and romanticism, 1789-1834

Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness is a 1793 book by the philosopher William Godwin, in which the author outlines his political philosophy. It is the first modern work to expound anarchism. (Source: [Wikipedia](

Nightmare Abbey, a venerable family-mansion, in a highly picturesque state of semi-dilapidation, pleasantly situated on a strip of dry land between the sea and the fens, at the verge of the county of Lincoln, had the honour to be the seat of Christopher Glowry, Esquire. This gentleman was naturally of an atrabilarious temperament, and much troubled with those phantoms of indigestion which are commonly called blue devils.

69 p. ; 19 cm

"Helen Maria Williams was a poet, novelist, and radical thinker deeply immersed in the political struggles of the 1790s. Her Letters Written in France is the first and most important of eight volumes chronicling the French Revolution to an England fearful of another civil war. Her twenty-six letters recounting Old Regime tyranny and revolutionary events provide both an apology for the Revolution and a representation of it as a sublime spectacle."--BOOK JACKET.

L.E.L. - poet, novelist, playwright, reviewer - wrote busily and profitably, one of a generation of women writers active as the last phase of Romanticism ushered in the Victorian period. She wrote with enviable ease and professional polish, as the ballads and narrative poems in this volume amply demonstrate. In her thirties she made an unfortunate marriage, went to Africa with her husband, and mysteriously died there in the same year, whether by accident or suicide is not known. The improvisatrice was published in 1824 and went rapidly through several editions. This facsimile is based on the fifth of 1825.

In 1792, when she was 42, Joanna Southcott began writing down her prophecies, sealing them against the day they were to occur. In 1801 her publications began to appear, written in a combination of prose - sometimes plain, sometimes incantatory - and primitive verse. This pamphlet of 1802 is a sample of the flood of writings which she poured forth until her death in 1814. Joanna is visited by Satan, or Apollyon, or a Friend of Satan, and disputes with him; she triumphs; she recounts her dreams of a flying horseman, a balloon, fires in the sky. A farmer's daughter and one-time servant, she is a descendant of Bunyan in the period of Blake. Unlike Blake she reaches a wide audience, speaking most directly to the poor and to women. Visionary, deluded, or mad, she was the object of veneration and focus of a large and devoted cult.

Walter Savage Landor was born on the 30th of January, 1775, and died at the age of eighty-nine in Spetember 1864.

War rages and a tyrant rules in Klosterheim but a stranger appears with the power to shake the hearts of evil and innocence alike. Does he bring doom, or deliverance?

"Written halfway between Confessions of an English opium-eater (1822) and the great, but fragmentary, Suspiria de profundis of the 1840s, Klosterheim is ostensibly a gothic fantasy in the manner of Ann Radcliffe, set in Germany during the Thirty Years' War. But De Quincey's gothic has a particular function, unlocking a door into the opium-taker's world of illusion and dream. He is writing at a period of desperate need and continuing addiction, and writing very well. Coleridge claimed to have read nothing since Quentin Durward that 'would compare in interest with Klosterheim', adding that De Quincey achieves a 'purity of style and idiom' to which Scott does not aspire."--BOOK JACKET.