William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism

Paul Cheshire has written a number of articles on Coleridge and his contemporaries, including a chapter on Coleridge’s notebooks for the Oxford Handbook of S. T. Coleridge. He has also written on the influence of seventeenth century hermetic philosophy on Milton. His initial study of The Hurricane, ‘The Hermetic Geography of William Gilbert’, appeared in Romanticism in 2003.

• AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsIntroduction Part One: William Gilbert in Romantic Culture1. A Magus of the 1790s: William Gilbert in Bristol and London2. Bristol and the First Romantics3. ‘With no unholy madness’: Gilbert and Coleridge4. ‘My astrological friend’: Gilbert and Southey5. The Calenture: Gilbert and Wordsworth Part Two: The HurricaneThe Hurricane a Theosophical and Western Eclogue. To which is subjoined, A Solitary Effusion in a Summer’s Evening. 6. The Hurricane and Hermetic Geography7. Decoding the Allegory of the ‘Theosophical and Western Eclogue’8. Son of a Saintly Slave Owner Part Three: Conclusion 9. Esoteric RomanticismBibliographyIndex

‘Cheshire’s readings transform Gilbert’s poem from something inscrutable to something deeply interesting… Cheshire makes a compelling case that “esoterism” is important but overlooked in all the Romantics, expanding how they may be read. The book further expands the geographies of Romanticism through its attention to the sea and Antigua as crucial sites for revolutionary thinking.’ Lawrence Evalyn, Eighteenth-Century Fiction