However, within this painting there is something haunting even these issues and approaches. It is the presence of the techne, or elements of the printing press and other modes of early modern communication. Marat's death-grip on the quill pen, one of his technological means of representation, suggests that the press played an important role not only in Marat's life, but in the perception and reception of the French Revolution itself.

In this paper I wish to show how the elements of the printing press, which are present in David's painting as synecdoches of modes of representation and communication, have set the stage for the Revolution. If the press was not a cause of the Revolution per se, then certainly its ability to cause significant periods of intersticial, seemingly dead, time between the event and its subsequent narration altered and affected the way the Revolution was received in France, in all of Europe, and especially in all of England. [1] Marat was a writer, publisher and printer by trade before he became an incendiary and ideologue. That David's painting shows how elements of the press continue to signify even after individuals are silenced suggests a new perception of how the subject is formed in relation to a language and techne that exists before and after the individual.

What does this have to do with British Romanticism? The French Revolution was obviously a seminal influence upon each of the Romantic writers, but it is important to understand that for the vast majority of British writers the Revolution was a represented, and not lived, phenomenon. They had the French Revolution delivered to them by means of daily newspapers and weekly or monthly journals. Because the Revolution was represented to Britain by means of the press, the printing press, along with other modes of early-modern communication, helped to establish and haunt Romantic scenes of writing as much as the events of the French Revolution themselves. The specter of the press that haunts David's illustration of Marat, then, is the same specter that haunts and inhabits the work of the British Romantics. However, many times Romantic writers were able to work with this specter. This suggests that the Romantics were significantly more than nature poets or mere transcendentally- minded ideologues who were oblivious to issues concerning the French Revolution and thereby equally oblivious to modernity and to their own situatedness within history.

The London Times can be a useful record to current investigators of Romantic thought in Britain because it gives an accurate account of how long it took events which happened in France to be reported to London's general populace. Though no longer considered to be the most accurate record of historical events, The Times was usually the newspaper that most speedily reported the French Revolution to London. This is important because the amount of time it took for news to travel from France to Britain had a tremendous impact upon the general populace. On average, it took a week for information to come from Paris to London. For example, it took ten days for The Times to report the death of Marat, four days to report Louis XVI's execution, and over ten days to report Robespierre's demise (The Times Reports the French Revolution 23). [2]

The significance of this time lag between event and its subsequent narrativization in Britain by the press should not be underestimated. Generally, the British were very frightened that they might be invaded at any moment, and they knew that printed news of imminent invasion was probably based on information that might be days, or even a week, out of date. In fact, it was likely that if an invasion actually did come any published warnings would be disseminated some time after the actual invasion. Even though news took some time to cross France and the channel, a fleet of ships could rather easily embark unreported from France (or elsewhere in France's expanding empire), travel the twenty or so miles across the channel, and easily land right on England's coasts. Britain of course had established coastal lines of defense, including emergency beacons called "martel towers." These tall platforms were stocked with wood which could be set on fire as a signal to watchers further inland, the theory being that news of a coastal invasion could be transmitted fairly quickly to the rest of the country by means of these fires. Dramatic systems of communication such as these were necessary because there was no other timely way to convey such important information. Considering these methods of communication and the necessary time lag, reports of troop movements and other calamitous events were a great source of anxiety not only because of the news itself, but because England's public knew very well that all news was always-already old news. People during this time understood that methods such as building and lighting martel towers represented that era's cutting-edge technology. It is this kind of technology which impacted Romantic scenes of writing.

Coleridge's "Fears in Solitude" was written in the context, or scene, created by the time-lag caused by the workings of the printing press and other extant modes of communication. The subtitle of the poem, "Written in April 1798, during the Alarm of an Invasion," is, like much Romantic writing, highly topographical or place-oriented in that it takes great care in explaining the situation in which the poem was first conceived. Place and time are very important elements in Coleridge's writing, and perhaps this element of his writing is best understood in terms of how he was able to figurate his anxiety within a temporal lacuna created by the workings of the press. "Fears in Solitude" captures Coleridge's confrontation with several fears which are created not necessarily by political or nationalistic concerns, nor even by his fascination with the imagination, but by the temporal lag caused by the limited speed of his nation's printing presses in disseminating information, a temporal lag that he tropes into a quiet and ostensibly natural space.

