Home and Nation in British Literature from the English to the French Revolutions [1 ed.] 1107064406, 9781107064409

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HOME AND NATION IN BRITISH LITERATURE FROM THE ENGLISH TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONS

In a world of conflicting nationalist claims, mass displacements, and asylum-seeking, a great many people are looking for ‘home’ or struggling to establish the ‘nation’. These were also important preoccupations between the English and the French revolutions: a period when Britain was first at war within itself, then achieved a confident if precarious equilibrium, and finally seemed to have come once more to the edge of overthrow. In the century and a half between revolution experienced and revolution observed, the impulse to identify or implicitly appropriate home and nation was elemental to British literature. This wide-ranging study by international scholars provides an innovative and thorough account of writings that vigorously contested notions and images of the nation and of private domestic space within it, tracing the larger patterns of debate, while at the same time exploring how particular writers situated themselves within it and gave it shape. A. D. Cousins is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a member of the Order of Australia. He has published thirteen books in America and England, including monographs on Thomas More, Shakespeare’s non-dramatic verse, and religious verse of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is on the Editorial Board of Moreana, the international journal of More and Erasmus studies, and of JLLC (formerly AUMLA). Geoffrey Payne is a lecturer in the Department of English at Macquarie University in Australia. He served as treasurer for the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association from 2008 to 2013 and was managing editor of their journal (AUMLA) between 2008 and 2011. His first book, Dark Imaginings: Ideology and Darkness in the Poetry of Lord Byron, was published in 2008.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

HOME AND NATION IN BRITISH LITERATURE FROM THE ENGLISH TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONS edited by A.D. COUSINS AND GEOFFREY PAYNE

Published online by Cambridge University Press

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107064409 © Cambridge University Press 2015 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2015 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Cousins, A. D., 1950– editor. | Payne, Geoff, 1971– editor. Home and nation in British literature from the English to the French revolutions / edited by A. D. Cousins, Geoffrey Payne. New York : Cambridge University Press, 2015. LCCN 2015021261 | ISBN 9781107064409 (hardback) LCSH: British literature – 17th century – History and criticism. | British literature – 18th century – History and criticism. | Home in literature. | Nationalism in literature. | Great Britain – In literature. | Identity (Psychology) in literature. | National characteristics, British, in literature. | Nationalism and literature – Great Britain – History. LCC PR438.H63 H66 2015 | DDC 820.9/005–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015021261 isbn 978-1-107-06440-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

HOME AND NATION IN BRITISH LITERATURE FROM THE ENGLISH TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONS

In a world of conflicting nationalist claims, mass displacements, and asylum-seeking, a great many people are looking for ‘home’ or struggling to establish the ‘nation’. These were also important preoccupations between the English and the French revolutions: a period when Britain was first at war within itself, then achieved a confident if precarious equilibrium, and finally seemed to have come once more to the edge of overthrow. In the century and a half between revolution experienced and revolution observed, the impulse to identify or implicitly appropriate home and nation was elemental to British literature. This wide-ranging study by international scholars provides an innovative and thorough account of writings that vigorously contested notions and images of the nation and of private domestic space within it, tracing the larger patterns of debate, while at the same time exploring how particular writers situated themselves within it and gave it shape. A. D. Cousins is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a member of the Order of Australia. He has published thirteen books in America and England, including monographs on Thomas More, Shakespeare’s non-dramatic verse, and religious verse of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is on the Editorial Board of Moreana, the international journal of More and Erasmus studies, and of JLLC (formerly AUMLA). Geoffrey Payne is a lecturer in the Department of English at Macquarie University in Australia. He served as treasurer for the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association from 2008 to 2013 and was managing editor of their journal (AUMLA) between 2008 and 2011. His first book, Dark Imaginings: Ideology and Darkness in the Poetry of Lord Byron, was published in 2008.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

HOME AND NATION IN BRITISH LITERATURE FROM THE ENGLISH TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONS edited by A.D. COUSINS AND GEOFFREY PAYNE

Published online by Cambridge University Press

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107064409 © Cambridge University Press 2015 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2015 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Cousins, A. D., 1950– editor. | Payne, Geoff, 1971– editor. Home and nation in British literature from the English to the French revolutions / edited by A. D. Cousins, Geoffrey Payne. New York : Cambridge University Press, 2015. LCCN 2015021261 | ISBN 9781107064409 (hardback) LCSH: British literature – 17th century – History and criticism. | British literature – 18th century – History and criticism. | Home in literature. | Nationalism in literature. | Great Britain – In literature. | Identity (Psychology) in literature. | National characteristics, British, in literature. | Nationalism and literature – Great Britain – History. LCC PR438.H63 H66 2015 | DDC 820.9/005–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015021261 isbn 978-1-107-06440-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

HOME AND NATION IN BRITISH LITERATURE FROM THE ENGLISH TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONS

In a world of conflicting nationalist claims, mass displacements, and asylum-seeking, a great many people are looking for ‘home’ or struggling to establish the ‘nation’. These were also important preoccupations between the English and the French revolutions: a period when Britain was first at war within itself, then achieved a confident if precarious equilibrium, and finally seemed to have come once more to the edge of overthrow. In the century and a half between revolution experienced and revolution observed, the impulse to identify or implicitly appropriate home and nation was elemental to British literature. This wide-ranging study by international scholars provides an innovative and thorough account of writings that vigorously contested notions and images of the nation and of private domestic space within it, tracing the larger patterns of debate, while at the same time exploring how particular writers situated themselves within it and gave it shape. A. D. Cousins is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a member of the Order of Australia. He has published thirteen books in America and England, including monographs on Thomas More, Shakespeare’s non-dramatic verse, and religious verse of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is on the Editorial Board of Moreana, the international journal of More and Erasmus studies, and of JLLC (formerly AUMLA). Geoffrey Payne is a lecturer in the Department of English at Macquarie University in Australia. He served as treasurer for the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association from 2008 to 2013 and was managing editor of their journal (AUMLA) between 2008 and 2011. His first book, Dark Imaginings: Ideology and Darkness in the Poetry of Lord Byron, was published in 2008.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

