Romantic Anti-Jacobins or Anti-Jacobin Romantics?

I propose to set two scenes of writing in a fundamentally parodic relationship to each other. One was famous in its day but is almost forgotten now, the other unknown then but forever famous now. The first was in a house next to No. 169 Piccadilly, opposite Old Bond Street, connected by a hidden passage to the bookshop of James Wright, the 'morning resort' of savvy young politicians like George Canning, who gathered there to throw together the weekly issues of the The Anti-Jacobin; or Weekly Examiner, from November 1797 to July 1798. The other was somewhere "a few miles above Tintern Abbey," where Wordsworth started composing his famous poem of that title, finishing it as he walked down Clifton Hill into Bristol on July 13, 1798, and delivering it next day to the printshop of Joseph Cottle in Wine Street for last-minute inclusion in the volume titled Lyrical Ballads. We know a great deal about these latter, Somerset scenes. Indeed, since the publication of Jerry McGann's The Romantic Ideology in 1983, and especially since Marjorie Levinson's provocative 1986 essay, "Insight or Oversight?," we have learned more new things about "Tintern Abbey"-a poem on which the community of Romantic scholarship thought it had a very good grasp-than anyone might have believed possible, in 1983. About The Anti-Jacobin, however, we have known, until very recently, only about as much as we have ever known, and that has seemed enough. But I want to suggest that it is not, and that these two scenes of writing have more to do with each other than we have thought. Considered as "text" and "context," they provide a good working model of an older form of literary-historical scholarship: viz., The Anti-Jacobin and its last polemical satire and cartoon, "New Morality," have remained deep in the background of Wordsworth and Coleridge's careers, thanks to its one-line reference to "C—-dge and S-th-y, L—d & L-b & Co." Usually this reference has been treated as something of a joke, if not downright slander, on the order of the "Spy Nozy" incident in Somerset the year before, or the Pantisocracy fiasco-almost always referred to as a "fiasco"-the year before that. At most, it is understood as a reference to the formerly radical writings of Coleridge and Southey, and a sign that the powers-that-were had not yet got the word that the two young poets had, in Coleridge's calculated phrase, "snapped their squeaking baby-trumpets of Sedition" and were no longer radicals but something else, something that we now call "Romantics." Instead, I want to suggest, following a newer model of historical interpretation, sometimes called "The New Historicism" (though its practice is not so unified), that these two scenes cannot be neatly divided into foreground "text" and background "context." At the very least, in 1798, their roles were reversed: The Anti-Jacobin was very much in the London foreground, Lyrical Ballads very far in its anonymous Bristol background. But, since the apparent reversal in value of these two scenes, over the intervening two hundred years, might still look like "poetic" or "historical" justice to some, I want to complicate that mere reversal, and suggest that the two scenes (i.e., texts, places, and authors) were mutually implicated in each other-and further (here I advance beyond suggestion to speculation) that the two sets of writers knew this, and were "in some sense"-those invaluable weasel words-communicating with each other. My instrument for creating this complicating mutual implication is the theory of parody developed by Linda Hutcheon, which derives in turn from the inter-textual theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, especially 'dialogism' and …