The 1790s saw a process whereby, as Gothic fiction moved towards the political, politics moved towards a Gothic aesthetic. Godwin's Caleb Williams represents the terrorist genre at the peak of its potential as a means of conscious intervention in the political events of the day. Yet, just like any Minerva Press bestseller, the work was duly adapted as an anodyne stage play; and his next novel of ideas, St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799), with an even more pronounced element of the marvellous, elicited not a court order but a parody, St Godwin, which overlooked the radical doctrines to focus entirely on the tangles of Godwin's private life and the idiosyncrasies of his prose style. Meanwhile the French Revolution was being written, and consumed by a paranoid British public, like a gripping romance translated from the German. A few years later and the conspiracy narrative, once conceived of as the substance of history, is being classified simply as a sophistication of a basic Gothic fiction type, the ‘explained supernatural’.

It was in the late 1790s that Coleridge and Wordsworth conceived their plan for Lyrical Ballads, a plan which Coleridge would later explain in terms particularly interesting for the present investigation. The collection was to consist of two sorts of poem: