John Barrell, Imagining the King's Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793-96. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN: 0198112920. Price: £70 (US$125).

The final section of the final chapter of John Barrell's Imagining the King's Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793-96 explores the curious affair of the arrest and trial of the ultra-loyalist, John Reeves, whose pamphlet, Thoughts on the English Government, seemed to suggest that the king could rule in the absence of any parliament and therefore in contravention of the English constitution. The part that created the greatest controversy, enough to have a Tory government that had done very well by Reeves' anti-Jacobin exertions put him on trial, was the image of the monarchy as the trunk of a tree (the British government) that could continue to live—continue to be a tree—even after the "branches" of the lords and commons had been "lopped off" and "cast into the fire" (623). The government may have felt compelled to prosecute, but Reeves' "not guilty" verdict was not altogether surprising. The Telegraph sardonically noted the prosecution's departure from its more usual strategy of interpreting works charged as libels in their "least favourable" sense. Sir John Scott and Thomas Plumer, serving as prosecution, had indeed urged the jury to interpret the pamphlet in whatever way best served the interests of the accused (637). It is the arguments that were used to defend Reeves, both in and out of court, that are of real interest. They focused on the figurative nature of language and, in particular, of metaphors, which by their very nature were prone to rhetorical flourishes and therefore to excesses that ought not to be interpreted as precise reflections of the author's intended message. Echoing a draft speech written by Edmund Burke, Reeves' defense insisted on the necessity of remembering the distinction between "a court of criticism" where literary extravagances might be savoured and a court of law which was charged with the more onerous task of determining a defendant's intentions based on "the common track of plain writing" which used "precise, positive, and express language" (634). The problem, and the main focus of this book, was the impossibility of maintaining this distinction. Imagining the King's Death explores the ways that political tensions manifested themselves as textual ambiguities in debates about the imagination. Barrell's claim is that "just as Burke was introducing, and Wordsworth and Coleridge were on the point of introducing, new meanings of 'imagination' into the language, the word itself was the object of a political conflict every bit as intense as those being fought over such large political words as 'sovereignty', 'liberty', or 'constitution'" (4). This was because the charge of treason was based on a 1351 statute which stated that it is treason "when a man doth compass or imagine the death of our lord the king." Presumably the word "imagine" was meant to be glossed as something like "intend," but as eighteenth-century critics consistently emphasized, the imagination was a transgressive creative power that by its very nature tended to exceed the human will. The various trials and legal maneuverings which are the subject of this book suggest a "notion of the imagination as wild and unpredictable, a faculty licensed to be unlicensed—which, since it cannot express our intentions, must be presumed to express what we do not intend" (636). Nor was the question of just who was doing the imagining any easier to determine. Everyone in the 1790s insisted that someone was imagining the king's death, they just didn't agree on who it was. The result was often elaborate conspiracy theories—not all of which, if Barrell is right about the government's legal efforts through 1794, were imaginary. "The treason was everywhere, but nowhere in …