In this poem Coleridge is gravely concerned with a potential invasion or "undetermined conflict" (93) as well as his knowledge that so many seem to be caught up in a desire for war and an unthinking relation to their own subjectivity. He fears that this superficiality will lead to the destruction of his world, his England. So, he finds a pastoral "green and silent spot" (92), a space of nature which gives him some distance from the necessarily belated news that has created his immediate fears. On the surface it would seem that the scene of writing for this poem is decidedly natural, for nature is explicitly posited as providing him an escape from temporal cares and the anxiety created by the press, the Revolution, and modernity in general. Coleridge's deployment of a pastoral setting is complete with a "silent dell" (92), singing birds, green vegetation, and even the requisite correspondent breeze. At first glance, this poem is attempting an escape from all care, and it would therefore seem to teach us little about his investigation of his culture and modes of communication.

However, the scene of writing in this poem is informed, or haunted, by a technological specter, namely the lacuna of temporality created by the delayed reporting of the invasion. The feared invasion is not the only burden that begins Coleridge's musings about how society has become "engulfed in courts, committees, institutions, / Associations and societies." The very mode of communication of the invasion itself informs his melancholy. When he writes of the undetermined conflict which might be happening even as he voices his fears, he is referring not only to the threat of invasion, but also to the necessary lag between event and communication, a space of seeming dead time caused by the technology of his day. The operative scene of writing is primarily established by the imperfect and slow workings of the newspaper and other extant modes of communication, not merely by his escape to a natural setting, or even by his melancholic imagination. This poem reflects an imaginative enterprise that engages with the issues broached by the technology of the day, showing that at least in this case, his imagination is more than what Jerome McGann calls, after A.O. Lovejoy, a "network of illusions" (The Romantic Ideology 154). [3] Far from being the primary means for the effacement of history and reality, Coleridge's imagination allows him to work through his subjectivity and come to an understanding of his relation to his technological modes of communication.

Once the impact of the lag that took place between the event and its subsequent announcement in London is understood, Coleridge's criticism of the press as "a vain, speech-mouthing, speech-reporting guild" (94) is more clearly understood. Instead of reading this line as yet another instance of his unnecessary reaction against the populist elements of the Revolution we can read it is a rather sensible, even far-sighted, warning against those, such as Marat, who claim to speak for all people. He was aware, as many at the time were not, that newspapers and presses were fond of establishing themselves as immediate and naive, in the Schillerian sense, representatives of the people. By foregrounding his technological scene of writing it also becomes clearer that Coleridge perceived how information about events was disseminated by the press, and how the very manner of this dissemination had almost as great an impact upon the meaning of the French Revolution to England as did the events themselves. Perhaps this explains why he later entitled his own newspaper The Friend (1808-1810), for he too understood the importance of colloquial rhetoric in establishing a popular journal, even though his was designed to counteract the frivolous and partisan journalism which he condemns in "Fears in Solitude" (English Romanticism: The Human Context 42).

Coleridge understood that frivolity and partisanship on the part of the press could easily lead to the fascism to which the French Revolution had, by 1793, descended. Far from allowing one to write off his stance as politically reactionary, an understanding of how the printing press continued to be a powerful presence within his work shows how his writing contains a presence not fully contained within or explained by our current rubrics based upon political considerations, race, class or gender. By considering the specter of the press in Coleridge's writing, we can begin to see him as more than a quasi-Luddite figure who attempted to separate humanity from technology. Instead, he is hoping to make himself and others more aware of their ideological and representational situatedness in an increasingly technological world, and his troping of time into a seemingly natural place, or space, enables him to bring about such an awareness. Perhaps his engagement with the technical is one reason why he keeps demanding our attention as romanticist critics.

Apart from discussing and troping the specter of the press in his poetry, Coleridge directly confronted it as he went about publishing his texts, as well. With the Biographia Literaria (1817) he was forced to include a great amount of filler because his publisher found that his original dictated version was too long for even two volumes. Then after Coleridge cut some of the passages, it was discovered that the resulting book was too large for one volume, but too small for two volumes. His publisher, of course, pushed for a two volume set, forcing Coleridge to make some questionable additions, including his Satyrane's Letters and chapter 23 (Samuel Taylor Coleridge 704). Many have noted the strangeness, and even the irrelevance, of these two passages to the rest of the Biographia. If these passages are indeed so problematic, they nevertheless represent his necessary confrontation with the printing press, proving that sometimes it can skew and even diffract an author's textual production. This bibliographic and/or technical aspect of his work shows how the printing press can supplement, in a negative sense, the message it conveys.

