Celtic night and gothic grandeur: Politics and antiquarianism in Wordsworth's Salisbury Plain

This essay reads Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain (1794) as an engagement with the antiquarian
strains of British radicalism in the early 1790s. Recent work on the poem by Damien Walford
Davies and Paul Wright has brought out strongly how it links ancient acts of murder
with what Wordsworth later called modern Britain’s ‘wars … against liberty’, and shown
how the poem dramatizes Wordsworth’s increasing awareness of ‘threatened Englishness’ and his abandonment of the ‘Celtic’ radicalism with which he aligned himself on his return from France in late 1792. I suggest that this is not simply a negative ‘reactionary’ turn; rather that Salisbury Plain sees Wordsworth facing the dangers that such ‘Celtic’ sympathies pose to a specifically English tradition of ‘Gothic’ radicalism. By bringing a range of historical material to bear upon the first text of the poem (also known as ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’) I hope to recover Wordsworth’s immediate sense of the monumental historical and political antithesis staked out on the landscape of Salisbury Plain - registered physically in the correspondence
between Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge, and figuratively in the opposition between the
talisman of ancient English liberty, Magna Carta, and the Wicker Man, the emblem of ancient British slavery.