HOME AND NATION IN BRITISH LITERATURE FROM THE ENGLISH TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONS edited by A.D. COUSINS AND GEOFFREY PAYNE

Published online by Cambridge University Press

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107064409 © Cambridge University Press 2015 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2015 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Cousins, A. D., 1950– editor. | Payne, Geoff, 1971– editor. Home and nation in British literature from the English to the French revolutions / edited by A. D. Cousins, Geoffrey Payne. New York : Cambridge University Press, 2015. LCCN 2015021261 | ISBN 9781107064409 (hardback) LCSH: British literature – 17th century – History and criticism. | British literature – 18th century – History and criticism. | Home in literature. | Nationalism in literature. | Great Britain – In literature. | Identity (Psychology) in literature. | National characteristics, British, in literature. | Nationalism and literature – Great Britain – History. LCC PR438.H63 H66 2015 | DDC 820.9/005–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015021261 isbn 978-1-107-06440-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

Notes on the contributors Acknowledgements

page vii xi

1. Introduction

1

A. D. Cousins and Geoffrey Payne

part i the english revolution and the interregnum

17

2. Nation, nature, and poetics: transitions and claspes in Denham’s ‘Coopers Hill’ and Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies 19 L. E. Semler

3. Home and nation in Andrew Marvell’s Bermudas

33

A. D. Cousins

4. Anne Clifford and Samuel Pepys: diaries and homes

49

Helen Wilcox

5. Home and away in the poetry of Andrew Marvell and some of his influences and contemporaries

61

Nigel Smith

part ii restoration, glorious revolution, and hanoverian succession

79

6. ‘Home to our People’: nation and kingship in late seventeenthcentury political verse

81

Abigail Williams

7. ‘Yet Israel still serves’: home and nation in Milton’s Samson Agonistes William Walker v

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Contents

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8. ‘A thing remote’: Defoe and the home in the metropolis and New World

112

Geoffrey Payne

9. Pope’s homes: London, Windsor Forest, and Twickenham

127

Pat Rogers

10. Samuel Johnson and London

141

Evan Gottlieb

11. Contesting ‘home’ in eighteenth-century women’s verse

154

Catherine Ingrassia

12. Home, homeland, and the Gothic

169

David Punter

part iii revolution in france, reaction in britain

185

13. Contesting the homeland: Burke and Wollstonecraft

187

Daniel I. O’Neill

14. Homelands: Blake, Albion, and the French Revolution

202

David Fallon

15. Jane Austen and the modern home

219

Gary Kelly

16. ‘All things have a home but one’: exile and aspiration, pastoral and political in Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy and Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘To Autumn’ 234 Geoffrey Payne

17. Sir Walter Scott: home, nation, and the denial of revolution

250

Dani Napton

Guide to further reading Index

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266 283

Notes on the contributors

a. d. cousins has published thirteen books in America and England, including monographs on Thomas More, Shakespeare’s non-dramatic verse, and religious verse of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is on the Editorial Board of Moreana, the international journal of More and Erasmus studies, and of JLLC (formerly AUMLA). He has been a visiting adjunct professor at the Renaissance Studies Center at the University of Massachusetts, a visiting scholar at Princeton and at Penn State, and a library fellow at the Library of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was also an honorary fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities. He holds doctorates in both English Literature and Political Theory and is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a member of the Order of Australia. david fallon is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Society at the University of Sunderland. He has published several articles that analyse the political nature of Blake’s work, including ‘“She cuts his heart out at his side”: Blake, Christianity, and Political Virtue’ in Blake and Conflict (2008, eds. Sarah Haggarty and Jon Mee); ‘“By a False Wife Brought to the Gates of Death”: Blake, Politics and Transgendered Performances’ in Queer Blake (2010, eds. Helen Bruder and Tristanne Connolly) and ‘Blake, Gender and Culture’ in The Body, Gender and Culture (2012, eds. Helen Bruder and Tristanne Connolly). evan gottlieb is an associate professor of English at Oregon State University. His book, Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832 (2007), treats themes of nationhood in British literature. With Juliet Shields he is co-editor of the collection of essays Local, National, Global: Representing Place in British Literature and Culture, 1660–1830 (2013).

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Notes on the contributors

catherine ingrassia is a professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is author of Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge, 1998; rpt. 2005) and editor of Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Culture (2005, with Paula R. Backscheider and Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century (2009, with Paula R. Backscheider), the latter won the accolade of Johns Hopkins University Press Director’s Circle Book in 2009. She is editor of the Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 (forthcoming, 2015). gary kelly is a professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. His publications include English Fiction of the Romantic Period (1989), Revolutionary Feminism (1991), and Women, Writing, and Revolution (Clarendon, 1993). He was the general editor of Bluestocking Feminism (6 vols., 2001) and was an associate editor of the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004–10, now online). He also serves as the general editor of The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture (9 vols., in progress, 2 in press). dani napton is an honorary associate of the Department of English at Macquarie University. She is co-author of The French Revolution and the British Novel in the Romantic Period (2012, with A.D. Cousins and Stephanie Russo). She has published on topics across early modern and nineteenth-century literatures, including, with Stephanie Russo, ‘Place in Charlotte Smith’s The Banished Man and Sir Walter Scott’s Woodstock’, SEL: Studies in English Literature 52.4 (2012). daniel i. o’neill is an associate professor of political science at the University of Florida. He is the author of The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate: Savagery, Civilization, and Democracy (2007) and co-editor of Illusion of Consent: Engaging with Carole Pateman (2008, with Mary Lyndon Shanley and Iris Marion Young). geoffrey payne is a lecturer in English at Macquarie University in Sydney. His publications include Dark Imaginings: Ideology and Darkness in the Poetry of Lord Byron (2008) and ‘Distemper, Scourge, Invader: Discourse and Plague in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year’, English Studies 95.6 (2014). david punter is a professor of English at the University of Bristol. The Literature of Terror (1980; 2nd ed. 1996) was seminal in establishing the

