About This Resource

The Editors

Daniel E. White is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. Author of Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge University Press, 2006), he has published articles on a variety of topics involving Romantic-era religion, imperialism, and political culture. At present he is working on a monograph, Romanticism and Religion in Early British India, and is co-editing Robert Southey: Later Poetical Works 1811-1838, vol. 3, Poems from the Laureate Period and Inscriptions (1814-22) (forthcoming from Pickering & Chatto).

Sarah Copland is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Her research in cognitive narratology brings together literary modernism's representations of mind functioning and current cognitive science accounts of these processes. Her article entitled "Reading in the Blend: Collaborative Conceptual Blending in the Silent Traveller Narratives" is forthcoming in Narrative (Spring 2008); an earlier version of the essay was awarded the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature's Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper at the 2006 Conference in Ottawa. She is also working on an article on mind modeling in The Waves and two co-authored articles, one on innovative pedagogies in teaching modernism and one on definitional debates about modernism.

Stephen Osadetz received his M.A. from the University of Toronto and is presently a doctoral student in the Department of English at Stanford University, where he is studying nineteenth-century poetry. He is coauthor (with James Gifford) of an article on Lawrence Durrell.

The Text

This is a diplomatic edition of our copy text, The Fall of Robespierre. An Historic Drama. By S. T. Coleridge, of Jesus College, Cambridge (Cambridge, 1794), the first edition of the play. For an account of the genesis of the piece, which was written over a very short period of time in late August 1794, the first act by Coleridge and the second and third acts by Southey, see the Introduction as well as the selection of letters included in the Letters, Reviews, and Literary Contexts section of this hypertext. The play was republished without substantive variants in 1829 (Paris) and 1831 (Philadelphia), and was collected in editions of 1836 (LR 1.1-32), 1874 (PWS 236-53), 1877 (PDW 3.1-39), 1893 (PWC 211-25), 1912 (CPW 2.495-517), and 2001 (CC 16.3.1.3-44), with a facsimile reprint of the 1794 edition issued by Woodstock in 1991. In the present edition, our line numbering follows Mays' in CC 16.3.1, and we have retained the spelling and formatting of 1794, only correcting typographical errors at 2.93 and 3.213.

The text is encoded in HTML; it features no frames but extensive use of tables. It will work best with Netscape 4.0 or Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher or a comparable browser; earlier browsers may not display everything properly. When using Internet Explorer, some readers may experience a problem with the annotations to the play text. If, when a note is clicked, the note pop-up window times out at the top of the page, users may click the note link a second time to navigate to the proper entry. Users with fast connection speeds will not likely experience this problem.

The files were marked up in HTML by David Rettenmaier at the University of Maryland. The table of contents was also designed and marked up by David Rettenmaier.

Image

Jean Joseph Weerts, "La Nuit du 8 au 9 Thermidor" (oil on canvas), Musee d'Art et d'Industrie, Roubaix, France, reproduced by permission of The Bridgeman Art Library.

Maps and Tables

"Departments of 1798," by Andrea Ades Vasquez, artist, reproduced by permission of the American Social History Project and Center for History and New Media from their website, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution <http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/1127/>, by Jack R. Censer and Lynn Hunt.

"France in the 1790s," reproduced by permission of John Gilkes, artist, from David Andress, The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution, London: Little Brown, 2005.

"The Revolutionary Calendar," from George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution, Oxford: Clarendon, 1959.

"Revolutionary Paris, drawn by Edward Weller, 1908," from Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, London: Chatto and Windus, 2006.

"Revolutionary Paris in Sections," from George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution, Oxford: Clarendon, 1959.

Acknowledgments

Support for this project was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and we appreciate the assistance we have received from the staffs of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, the E. J. Pratt Library, and Robarts Library at the University of Toronto, and of the British Library. We would like to thank Neil Fraistat for suggesting some time ago that we carry out this project, and Melissa J. Sites, Brian Bloomfield, and Ryan Claycomb for providing the original research and coding for the project. We are grateful to Tilar Mazzeo, editor of Electronic Editions at Romantic Circles, for her advice and suggestions, and to David Rettenmaier, Site Manager, for his contributions to the design of this edition.