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William Gilbert - Further Information

 

 

The Current State of Research

Interest in William Gilbert has been largely confined to scholars of English literature specialising in the Romantic era. Specialisation creates problems of linkage. Until Gilbert's name is better known, a researcher within a different discipline will not recognise the name and connect the two fields of activity. For example Patrick Curry's excellent historical survey Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989) mentions a William Gilbert offering tuition in the 'production of magico-astrological talismans' in 1790's London, but makes no link with the William Gilbert known to the world of literary scholarship. Prior to Marsha Keith Schuchard's ground-breaking 1999 paper presented here, the literary world was totally unaware of Gilbert's previous part in the Millenarian London of the early 1790's and of his essays in The Conjuror's Magazine. Too much discovery consists in finding out what someone in an unconnected field already knew; the purpose behind this website is to enable researchers in different areas to realise such points of connection. Any omissions will gladly be added to the list.

 

                                                       Paul Cheshire,  February 2007     

 

 

Brief Bibliography of Works on Gilbert

 

Modern Studies

Cheshire, Paul, 'William Gilbert's Date of Birth' (www.williamgilbert.com)
A dispute with a rival  astrologer in the Conjuror's Magazine is used to establish Gilbert's date of birth available here.

---------- 'The Hermetic Geography of William Gilbert', Romanticism 9.1 (2003) pp 82-93.
Primarily a study of the metaphysical theory of continents underlying The Hurricane, noting parallels with a 17th century hermetic tract by Michael Maier, and Swedenborg's writings, but waking up halfway through to how Gilbert's view of Africa could be linked to his background as son of an Antigua slave plantation owner. (See The Hermetic Geography of William Gilbert - Edinburgh University Press)

 

Kaufman, Paul, '‘“The Hurricane” and The Romantic Poets’ English Miscellany 21, (1970), pp. 99-115.
Much valuable bibliography and good on Gilbert's influence on the romantic poets, but the article loses focus when it drifts off into a history of theosophy that has little to do with Gilbert or his period.

 

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography - Richard Garnett, 'Gilbert, William (b. in or after 1760, d. c.1825)' rev. S.C. Bushell (Oxford University Press, 2004) [accessed 8 Nov 2004: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10706 ] .
The information for this article is derived from Gilbert's Bristol contacts, Cottle and Southey, and replicates their misunderstandings, conjectures and errors. I have been unable to trace the unpublished Robert Southey 1824 letter to W. Sidney Walker cited by Garnett as a source of biographical information, but I suspect that the biographical notes in the 1824 Retrospective Review  (see below) are based on it, or on another Southey letter written at the same time.

 

Schuchard, Marsha Keith, 'Rediscovering William "Hurricane" Gilbert: A lost voice of revolution and madness in the worlds of Blake and the Romantics'.
A 1999 conference paper, available here. A groundbreaking study of Gilbert's previously unrecognised links with 1790's millenarians, Freemasons, and Swedenborgians, and possibly William Blake.  Although subsequent discoveries have made this article biographically unreliable in places, and some links are not sufficiently substantiated, Schuchard's extensive specialist research ensures that her article provides a vital introduction to the occult underworld that Gilbert inhabited.

 

Nineteenth Century Study

'William Gilbert's Hurricane', Retrospective Review 10 (1824), (London: Charles Baldwyn) pp.160-172.
This is the only known literary study of Gilbert and his work from the nineteenth century. Its anonymous author claims to have been provided with information by someone close to the poet. 'Of its author, William Gilbert, the little we have collected is chiefly from the information obligingly furnished to us by a distinguished literary character, an early friend of the author's, and by whose occasional notice of the work before us, concurring with a similar testimony from another quarter, our attention was directed to The Hurricane.' Much of this information appears in the DNB article, and with the coincidence of the year, it is highly probable that Southey is the source. Long extracts from Gilbert's poem are given; the analysis is brief but sympathetic.