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Notes on the contributors

ix

prominent position of gothic literature in the modern academy. His other publications include Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law (1998); Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography (1999, ed. with Glennis Byron); A Companion to the Gothic (ed., 1999); and Metaphor (2007). pat rogers is Distinguished University Professor at the University of South Florida, where he holds the DeBartolo Chair of Liberal Arts. Over a long and distinguished career, he has published widely on the subject of eighteenth-century British literature from Grub St: Studies in a Subculture (1972) and Literature and Popular Culture in EighteenthCentury England (1985) to Essays on Pope (Cambridge, 1993, rpt 2006), Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts (2005), and Alexander Pope: A Political Biography (2010). He is also editor of the Oxford World’s Classics, The Major Works of Alexander Pope (1993, 2008), and The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope (2007). His edited book Jonathan Swift in Context is in production with Cambridge University Press. l. e. semler is Professor of Early Modern Literature in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. His publications include Eliza’s Babes; Or The Virgin’s Offering (1652): A Critical Edition (2001); Word and Self Estranged in English Texts 1550–1660 (2010, ed. with Philippa Kelly) and Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe: Learning vs. the System (2013). He is also author of two chapters on Margaret Cavendish: ‘Margaret Cavendish’s Early Engagement with Descartes and Hobbes: Philosophical Revisitation and Poetic Selection’, Intellectual History Review 22.3 (2012) and ‘The Magnetic Attraction of Margaret Cavendish and Walter Charleton’ (in Early Modern Women Testing Ideas, ed. Paul Salzman, 2011). nigel smith is a professor of English and co-director of the Centre for the Study of Books and Media at Princeton University. He has published widely on the social role of literature in the seventeenth century with a particular focus on its connections with politics and religion. His works include Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (1994), Radicalism in British literary culture, 1650–1830: From Revolution to Revolution (Cambridge, 2002, ed. with Timothy Morton), The Poems of Andrew Marvell (ed., 2006), and Is Milton Better than Shakespeare? (2008). He has also edited The Oxford Handbook of Milton Studies (2009, with Nicholas McDowell) and in 2010 published a biography of Marvell, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (2010).

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Notes on the contributors

william walker is a senior lecturer in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. He is author of ‘Paradise Lost’ and Republican Tradition from Aristotle to Machiavelli, vol. 6, Cursor Mundi, UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (2009) and Locke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy (Cambridge, 1994, rpt. 2006). helen wilcox is a professor of English at the Bangor University of Wales, where she acts as director of the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She is author or editor of more than 100 books, book chapters, and articles, including Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century English Women (1989; rpt. 1994), Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700 (Cambridge, 1996), The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge, 2007), and 1611: Authority, Gender and the Word in Early Modern England (2011). She is also co-editor of English, the journal of the English Association. abigail williams is a professor of English Literature and Lord White Tutorial Fellow at St Peter’s College, University of Oxford. She is author of Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture: 1680–1714 (2005) and co-editor of ‘Cultures of Whiggism’: New Essays on English Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century (2005, with David Womersley and Paddy Bullard). She is also editor of Jonathan Swift, ‘The Journal to Stella’: Letters to Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley, 1710– 1713 (Cambridge, 2013).

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Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank all of the contributors for their enthusiasm for the project, Linda Bree at Cambridge University Press for her astute and patient guidance of the project to final publication, and Roberta Kwan for her thoughtful, scholarly sub-editing of our manuscript. An earlier version of the chapter by A. D. Cousins has appeared previously in Parergon 30 (2012): 203–19. The chapter by Helen Wilcox has also appeared previously in Home Cultures 6.2. (2009): 149–62. A version of the David Punter’s chapter has appeared in The Gothic of the Everyday: Living Gothic, edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Maria Beville (Palgrave, 2014).

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chapter 1

Introduction A. D. Cousins and Geoffrey Payne

In a world of conflicting nationalist claims, mass displacements and asylum-seeking, a great many people are looking for ‘home’ or struggling to establish the ‘nation’. Often the two quests are closely connected. It is understandable that, especially now, students of British literature and culture should be sensitive to those preoccupations as they manifested themselves between the English and the French revolutions: a period when Britain fought an internecine war – with its devastating, traumatizing effects on how Britons thought of ‘nation’ and ‘home’ – achieved a confident if precarious equilibrium, then seemed to have come once more to the edge of overthrow. Yet no single book offers a developed overview as well as analysis of the debates about what constituted home and nation during this widely studied time. Nor is there a book that examines how those contested terms were seen or made to interact with each other. It is the lack of both those things that our book is intended to meet. Between revolution experienced and revolution observed, attempting to identify or implicitly appropriate home and nation was a concern elemental to British literature. What we hope to offer is an innovative and thorough account of the writings that, throughout this period, debated notions and images of the nation and of one’s private domestic space within it. No single account of this powerful and pervasive dispute can be all-embracing, and it is not our intent to essay complete coverage of the topic. Rather, we aim to trace the larger patterns of disagreement, at the same time exploring how particular writers situated themselves within and gave shape to the debates in which they participated. Our aim is to shed new light on this vigorous contest and, in doing so, to suggest new ways of viewing the writers who took part in it. By the time of the early Stuarts, the term ‘state’ had of course come to signify far more about England than merely the mechanisms of government operating in the immediate service of the king, but it by no means yet indicated a ‘coordinated and territorially bounded network of agents 1

