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This is the first book to bring perspectives from the field of Peace Studies to bear on the writing of the Romantic period. Particularly significant is that field’s attention not only to anti-war protest but more purposefully to considerations of how peace can actively be fostered, established, and sustained. Resisting discourses of military propaganda, writers such as Helen Maria Williams, William Wordsworth, William Cobbett, and Jane Austen embark on the challenging and urgent rhetorical work of imagining, and inspiring others to imagine, the possibility of peace. The writers considered in this book formulate a peace imaginary in various registers. Sometimes this means identifying and eschewing traditional militaristic tropes in order to craft alternative figurations of a patriotism that is compatible with peace. Other times it means turning away from xenophobic discourse to write about relations with other nations in terms other than those of conflict.

This Afterword cautions against projecting post-Romantic naturalizations of war and modern pessimism about perpetual war onto the Romantic period. Many writers of the Romantic era took seriously the view that they inherited from Enlightenment-era philosophers that peace was the more “natural” state of affairs and war a socially constructed corruption of human impulses. Our anachronistic projections onto the Romantic period put us at risk of losing sight of the rich culture of peace forged by the Romantics. The Afterword suggests looking to the modern discipline of Peace Studies, which has returned to the idea of war as a socially enculturated aberration, as a way of understanding and appreciating the widespread belief in and strivings for peace that characterized the Romantic period.

Chapter 4 considers nuanced engagements with the peace of 1814–15. At the end of the Napoleonic war, a broad peace, one that included Britain, had come at last, but what did it bring? This chapter approaches this question by focusing on two important moments: the arrival in Britain of the initial news of accord in April 1814, and the reappraisals of the peace that emerged in the wake of the Congress of Vienna and Waterloo. The main exhibit for the first moment is Keats’s early sonnet “On Peace,” an arrival-of-peace poem that works a sophisticated version of the national aubade mode. The second is Austen’s engagement with peace in Persuasion, and in particular the curious narrative status of Captain James Benwick, recently returned from the war. It is in Austen’s portrait of Benwick that her version of the coming of peace is most challengingly developed. Her complex, purposefully resistant presentation of one soldier’s uncertain arc of return counters the peacetime jeremiads of the war faction to reveal the real opportunities and difficulties faced by a generation who had known only war and who were now being asked to imagine and embrace new ways to understand their lives.

If today Cobbett is remembered as the “farmer’s friend” who brought the struggles of agrarian life to national attention, this chapter offers a way to think about Cobbett’s writing that takes seriously the significance of both his own military service and his self-education in international law. The chapter tracks Cobbett’s development from a whistleblower on war profiteering to an important commentator on Britain’s international military engagements, arguing that crucial to this development is his translation of Friedrich Martens’ seminal work of international jurisprudence, Précis du Droit des Gens Moderne de l’Europe (1789). Far more than the voice of Little England that has so often served as his caricature, Cobbett presents the difficult and fascinating case of a writer whose treatment of international conflict and diplomacy was out of step with both national sentiment and his own political maturation. With his unusual combination of soldier, farmer, and student of international law, Cobbett remained opposed to peace well into his supposed “radical” turn. Studying his complex trajectory allows us to consider what conditions had to be in place for such a strident war supporter finally to become a tribune of peace.

This chapter examines Helen Maria Williams’s Ode on the Peace (1783), written in the fraught months between the preliminary agreement and the definitive treaty that ended the War of American Independence. Williams’s poem explores a fundamental question: how is peace achieved? Active in London Dissenting circles in the early 1780s, Williams knew that peace does not come merely when the war machines are exhausted but is an achievement that must be earned. Crucial to her Ode on the Peace is her sense that the poet can play a crucial role in working for peace.

This chapter focuses on the series of sonnets that William Wordsworth wrote in 1802, during the Peace of Amiens, when he visited France for the first time in a decade. Critical attention to the political contours of these 1802 poems has tended not to distinguish them from his wartime sonnets of 1803 and 1804, which are often taken as lenses through which to read the peacetime sonnets of 1802. There is surely critical value in thinking about Wordsworth’s sonnets from these years as a series, but in setting them within an undifferentiated chronology we risk overlooking the formal, personal, and political registers that obtain in each poem. Rather than taking Wordsworth’s wartime sonnets as a frame through which to project war back into his peacetime verse, this chapter considers the 1802 sonnets as deeply tied to the era of peace, their ideas and language sharing relays with other Amiens-era discourses, including narratives of travel to France during the peace, and political tracts that consider the significance for Britain of the war’s end and the ways in which concord might be preserved.

The Introduction considers the steadily rising attention given to the challenge of peacemaking across the long eighteenth century, paying special attention to the Enlightenment discourse of perpetual peace. This discourse illuminates in a concentrated way many of the key ideas that Romantic-era writers would come to explore, such as how best to define peace, how to identify the forces that tend to stand in its way, and how to understand the actions by which it is achieved and preserved. In this Introduction I offer an example of how these concerns thread through what was a virtual genre during the Romantic period, “arrival-of-peace” poems that explore a basic epistemological challenge: after so much war, how can this new thing called peace be known? My main exhibit here is Amelia Opie’s “Lines Written at Norwich on the First News of Peace” (1802), which evinces the cross-energy embodied in the discourse of the treaty—a literary mode I refer to as “treaty poetics”—in which new beginnings must coexist with past wrongs, and compensation can only partly satisfy the demands of what has been lost.