However, Coleridge was able to work with this seeming resistance of the material to his ideas, a move which shows his awareness of the conventions and history of the book, as well as his ability to negotiate the materiality of the book. Knowing that the Biographia would be presented in two volumes, he ensured that the first volume would climax with his now famous definition of the primary and secondary imaginations in chapter 13, and that the second volume would begin with his critique of Lyrical Ballads. His attempt to bring about at least a momentary unification of what Jerome McGann has called the textual and the bibliographic codes (i.e. the written text and the various forms and elements of the book) [4] shows how Coleridge was quite aware that the physicality of the book, its very techne, is an essential part of communication. With this in mind, it is clear that sometimes the physicality of the book can amicably supplement its textual code, especially when its author understands the aspects of modern book production.

Joanna Southcott, the millennialist prophetess, had to contend with the specter of the press in communicating her divine visions, as well. Convinced that she, as a woman, was the only one who could interpret the Bible correctly, Southcott became a prolific publisher and interpreter before she ended her career and life with the incredible claim that she was, at the age of 64, pregnant with the divine "Shiloh," a figure who would be coadjutor with Christ in the imminent millennium (Prophecies Announcing the Birth of the Prince of Peace 1-2). In publishing her prophecies and visions, her typesetter often complained about her language and spelling, and she responded with the following message to public: "the Reader will observe, that the following is printed word for word according to the original. Worldly-minded Critics may cavil at the language; but I have been ordered thus to give it the world, [sic] to try the heads of the learned" (The Strange Effects of Faith 25). Later she writes that "the first edition was printed with many errors, which remain in this, because the book was not to be altered" (32).

Southcott's attitude toward the press, or the techne, was that it was a transparent medium for her visions and desires, and nothing more. She often wrote statements that imply a unity of conception and execution, for her words were supposed to have come directly from her God to the world who would be judged for its wickedness and disbelief:

The time is come, that judgements must at God's own house begin, And, if he first attacks the just, what case are sinners in? If God the righteous, whom he lov'd, with justice does correct, What must the sons of violence, whom he abhors, expect? (The Strange Effects of Faith 26).

However, even for Joanna Southcott, "the woman clothed with the sun" (The Third Book of Wonders 11), the press proved to be a resistant medium to her poetically rendered visions and revelations. She was forced at least once by her printer to suppress some of her writings, a fact which caused her to issue apologies such as the following:

I am sorry, my intentions cannot be fulfilled, by giving to the public in print the whole contents of the letter above, and of other letters hereafter. -- The Printer declines copying them fully. He tells me, that however perfect my conviction may be, that what I have written is of God, and however strong my resolution may be to hazard all consequences in its publication, yet he has received no supernatural instructions, and therefore feels not, in this case, any degree of the spirit of martyrdom within him. (The Strange Effects of Faith 21)

The printer's wish to avoid "the ill-humor of Political disappointment," a phrase which refers to his fear of imprisonment for libel, or even death for sedition, is further evidence of the political repression extant in Britain circa 1801. It is also further proof that an investigation into the modes of production and reproduction of books can lead to a deeper understanding of the complex and disparate visions of all of the Romantics, be they secularizing high poets or apocalyptically minded millennialists.

Thomas De Quincey's The English Mail Coach (1849) illustrates how technical progress in Britain facilitated intersubjective communication and accelerated the very notion of temporality itself. De Quincey enacts a rubric of plenitude in his narrative as he investigates the impact of the mail-coach and the newspaper to his subjectivity around the time of the Battle of Trafalgar (1805). Writing about an encounter in his youth when another coach nearly collides head-on with his own, he records in a rather arresting way how this experience was "a vision of sudden death" (361). His merely pleasurable ride on the mail-coach, a largely successful attempt to surf along the new technological wave that is sweeping over his culture, quickly becomes a moment where technology radically alters his own perspective on the world. By surfing the network of his culture's lines of communication (he is on the King's mail-coach, after all, just as we today surf on a network created by the military and the state), he becomes discursively created by them.

There is nothing new about how a disaster, imagined or not, creates a new appreciation of death and life. The novelty of De Quincey's confrontation is that the mail-coach always remains a synecdoche of technology, and as such it impels him towards a recognition of the possibility of death. The mail-coach brings him to an immediate confrontation with death, but in a way in which the confrontation is conducted always-already on a technological tableau. De Quincey's narrative, then, illustrates how a new relation of human to techne is taking place, a new relation best investigated not in terms of race, class, or gender, but in terms of how technology has affected and effected subjectivity. The quasi-Burkean scene of terror and death that is The English Mail CoachÊis supplemented by another scene of writing that haunts his narrative, and this is the scene of the techne, or of modes of communication.

