1. This reaction was partly in response to some radical publishers printing both pornographic materials and political tracts. See Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1988), especially 204–31. Much good work has been done on the volatile 1790s;
2. see for example Jon Mee’s Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
3. For an excellent history of the magazines and their relation to the Lyrical Ballads, see Robert D. Mayo, “The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads,” PMLA 69 (June 1954): 486–522. He notes, that Wordsworth and Coleridge had initially planned to jointly submit the “Ancient Mariner” to this same Monthly Magazine.
4. See Michael Gamer’s Romanticism and the Gothic (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000) for an incisive treatment of the interrelations between the latter two modes.
5. For an illuminating comparative treatment of the two poets, see Jerome McGann’s Byron and Wordsworth (Nottingham, UK: University of Nottingham, 2001). In a different gesture of critical refraining, Clifford Siskin’s new work initiates a revolutionary new understanding of Wordsworth’s project as an Enlightenment “system” that helps to shape what we now see as Romanticism;