British Women Poets and the Revolutionary Years; Sympathy, Social Activism, and the Promise of Change

This dissertation explores the connection between sympathy and social activism in the political poems of Helen Maria Williams, Anna Barbauld, and Charlotte Smith in the years surrounding the American and French Revolutions (1769-1812). My dissertation adds to the existing scholarship through my examination of how the above writers’ political poetry engages with the idea, propagated by both eighteenth-century sensibility culture and moral philosophy, that individual feelings of sympathy and acts of compassion can (and ought to) directly lead to larger social reforms. This project traces each of these writers’ evolving attitudes toward the role of poetry in inspiring such social activism, as well as their later reflections on their earlier activist poetry that failed to inspire the desired political change. One can draw a common thread among the writers’ bodies of work, as well as can notice a common trajectory of throughout their writing careers. Their early career writing expresses a youthful optimism for both radical social change and the belief in poetry’s potential for inspiring that change, while their later writing questions those same ideals after witnessing the French Revolution’s violent turn, Britain’s despotic counterrevolutionary legislation, and one failed social cause after the next. This project explores each writer’s unique lyric responses to these revolutionary issues, as well as their poetic methods for addressing political disappointment in their later poems as they pose the question of whether sympathy (or the sympathy-rousing poem) still holds value even after it has failed to meet its social ends.