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a.d. cousins and geoffrey payne

exercising political power’ and functioning largely regardless of monarchic rule.1 The story of the state in Europe between 1648 and 1789 may be, as Martin Van Creveld has argued, that ‘the person of the ruler and his “state” were separated from each other until the first became almost entirely unimportant in comparison with the second’.2 The British experience during those years interestingly diverges from that trajectory, especially as regards the concept of separation. True, even amidst the Revolution a future without the monarchy was envisioned by few of the English or other Britons. After the regicide, and throughout the brief life of the Republic, it was of course quite imaginable by some; but, again, during the Protectorate it must have been harder to imagine the state without a single ruler of one kind or another (and, upon the Restoration, virtually impossible). Nevertheless, as political changes succeeded each other, the altering ‘state’ was, in the case of England at least, then also decidedly a nation – insofar as it was geographically defined, sovereign, and variously imagined into possession of its own identity.3 From the English Revolution to the close of the Interregnum, those multifarious concepts of what constituted the nation both helped stimulate and were impacted by conflict; the nation’s sovereignty was destabilized; so, too, were its geographical boundaries. The Stuart dream of a composite British empire, of a godly and united nation that might form a bulwark against papal imperialism, had not so much collapsed as been forcibly appropriated and metamorphosed by those who had come to be the Stuarts’ opponents.4 New ways of envisioning state formation and national identity therefore became necessary, which often – though not invariably – meant that old ways were put to new ends, that precedents and orthodoxies were redeployed. For example, the conquest trope convenient to King James’s political theorizing would be easily redirected against monarchic rule by Marchamont Nedham, in his The Case of the Commonwealth of England, Stated, so as to justify the existence of the Republic.5 Yet at this time of uncharted experiment, iteration of old ways would not necessarily mean their mere duplication or re-allocation. Moreover Andrew Marvell was acutely aware that, after the regicide in 1649, what Machiavelli called ‘new measures’ had been implemented and thereby a new age had been inaugurated. Marvell’s speaker in An Horatian Ode declares that Oliver Cromwell has ‘ruin[ed] the great work of time, / And cast the kingdoms old / Into another mould’.6 How, then, to interpret and capture a likeness of this figure at the forefront of national upheaval, and so of the phenomenon itself? How to depict the violent advent of the Republic and to anticipate its future course? Marvell’s tactic in An Horatian Ode was in

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Introduction

3

part to portray Cromwell as the ambiguous convergence of Lucan’s Caesar and Horace’s Octavian. A revolutionary and still-transforming England could thus be aligned with different moments in Roman history and therefore divergent possibilities. On the one hand, it could be associated with the Civil War that Lucan linked to Caesar’s overreaching and callous ambition – and so with continuing or deepening civil disruption. On the other, it could be associated with the post-Civil War principate and its Augustan peace – with a triumphant resolution of discord. In the absence of ‘the royal actor’ (53), and by the light of Cromwell’s ‘active star’ (12), both were foreseeable. During the Protectorate, when Marvell would picture Cromwell as worthy of a crown but more than a king, he and other writers suggested that a godly principate had been established and an imperial British identity restored or established anew. ‘[T]o be Cromwell was a greater thing, / Than ought below, or yet above a king’, Marvell proposed in his The First Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord Protector, going on to identify Cromwell as pater patriae and princeps, as pre-eminent in both piety and heroic virtue.7 Edmund Waller likewise painted England’s future in terms of a godly and imperial Augustanism, observing to an already Davidic Cromwell that ‘[a]s the vexed world, to find repose, at last / Itself into Augustus’ arms did cast; / So England now does, with like toil oppressed, / Her weary head upon your bosom rest’.8 The death of Cromwell, according to John Dryden, was the loss to Britain of a figure with Roman imperial status and international achievements.9 Yet counter-writings of the nation during the Revolution and Interregnum were no less assertive. Cromwell’s ‘cast[ing] the kingdoms old / Into another mould’ was, for Edward Hyde as for other royalists, God’s providential punishment of Britain rather than his raising the nation into an empire of his Chosen.10 Independents such as John Milton saw Cromwell as having marred a divinely offered opportunity to establish a truly free and truly sanctified nation. The Revolution, moreover, in fracturing the nation had not merely transformed its self-rule and fragmented its self-identity. In doing so the Revolution had made unstable the very notion of home. Richard Lovelace suggested in his The Grasshopper that for royalists the concept of home was inseparable from the existence of the monarchic state. The king had perished, his son was embattled, but the spirit of the monarchy could nonetheless survive and flourish in Britain within royalist households. Arrogating the significance of the sacred flame in Rome’s Temple of Vesta, Lovelace wrote to Charles Cotton: ‘Our sacred hearths shall burn