The significance of this encounter with death and the techne is that he realizes, like Martin Heidegger after him, that intimate confrontations with the possibility of death can create a self-aware subjectivity, an understanding of being-in-the-world. [5] De Quincey's narrative records a sudden and all-too-real irruption of death into life, an irruption that begins to reconfigure his very relation with time and space. If Heidegger is correct that our being in life is always- already configured in terms of our relation to the possibility of our death and that death is the ultimate irruption of the calculus of being and time, then De Quincey's narrative is an important precursor text in that it suggests how modes of communication alter the relation to death, to being, and to self. His perspective is also something of a divergence from Heidegger's perceptions, for Heidegger tends to discount the impact of technology or even treat it as an impediment to an understanding of subjectivity. [6] Yet De Quincey has employed aspects of technology as the very modus vivendi, the very ground, for understanding his relationship to language and thought.

The scene of writing in The English Mail Coach is decidedly informed, or haunted, by technological issues like the mail-coach, the printing press, the newspaper, and the book, in addition to the French Revolution. As the following quote suggests, it is in relation to death and the techne that one becomes focused upon one's phenomenological and discursive self:

Thirty-seven years ago, or rather more, an accident made me, in the dead of night, and of a night memorably solemn, the solitary witness to an appalling scene, which threatened instant death in a shape the most terrific to two young people, whom I had no means of assisting, except in so far as I was able to give them a most hurried warning of their danger; but even that not until they stood within the very shadow of the catastrophe, being divided from the most frightful of deaths by scarcely more, if more at all, than seventy seconds. Such was the scene, such in its outline, from which the whole of this paper radiates as a natural expansion. (385)

De Quincey might as well have said that the whole of his life radiates from this incident as a natural expansion, for he repeatedly writes that this incident invaded his dreams and altered his outlook on life. Writing that this incident "in a moment told its own tale, and wrote all its records on my heart forever" (375), the very metaphors he uses to convey the impact of this scene are all centered around forms of the techne: the incident "told" its (constructed, or written) tale, and "wrote" its "records" on his heart. The scene here is not one of nature, nor is it inherently political, even though it takes place upon a mail-coach full of news about the French Revolution. Though it is certainly informed by De Quincey's opium addiction and discourse concerning this drug, this scene is based upon an intimate relationship with his society's mode of communication and how he has become reinscribed by his relation to modes of representation and communication.

The moment of sublime terror and expressed affect that De Quincey relates is supplemented by its technological milieu, and therefore constitutes something more important than its reputation as a documentation of the psychological mind-frame of an early 19th century opium eater. It is a scene enabled by the accouterments and materials of communication and writing itself. The mail-coach, supposedly a mere tool and method of state communication, begins to actually contribute to the very subjectivity of its users. The coach actually enables the phantasmic investigation revaluation of subjectivity that De Quincey is noted for. It has been a truism that his work often is seen as an investigation into "individuality." [7] What I wish to show is how an emphasis upon the techne of the press illustrates how De Quincey, like many other Romantics, is very much aware that he is not an "individual" in the liberal sense of the word, but is in fact a subject, a radically decentered affect of language who becomes reconstituted, or at least greatly affected, by his proximity to the techne. The specter of death for De Quincey is therefore the specter of death and the printing press and other modes of early modern communication.

De Quincey himself writes that it is during a moment enabled by the mail-coach itself that so many disparate discourses come together to formulate a new and decidedly apocalyptic or ecstatic understanding of subjectivity:

What I had beheld from my seat upon the mail the scenical strife of action and passion, of anguish and fear, as I had there witnessed them moving in ghostly silence; this duel between life and death narrowing itself to a point of such exquisite evanescence as the collision neared; all these elements of the scene blended, under the law of association, with the previous and permanent features of distinction investing the mail itself. (386)

The subjectivity here is modern in the sense that it is described in secular and temporal terms. The passage narrows all of humanity to a moment of an idea of life and death devoid of any religious discourse of any significance. This moment can also be read as quite postmodern in the sense that subjectivity is created in relation to "the mail itself," to the institution of the King's mail coach, and not an absolute model of what a self is. De Quincey records here a moment where subjectivity becomes a duel, a contingent creation of self as evanescence, suggesting a decentered subjectivity, not an ideal ego that feeds upon infinity. De Quincey's is a self constituted by temporal happenstance during a moment which no correspondence to any one configuration of humanity or reality can be evoked, for his very understanding of the world has been created in an ecstatic and decentered relation to the near-collision he witnessed. This moment of reality and temporality was staged partly by his imagination, partly by news concerning his nation's crisis at the Battle of Trafalgar, and decidedly within a moment made possible by the techne, or the printing press and other methods of communication.

