Alarm is the defining context out of which British Romanticism emerged, not the waxing and waning of revolution that ostensibly made it bliss to be alive in that age. So argues Kenneth Johnston's Unusual Suspects: Pitt's Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s, a book that foregrounds the lost in order to refute the win-win long accorded to the politics and literary culture of England in this period. The primary loss it recounts is those many men and women whose promising careers were ruined and whose lives were lost to the literary history of the British Romantic era as a consequence of their various encounters with Pitt's reign of alarm. From more than seventy contemplated, Unusual Suspects features Joseph Priestley, James Montgomery, William Frend, Thomas Beddoes Sr., Helen Maria Williams, William Drennan, Robert Bage, Gilbert Wakefield, and James Mackintosh in chapters that seek to preserve not only their individuality but also its manifestation of the cumulatively disastrous consequences of alarm. Each details the radical things that these persons were saying and doing up until such doings vanished from their writings, comprising a “before” and “after” through which the reality of alarm becomes legible.

Envisioning what might have been if reform in the 1790s had not been so systematically repressed accounts for the book's organization and the epistemological challenges that it acknowledges. The nine chapters that comprise parts 2 through 5 are bookended by parts 1 and 6, each of which highlights a different category of “usual” against which the sufferings of the unusual come into sharper focus. Part 1's usual suspects join the others as casualties of alarm, they being the large number of men actually tried for sedition and treason during the decade that mounted more such trials “than ever before or after” in the history of Britain (xiv). Chapter 2 particularizes this history through focus on the most famous representative in each category, John Thelwall (usual) and William Godwin (unusual), both of whom exemplify the “promising Before” and “depressing After” of radical lives that came of age in the early 1790s (107). In contrast, part 6's “usual” means canonical and grants a chapter apiece to showing how Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Lamb, Blake, and Burns also were victims of alarm but lived to tell in some of the most highly prized texts of the period.

Demonstrating that reform in the 1790s did not fail but was systematically quashed means to exonerate both the principles and the agents of reform. Its delineation of the deeply orchestrated but wholly random mechanisms of alarm in the process exposes what is so disarming about reigns of terror and alarm. They leave no face to face, either of the victim or of an accuser the victim might face. Alarm's extralegal activity is diffused into a mob (Priestley), public opinion (all nine), church and state bureaucracies (Frend, Beddoes Sr., and Bage), thin airs of ridicule (Godwin and Beddoes Sr.), scandal (Williams), and innuendo (Montgomery). One poignant reckoning is the “genuine surprise” felt by controversialists when the force of their argumentation encounters no backlash other than penalty (83). Equally disarming is confronting the two-facedness of one's friends, a reckoning pursued to sobering conclusions about some highly canonized writers, as well as the invariably harsher treatments of female suspects. Yet this, too, Johnston convincingly ascribes less to the failings of individuals than to the climate that occasioned it.

Johnston pulls back from prescribing what we should conclude from his revised history of the history of the 1790s other than perceiving Romanticism as not all that it was cracked up to be from the perspective of support for reform. To a large degree, he is content to provide his unusual suspects their day in court, “so far as possible to let them tell it in their own words,” to expand the canon of reform-minded treatises, and to leave it at that (xx). After all, as the “weak” reading aired in the coda puts it, what's done is done (324). But two of Johnston's strong arguments uncover ongoing interactions between Romanticism and reform. By analogizing Britain in the 1790s to McCarthyism in 1950s America and to reigns of terror at home and abroad right now, Johnston rightly observes that what was done is recurring. Moreover, repressive regimes target artists and intellectuals because of the threat that creativity poses to establishments of every kind. He also argues that what was fundamentally done in by Pitt's reign of alarm was a “republican voice” that speaks truth to power directly (xvii, xx). Registering this loss reveals the curious status of poetry in the argument, where, in the cases of unusual suspects, their resorting to writing it marks the spot where alarm got the better of them—better encompassing pamphlets, periodical essays, newspaper articles, letters from France and Ireland, and the finest self-defenses; in other words, everything but their poetry. It also influences Johnston's imaginings of what might have been in existing canonical works: more truly sociable conversation poems if Thelwall had been encouraged to stay at Nether Stowey; a novel's rise that did not wait until Austen to arrive, passing over the “socio-political sophistication” of new philosophical fiction (181); the “remarkably unpoetical” passage in book X of The Prelude that, in outing Pitt as “the rat” responsible for “juvenile errors” of revolutionary enthusiasm, possibly accounts for the forty-five-year delay in publication that, had it not been delayed, would have had “enormous” effects on the “development of English literature” (255, 251).

One hears in these observations impatience with the indirection of poetic language, a perception strengthened by the critical voice that Johnston adopts and defends. For this voice speaks avowedly American English—by turns colloquial, straightforward, and unafraid to call a spade a spade—because of its greater claims to being a republican voice. Even more surprising, this plain-speaking voice recalls the lost, the spectral, and the disappeared without a trace of the trace. To me, the most intriguing paradoxical insight in Unusual Suspects is how its impatience with poetic indirection in the name of democratic reform reveals the necessity of poetry for it. If Johnston's argument states that Pitt's reign of alarm silenced reform and intensified the indirections of poetry for the worse even in the best, it suggests why poetic indirection provides the staying power for reform. Even when indirection is not occasioned by legal or psychic repression, poetry's allusiveness is fundamental to survival. Calling this Romantic ideology misses how the terrorized need a less rationalist truth to redress the power of trauma and how rewriting the history of a history effects positive change.