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a.d. cousins and geoffrey payne

eternally / As vestal Flames’.11 A now-sacred flame defines the royalist household, implying a microcosmic survival of the monarchy in Britain despite the king’s defeat and death. This sense of domestic space as both precious and surrounded by threats is shared in some respects by Marvell. Displacement and dispossession – homelessness, in fact – recur throughout his verse. For example, the speaker of his The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn is a young girl with apparently no familial or domestic environment; and civil-war ‘troopers’ have slaughtered the pet that seems to have been her sole companion. But the impact of the Revolution on the domestic sphere is registered more directly and intricately in Marvell’s Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax. There, Marvell’s persona gestures towards the political turmoil surrounding the Fairfax estate and challenging the judgment of its owner. (In this poem, by way of contrast with Lovelace’s, political difficulties are generated by allies rather than by enemies.) He emphasizes from the start however that Fairfax, his family, and his estate manifest an unchallengeable certainty amidst all impinging uncertainties, for they embody a protestant virtue that suggests their domestic space and their futures to be under the sure protection of Providence. Marvell’s persona does not deny the complexities pressing upon the little world of the Fairfaxes; he acknowledges the ironic contradictions necessarily confronting them – and Fairfax himself in particular. Yet his perspective is both ludic and salvific, implying that the godly household of the Fairfaxes cannot share in the ruin of the greater British world and will be instrumental in that world’s restoration.12 A mythos of national restoration runs variously through Stuart, Revolutionary, and Interregnum writings of the nation, and its use to describe the return of Charles II is therefore iterative rather than novel. Yet his return to the throne was portrayed by way of other myths as well. For example the biblical ‘Prince of Peace’ narrative, which had been associated with his grandfather and his father, was revived.13 More important, the Augustan analogy was re-directed from Cromwell to Charles. As Dryden famously wrote: ‘Oh Happy Age! Oh times like those alone / By Fate reserv’d for Great Augustus Throne! / When the joint growth of Armes and Arts foreshew / The World a Monarch, and that Monarch You’.14 Not everyone would agree with that view of the king and the nation. Marvell gracefully pictured Charles as another Sun King, but just after having depicted him as inclined to violate his own country.15 Rochester’s imaging of the king and his impact on Britain could be even less flattering.16 A powerful and problematic discourse of the nation had nevertheless been retained and would be amplified.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107587571.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Introduction

5

Indeed, questions about a king’s impact upon the nation remained a central problem for writers seeking to validate the new political order that followed from the political revolution of 1688. For supporters of William’s takeover, the discourse of national restoration remained a convenient tool, with supporters such as Thomas Shadwell (the Laureate appointed by William’s ministry) positioning the new monarch as saviour of the liberties and traditions that had been eroded under the government of the tyrannically bent Stuarts.17 Shadwell’s pair of poems celebrating the new regime of William and Mary, A Congratulatory Poem on His Highness (1689) and A Congratulatory Poem to the Most Illustrious Queen Mary (1689) are exemplary of the flood of panegyric verse that was written during the years of William and Mary’s reign and indicate ways in which narratives of national identity were sustained. The poem addressed to William celebrates his renewal of the traditional forms that sustained the relationship between a constitutional monarch and his subjects. Remembering (or inventing) a past when freedom served as the keystone of England’s political order, William’s reign is connected to an organically developed social order and is sanctioned by its natural ability to guarantee political freedoms.18 Such mechanisms are mobilized in support of the poem’s inversion of the invasion narrative that might be attached to William’s actions: ‘H’ Invaded us with Force to make us Free / And in another’s realm could meet no Enemy’ (133–4). The poem to Mary continues the process of inversion, counterbalancing William’s invasion with a discourse of homecoming that bolsters the legitimacy of the new regime. That poem’s opening depicts a nation under the Stuarts ‘bereft’ (2) of light and struggling under the oppression of tyrannical forces, which is ‘reviv’d’ (7) by the restorative power conferred by the returning Queen.19 Mary’s particular function, however, is to renew the nation’s distressed fortunes by her symbolic capture of William, turning William’s invasion of England into the nation’s conquest over William and, by weight of that conquest, gaining power over benighted Europe: ‘Our ador’d Princess to Batavians lent, / Is home to us with mighty interest sent / For we, with Her, have won the Great Nassau / Whose sword shall keep the Papal World in awe’ (17–20). The nature of Mary’s potency at home in England could also be used to assuage concerns about William’s foreign-policy aspirations, with Shadwell’s celebratory New Year poem of 1692, Votum Perenne, celebrating both ‘A Prince who bravely can abroad orecome, / While his Fair Queen can wisely Reign at Home’.20 In each of these representations we see the ascendance of discourses that frame England as a national home that serves to anchor and sustain a monarch whose attentions may well be directed to foreign realms, a crucial issue for William’s supporters, who found themselves

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defending a Dutch ruler with obvious vested interests in European rather than English affairs.21 Such concerns would remain prevalent for decades to come, especially as the Act of Settlement (1701) conferred the succession to the English throne upon the heirs of the Electress Sophia of Hannover. The idea of Augustus also remained a useful analogy for writers responding to the political climate following 1688, though later writers found a more difficult task in sustaining the positive emphasis that had predominated under the Protectorate and the Restoration court. While some supporters of William did retain the panegyric impulse in connecting William and Augustus – Prior, for instance, in Carmen Seculare, for the Year MDCC – for writers marginalized under the new political order, the analogy could be used for satirical purposes.22 Utilizing the facet of the Augustan myth that binds his rule to the notion of the Golden Age – supplying a Classical counterpart to the biblical home of Eden – writers such as Pope deployed the Augustan analogy to signify the Rome’s imperial decadence.23 The satirical Epistle to Augustus (1737), for instance, now addressed to the Hannoverian George II, refuses the ‘Panegyric strains’ (405) of earlier writers, and mobilizes a critique of the nation’s predilection for political change by eulogizing a lost model of Englishness that was founded upon a bedrock of domestic restraint and sobriety: Time was, a sober Englishman would knock His servants up, and rise by five o’clock; Instruct his family in ev’ry rule, And send his wife to church, his son to school. To worship like his fathers was his care; To teach their frugal virtues to his heir; To prove that Luxury could never hold, And place on good security his gold.

