Conclusion

Abstract

Anne Janowitz concludes her study of Mary Robinson and Anna Barbauld by calling attention to a collection of Odes published in Ludlow in 1800 by George Nicholson and distributed in London by radical bookseller Henry Symonds. Janowitz cites the collection as reflective of the final defeat of the radical moment, writing that “it is a sad booklet, suffused with the voices of resignation and retreat of radicals and reformers and bluestockings and sold by a bookseller recently associated with Paine’s red-hot republicanism.”¹ Among the contributors whose works Nicholson gathered for the volume and who would have known in their own lives the energy but also the defeat of the radical moment were Anna Barbauld, the satirist Peter Pindar (John Wolcot), Robert Burns and, as I have tried to show in this book, Mary Robinson. The poems themselves foreground various modes of introspection — in their titles, with odes to melancholy, reflection, sympathy, and despondency (to name a few) and in their subject matter, which for the most part displays a kind of quietist pastoral retirement, frequently adorned with classical images but with little, if any, contemporary referentiality.²