English Visiting Speaker Seminar Professor Philip Connell, University of Cambridge

‘The London Revolution Society and the Politics of Commemoration in Late Eighteenth-Century England: New Light on the Origins of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France'

The Society for the Commemoration of the Glorious Revolution was one of the most important extra-parliamentary political associations in later eighteenth-century England. It also figured prominently in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, which sealed the Society's reputation as an organ of political and religious radicalism and the initial, fateful point of contact between the French revolutionary regime and its English admirers. This paper offers a new account of the Revolution Society, which departs in significant respects from the terms of Burke's polemic. It will return our attention to the centenary of the ‘glorious revolution' in 1788, and its relation to the major constitutional crisis precipitated by George III's mental incapacity during 1788-89, as significant but hitherto misunderstood contexts for the argument of the Reflections.

Philip Connell is a Professor of Literature and History in the Faculty of English, and a Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. His research interests range across literature, politics, and intellectual history between 1650 and 1840. His publications include Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope (2016) and Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture' (2001). He is currently working on revolution and cultural memory in Romantic Britain.