(161–8)

Under the new rule of the new Augustus, however, social solidity is undermined through the malign influence of a luxurious culture, and the collapse of boundaries separating different social structures is signified as an aesthetic disease that infects the body politic and undermines its ability to regulate order: ‘Now times are changed, and one poetic itch / Has seized the Court and City, Poor and Rich’ (169–70). The coup de grâce for the old order is registered at a domestic level, as a proper form of divine worship is degraded to popular balladry: ‘And all our grace at table is a song’ (174). Rather than securing and upholding pious virtue, the courtly home corrupts the remainder of English society via its connections to ordinary homes, and its diseases become the diseases of a disordered and decadent society.

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7

The diseased nature of common domestic life would increasingly form a subject of interest for writers in the new century. Defoe, for instance, would explore the trope of disease in a literal sense in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722).24 Pope, too, with grander poetic aspirations, could signal the interests that would permeate his writing throughout his lifetime in his early poem The Rape of the Lock (1714), by giving attention to the ‘low’ subject matter that grants the poem its mock-epic status. In the corrupt world that is portrayed, all of the poem’s central events – the episode in Belinda’s dressing room, the party at Hampton Court, and even the Battle of the Lock itself – are granted an air of national significance as political emphasis moves away from a court-centred vision into the broader public sphere that was the offspring of the so-called ‘Republic of Letters’ that is one of the monikers applied to the age. The comparison reaches its epitome in the passage that opens the poem’s third canto, where the separation between public and domestic life are collapsed in the ambiguously public/ domestic space of Hampton Court, as even ‘great ANNA! Whom three realms obey / Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea’.25 Although the tone is different, Pope’s poem explores the same phenomenon that Addison named as inspiration for his project in The Spectator, where his ideal of bringing philosophy to ‘dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffee-houses’ is to be advanced by making his paper ‘a part of the tea equipage’.26 In their different ways, both Addison and Pope articulate responses to an opening up and levelling of the spheres of aesthetic influence and interest, not only among classes but also along gendered lines.27 A further challenge presented to writers during the reign of Anne grew from a reconfiguration of the idea of statehood that emerged in debates about the meaning of the Act of Union in 1707 and the ensuing attention to the relationships between the centres and margins of British life. Following the political unification of Britain, the millions of inhabitants of England and Scotland no longer officially dwelt in the nations of the childhood, a process repeated with the incorporation of Ireland under the Act of 1800. As a result, the nostalgia that is endemic to the process of developing a connection with the homeland of one’s birth became a matter that needed careful management by those writers who wished to sell the new British entity as a unifying discourse.28 Throughout the eighteenth century, tensions around the differences of national character between England and her partners in the Union would drive aesthetic experimentation and elicit further instabilities an conceptualizing the relation between home and state.29 Controversy over the potential return of the Stuart

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monarchy, even beyond the calamitous failure of the 1745 rebellion, meant that the nation continued to be troubled by several competing models that might be employed to determine crucial aspects of national identity. As late as 1814, Walter Scott’s Waverley could gain currency by debating aspects of the national character by presenting an array of competing versions of domestic life, both at home – via a juxtaposition of the hero’s formative experiences at Waverley-Honour and Brerewood Lodge – and ‘abroad’ in the Scottish manor-house of Tully Veolan and Fergus MacIvor’s Highland retreat of Glannaquoich. Scott’s novel built upon the practices he observed in Edgeworth’s pioneering regional novel, Castle Rackrent (1800), where a series of problems facing the newly united Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland is explored via the narration of ‘honest Thady’, a domestic servant who ‘tells the history of the Rackrent family in his vernacular idiom, and in the full confidence that [their] affairs will be as interesting to the world as they were to himself.’30 Edgeworth’s shift to the vernacular is indicative of a broader significance arising from attention to the nation’s peripheries, as alternative linguistic models for self-representation were combined with home-grown mythological systems that might serve as alternate models to those handed down from Classical antiquity as potential tools for drawing together a cogent national identity. In turning to Scott and Edgeworth, we also may acknowledge the growing popularity of prose forms during the eighteenth century, giving rise to new or revised generic models for exploring connections between home and nation. Along with the spectacular and well-charted rise of the novel, other prose media – periodicals, journals, letters, lives, histories – gathered new audiences and opened new fields of authorship. Women, in particular, gained new power in the literary sphere, and writers such as Burney, Moore, and Reeve built upon the successes of earlier pioneers such as Cavendish, Behn, Astell, and Haywood to push domestic issues to a new prominence. Late in the seventeenth century, Mary Astell could respond to Locke’s analogy between family and state by contesting his vision of the governance of the microcosmic institution of the family by using his own arguments about state governance against him: If the Authority of the Husband, so far as it extends, is sacred and inalienable, why not of the Prince? The Domestic Sovereign is without Dispute Elected, and the Stipulations and Contract are mutual; is it not then partial in Men to the Last Degree, to contend for and practice that Arbitrary Dominion in their Families, which they abhor and exclaim against in the State?31

