DJ: That's an aspect of Romanticism which we shouldn't ignore — that it was in many ways a violent reaction against the French Revolution and the egalitarian ideals that that stood for, just as it was also a reaction against the industrial revolution and the utilitarianism that emerged from that. 

TB: I don't think it's actually so much a reaction against the French Revolution because the dates and the timings are all wrong. I think it's a reaction against the Enlightenment which is then intensified by a reaction against the French Revolution. I think Jonathan and I agree in this respect at least that we see it coming from the middle decades of the 18th century, before the French Revolution was even a cloud as big as a man's hand. Rousseau, who is so important in all this, has this kind of Pauline moment in 1749 when he's on his way out to Vincennes. As he writes in the Confessions and elsewhere, the scales suddenly fell from his eyes and he realised that what his enlightened philosophe colleagues thought, that reason was leading to the emancipation of humankind, was doing the reverse: it was leading to a new kind of tyranny. Garlands of flowers were being heaped on chains. 

JB: One figure that I really wanted to see you fitting into the pattern, who you didn't talk about at all, was the Marquis de Sade. In terms of that idea of a radical critique of the Enlightenment, and of the sense that modern notions of sexual freedom can be traced back to Romanticism, de Sade is an interesting, almost deeply influential figure. 

TB: Well, mea culpa, I certainly should have done. Should it ever go into another edition I will make sure there is a paragraph or two, complete with some spicy quotes from the divine Marquis. I wonder how influential he was though, actually. I think he becomes very influential once his works were freely available in the 20th century and, so I understand, very influential on psychologists and psychiatrists. But do you think he was actually influential on the Romantics? I know more about the German Romantics than the English Romantics, but I can't actually think that de Sade is often referred to, not least because it was so difficult to get hold of the most outspoken and extreme books — Philosophy in the Boudoir or Juliette. 

JB: The influence was more of an idea of what he had written and what he had done and what he had stood for than actually a direct reading of the texts. Justine did circulate but his influence was more at the level of a sort of perception of what he represented and what he stood for. The key area where that influence comes through is actually in the gothic novel. A figure like Matthew Lewis, who wrote The Monk, the bestselling, most scandalous of the gothic novels, saw himself almost as an English de Sade. So in a way there is a sort of similarity to Byron in the sense that the cult of Byron and what Byron represented is actually curiously at odds with what a lot of Byron's work is like. Byron gives you the great image of the Romantic artist, the artist as rebel in exile but he's often writing in rhyming couplets in the style of Alexander Pope, and he's deeply critical of Wordsworth and English Romanticism.

DJ: But isn't there another strand in Romanticism, which is just the opposite? A strand that says inventing morality for ourselves is deeply wrong. You mention Wordsworth, but there is a deeply religious strain as well, Chateaubriand, Novalis, people who are basically saying, let's go back to the Middle Ages when at least they knew what was wrong and what was right. So how does that work? Romanticism seems to embrace both extremes, the Christian and the satanic.