Notes for Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred Eleven 

Excerpts from T. L. Peacock’s The Genius of the Thames from The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, eds. Herbert Francis Brett Brett-Smith and Clifford Ernest Jones

Far other charms than these possess,

Oh Thames ! thy verdant margin bless:

Where peace, with freedom hand-in-hand,

Walks forth along the sparkling strand,

And cheerful toil, and glowing health,

Proclaim a patriot nation’s wealth.

The blood-stained scourge no tyrants wield:

No groaning slaves invert the field:

But willing labor’s careful train

Crowns all thy banks with waving grain,

With beauty decks thy sylvan shades,

With livelier green invests thy glades,

And grace, and bloom, and plenty, pours

On thy sweet meads and willowy shores.

Long as the cliff that girds thine isle

        The bursting surf of ocean stems,

Shall commerce, wealth, and plenty smile

        Along the silver-eddying Thames :

Still shall thine empire’s fabric stand,

Admired and feared from land to land,

Through every circling age renewed,

Unchanged, unshaken, unsubdued; (155)

I acknowledge it to be gloomy. I am sure I do not wish to be a true prophet; ye t w hen one sees the . . . astonishing revolutions which have changed . . . the political face of the globe, what nation has a right to say ‘My mountain stands strong, I shall never be moved’? (“Letter to Judith Beecroft,” 19 March 1812 , quoted in Anna Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose 160)

The following selections are from Barbauld’s 1793 pamphlet “Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation,” in Anna Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose:

When we carry our eyes back through the long records of our history, we see wars of plunder, wars of conquest, wars of religion, wars of pride, wars of succession, wars of idle speculation, wars of unjust interference, and hardly among them one war of necessary self-defense in any of our essential or very important interests (312).

Of late years, indeed, we have known none of the calamities of war in our own country but the wasteful expence of it; and sitting aloof from those circumstances of personal provocation, which in some measure might excuse its fury, we have calmly voted slaughter and merchandized destruction—so much blood and tears for so many rupees, or dollars, or ingots (312).

War is a state in which all our feelings and our duties suffer a total and strange inversion . . . A state in which it becomes our business to hurt and annoy our neighbour by every possible means; instead of cultivating, to destroy; instead of building, to pull down; instead of peopling, to depopulate” (311-312).

“Let us lay aside the grimace of hypocrisy,” Barbauld states satirically, “stand up for what we are, and boldly profess, like the emperor of old, that everything is sweet from which money is extracted, and that we know better than to deprive ourselves of a gain for the sake of a fellow-creature” (309).

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