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9

Progress in disseminating new ideas to a broad audience and effecting social change, however, takes time, and thus we find Wollstonecraft struggling with similar issues at the end of the eighteenth century in her A Vindication of the Rights of Women, interrogating the structural position of ‘vice-regent’ wives who remain subordinate to the tyrannies of their husbands’ governing order.32 Emerging from the nexus between an interest in regional writing and the situation of figures marginalized by the prevailing hegemonic order, writings in the Gothic mode typify other late-century developments in imagining a corporate national identity. From its origins in the Gothic revival in architecture to its articulation in Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and beyond, the Gothic genre’s interest in the ambiguous signification of domestic spaces is paramount, and connects with its obsessive interrogation of myths of national significance. Homes are a central feature of Gothic novels. As symbols, they are suggestive of the complex struggle for modern subjects to find their place within a world built on antiquated social paradigms. Castles, abbeys, manors, halls are typically turned to sites of modern domestic living, and the conflicts that emerge within those spaces are significant of the struggles of modern individuals (especially those connected to the middle classes) to establish their place among the revenant relics of a quasi-feudal social order. Walpole’s seminal Castle of Otranto (1764) sets the frame with the titular ‘Castle’ serving to house a family drama that has implications of national significance because of the way individual actors are framed in relation to an archaic feudal system. Later, even writers who approach the genre in a satirical vein, such as Austen in Northanger Abbey (1819), make use of the conventions so delineated. After all, even though Catherine Morland may well be mistaken in her attempts to read the Abbey and its owner General Tilney upon a schema derived from the principles of Gothic fiction, her general impressions of them are true. General Tilney does secretly harbour a tyrannical bent of character: though not a murderer as Catherine imagines, his monstrosity is exposed via his breach of the rules of decorum for the hospitable treatment of guests when he ejects Catherine from the house when he learns of her family’s straightened finances. It is via the lens of those actions that readers must interrogate Henry Tilney’s castigation of Catherine when he learns of her beliefs about his father’s character. It is also in the terms of his expostulation that readers are invited to consider the ramifications of the actions contained within an isolated domestic space in terms of the delineation of a national character: ‘Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are

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Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing?’33 Whether Tilney’s questions are to be answered in the affirmative or negative, the implicit suggestion that sites of domestic action both reflect and determine features of the national character remains central to the message conveyed. Although it was published in 1819, Northanger Abbey was chiefly a product of the 1790s, and is reflective of the interests of that decade – especially in its responses to the French Revolution’s disruptive influence in Britain. Like many contemporaneous texts, Austen’s novel imagines the possibilities of the terrible ramifications of the spread of the Terror across the Channel, as Robert Miles suggests, making connections between ‘narratives of repression, violence, and liberation on the one hand, and the present revolutionary context on the other’.34 Austen’s youthful responses were, of course, pre-empted by earlier vociferous political debates with competing interpretations of the meaning of the Revolution for English nationalists vying for supremacy. Edmund Burke typified conservative responses to the Revolution, presenting a series of pamphlets that depicted the potential threat to the English nation. An image from Burke’s Letter to a Noble Lord speaks to his horror at the innovations implicit in the revolutionary act: The revolution harpies of France, sprung from night and hell, or from that chaotic anarchy, which generates equivocally ‘all monstrous, all prodigious things,’ cuckoo-like, adulterously lay their eggs, and brood over, and hatch them in the nest of every neighbouring state. These obscene harpies, who deck themselves, in I know not what divine attributes, but who in reality are foul and ravenous birds of prey (both mothers and daughters) flutter over our heads, and souse down upon our tables and leave nothing unrent, unrifiled, unravaged, or unpolluted with the slime of their filthy offal.35

Notable in Burke’s choice of imagery is his use of Milton’s depiction of Hell from book 2 of Paradise Lost (the reference is to 2.625), which serves to characterize the relationship between the ‘neighbouring state’ of France and the English homeland. Implicit, here, is a reprisal of the notion of England as an Edenic paradise, an ideal home that is threatened with destruction via the demonic powers unleashed by the innovative (though not unprecedented) actions of Revolutionary France. The connection between Milton and Burke may appear ironic given Milton’s support of the revolutionary regime under the Commonwealth, but the choice is

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significant of the manner by which actors on many sides of political debate could appropriate similar imagery in support of their own agendas. Both innovative and iterative, Burke’s response is indicative of concerns that lie at the heart of all the studies incorporated in this volume, as different writers at different times arrange similar methods for imagining home in their attempts to legitimate or authorize their own visions of the nation. A few words remain to be said about the design of this book. Given the historical sweep of the project – the material covered spans an era of nearly two hundred years – the sections of the book have been arranged to present broadly focused accounts of what was at stake when contemporary writers debated the homeland: what it was, and what it should be; who threatened it, and who were truly upholding it. Each section also encompasses widely ranging accounts of what was at issue when writers likewise debated the concept of home: what constituted it, or what should; whether it remained secure or was under threat from problems affecting the homeland as a whole; how domestic economy mirrored that of the homeland; where its future lay; what classical or Christian models were most relevant to it. In particular, how did the actuality of revolution – or fear of it – threaten the idea of home itself and make the domestic a microcosm of the debates over national concerns? The sections are influenced by different forms of revolution: the English parliament’s challenge to the conception of monarchy dominates the opening section, the aftershocks of 1688 provide the impetus for the second, while the French Revolution of 1789 gives impetus to the various interrogations of what it means to be at home in Britain on either side of the end of the eighteenth century. The sections offer a perspective of the chronological development of the various debates about the relationships between conceptions of nationhood and homeland, though also, we hope, they offer a means by which to trace the similar features of the debates that unfold at the various moments covered. To that end, Home and Nation also gives emphasis to six particular themes that interplay throughout the book, providing means by which to connect and compare works from different moments in the historical period covered in the study as a whole. An important starting point stems from considerations of competition over the idea of home, where alternative images of the domestic life are held up as models of national significance. Wilcox’s discussion of the life-writings of Clifford and Pepys, for instance, launches an investigation of how contrasting attitudes to daily domestic affairs recorded in their diaries are determined by the homes in which each writer lived. Such themes are picked up in obvious ways by Ingrassia’s chapter on contesting the home in women’s