De Quincey's narrative relates a new understanding that he can only represent in terms of a "Dream-Fugue," a phantasmic re- representation of a new scene of writing and being. The unprecedented speed of the coach in delivering the mail creates what was then a new connectivity between the government and its citizens and also between Europe and England. It also allows for the dissemination of information in the form of printing: it allows for what he at one time saw as the speedy "diffusing through the land the great political events, and especially the great battles during a conflict of unparalleled grandeur" (386). It is only necessary to read the first few lines of the text where De Quincey writes that the inventor of the mail coach was "twice as great a man as Galileo, who did certainly invent (or, which is the same thing, discover) the satellites of Jupiter, those very next things extant to mail-coaches in the two capital pretensions of speed and keeping time" (336) to understand that he has understood the impact of his culture's then- modern modes of communication upon the subject.

Yet for De Quincey the use of the mail-coach does something more than aid in the sudden unification of society and the quickening of time. His narrative of an incident concerning the news of the ill- fated 23rd Dragoons contains a fascinating example of how the technology of his day creates virtual realities and even virtual identities. News of the destruction of this entire regiment of British soldiers had been all the rage in London for some twelve hours when De Quincey, fresh from riding on the coach which contained this news, met one of the mothers of a soldier in that regiment. Yet instead of relating her son's death and referring her to the newspaper, he simply tells her about how the exploits of her son's heroic regiment had now become famous in print. He further writes that her fear for her son then became swallowed up in joy, and that "the poor woman threw her arms round my neck, as she thought of her son, and gave to me the kiss which secretly was meant for him" (360).

This transference of affection and identity is enabled by the techne as well as upon De Quincey's withholding of information contained within the mail coach. Certainly the potential to lie, or at least withhold information and to treat one person as another, has existed before his experience. However, the ability to create virtual worlds and identities becomes greatly enhanced by means of De Quincey's and the mother's relation to the mail-coach, and the important information it so (at least to the young De Quincey) speedily delivers. He becomes to this woman a virtual son. As such he becomes a precursor--and even harbinger--of the cyberpunk virtual identities discussed and portrayed in the past few decades. [8] This scene captures the way in which technology brings about the possibility for one human to stand in as another, a result of the redefinition of the self as mere function of language, rather than the self as absolute unique individual. De Quincey is able to stand in as a son to the mother who learns, by means of a newspaper brought on the coach, (false) stories about her absent son; she is so greatly affected by De Quincey's news because her very perception of the world has become discursively created, and De Quincey himself becomes a function, for the woman, of her son.

This specific narrative illustrates how the techne and language begin to affect the way in which people function in the world. Incidents where strangers become proxies for sons to desperate mothers are, like moments of terror, hardly anything new, but in this case the impact of technology upon subject positions has enabled a transference to instantly occur among these people. It is the suddenness of the identity and non-identity, or intersubjectivity, between these two people that makes this passage something quite unique. Furthermore, his use of selective memory in this narrative, along with selective truth, shows how a human act of witnessing to another is enabled and also defrauded by the presence of the techne. This new scene of writing, or re-encoding of the self, then, enables a perspective upon communication, or witnessing, that is both truth and lie, a moment where the techne of language itself is as much of a curse as it is a gift.

David's representation of Marat's demise suggests something more than the death of one face of the French Revolution and the birth of another particularly more violent (and apparently more accurate) representation of it. David's painting suggests the importance of the printing press and other modes of communication to various scenes of writing during the last part of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, what most (still) call the Romantic period. As critics interested in the study of Romanticism, and specifically British Romanticism, perhaps we should study not only the French Revolution itself, but the way in which it was represented and the way in which these modes of representation impacted the poetry and prose of the authors we study. Technology and Romanticism are two concepts, or movements, that are deeply interfused. The Prometheus Unplugged conference and its Web page and MOO are ample proof of this fact. Just as ignoring technological advancements today is to lose our understanding of our subjectivity, to ignore the technology that was extant during the time in which the Romantics worked is to reduce this important aspect of their work to a mere ghost in the machine of Romanticism.

Works Cited

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Fears in Solitude: Written in April 1798, during the Alarm of Invasion,” The Oxford Authors: Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Oxford, 1985.

De Quincey, Thomas. The Opium Eater and Other Writings London: Cassell, 1908.

Gaull, Marylin. English Romanticism. New York: Norton, 1988.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Robinson and Macquarrie, trans. Harper, 1962.

McGann, Jerome. The Romantic Ideology. University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Southcott, Joanna. The Strange Effects of Faith. Third Edition. London: J. Middleton, 1801.

---. The Third Book of Wonders. London: W. Marchant, 1814.

---. Prophecies Announcing the Birth of the Prince of Peace. London: W. Marchant, 1814.