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verse from the eighteenth century, but also crucially underpins Rogers’s discussion of Pope’s homes and his poems and Payne’s discussion of the function of homes in the symbolic structures of Defoe’s novels, as well as Napton’s discussions of the functions of homes in novels by Sir Walter Scott. Payne’s chapter on Defoe also connects with others that deal with the theme of the metropolis and the periphery when considering the nexus between home and nation. Gottlieb’s discussion of the multifaceted development of Johnson’s attitude to London as the central ‘home’ of British life marks one direction in which the thematic is developed, while Cousins’s chapter on Marvell’s treatment of the New World as a way of considering the domestic and the national is indicative of a different tack. Those contributions also anticipate the related interest in issues of alterity and exile that dominate Walker’s chapter on Milton’s Samson Agonistes and Rogers’s discussion of Pope, and similarly inform the formal interrogation of the pastoral mode in the poems of Shelley and Keats. Matters of form comprise a further significant thematic concern that is addressed throughout the volume, whether identifying the uses of specific modes such as Gothic or pastoral, or investigating problems in using classical models and Christian imperatives to identify or appropriate home and nation. The discussion of the Gothic, with its focus on what is alien to the familiarly domestic or national, interacts with Fallon’s discussion of Blake’s considerations of France and Albion as seen through his eyes, as well as with Scott’s account of Scotland and England in relation to the threat of revolution. All of those themes are further connected by the constant presence of discussions that balance conflicting views about how best to write or represent the nation, a thematic that draws together nearly all of the essays collected and that serves as a centring presence that imbues the investigation with a vibrant cogency.

Notes 1. The quoted formulation of ‘the state’ is Michael J. Braddick’s, in his State Formation in Early Modern England c. 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 6. See also Martin Van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 126. 2. Van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State, p. 127. 3. Those three categories of nationhood were initially deployed by Benedict Anderson, in his Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). See pp. 14–6. 4. As guides to the content of Stuart imperial dreaming, see William Camden, Britain, Or, A Chorographical Description of the Most Flourishing Kingdomes,

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5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

13

England, Scotland, and Ireland, trans. Philemon Holland (London: Bishop, 1610), and then Edmund Gibson, Camden’s Britannia, Newly Translated into English: with Large Additions and Improvements (1695; rpt. London: Times Newspapers Ltd, 1971). Camden’s representation of the Emperor Constantine implicitly foreshadows a British imperial destiny (pp. lxxv–lxxvii and lxxxvii– lxxxviii, in both editions). The Introduction to ‘Scotland’ affirms Camden’s vision of a united and expansive Britain. With these compare James I’s Basilicon Doron, his speech to Parliament on 19 March 1604, and his speech in the Star Chamber on 20 June 1616. Reference is from King James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (1994; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), respectively at pp. 31–2, 135–7, and 205–9. See further Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (1992; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 1–19, 144–5; Allan I. Macinnes, ‘The Multiple Kingdoms of Britain and Ireland: the “British Problem”’, in Barry Coward, ed., A Companion to Stuart Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 3–25, at 4–7. In addition, see Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts, eds., British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See The Case of the Commonwealth of England, Stated, ed. Philip A. Knachel (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969), pp. 14, 21, 24–7. An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland, in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith, rev. edn (Harlow: Longman, 2007), at lines 34–6. Subsequent reference is from this edition. For example, 99–110, 131–6, 225–6, 279–82, and 387–90. After the fourth passage, where Marvell implies that Cromwell is the father of his country, a comparison immediately follows between Cromwell and Noah. Fusing the Augustan with the Christian, Marvell evokes the notion of a godly principate. Indeed, he pictures Cromwell as both princeps and the angelic intelligentia of Britain (126, 401). See also A Poem upon the Death of his Late Highness the Lord Protector, 84, and 227–8 (which may suggest the Augustan clipeus and its list of virtues). A Panegyric to my Lord Protector, 169–72 in Seventeenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, ed. Robert Cummings (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). See 13–16 on Cromwell’s restoration of a composite British empire and 133–40 on Cromwell as Davidic ruler. See his Heroique Stanzas to the Glorious Memory of Cromwell, 1–4, 65–8, and 109–12 in The Works of John Dryden: Poems 1649–80, eds. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956). Subsequent reference is from this edition. Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. Dunn Macray, 6 vols. (1888; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), vol. 1, pp. 1–2. See also vol. 6, pp. 90, 97.

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11. 25–6, quoted from Cummings, Seventeenth-Century Poetry. 12. The poem thus re-writes its royalist predecessors in the country house tradition. On protestant virtue – chiefly, a Calvinist principle of moderation – as embedded in the Fairfax dynasty and estate, see 1–280. On issues of personal judgment confronting Fairfax himself, see especially 345–60; and on the providential significance of the Fairfaxes, see 721–44. 13. See, for example, Dryden’s Astraea Redux, 139–40. 14. Ibid., 320–3. 15. The Last Instructions to a Painter, respectively at 955–6 and the sardonically erotic 885–906. 16. A representative instance can be seen in A Satyr on Charles II, especially at 10– 21, in The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth (1968; rpt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). 17. Kevin Sharpe offers an extensive discussion of the literary panegyrics produced upon the accession of William and Mary in 1689. See Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–1714 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), esp. ch. 9. See also Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), ch. 3. 18. ‘Old Customs grew to Laws by long Consent,/ And to each Written Law of Parliament;/ Freedom in Boroughs, and in land Freehold,/ Gave all, who had them, Voices, uncontroul’d’. Thomas Shadwell, A Congratulatory Poem On His Highness the Prince of Orange His Coming into England (1689) in The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. Montague Summers, vol. 5 of 5. (London: Fortune Press, 1927), p. 337, at lines 13–16. 19. Thomas Shadwell, A Congratulatory Poem to the Most Illustrious Queen Mary upon Her Arrival (1689), ibid. p. 343. Subsequent reference is from this edition. 20. Thomas Shadwell. Votum Perenne: A Poem to the King on New Year’s Day (1692), ibid. p. 365, at lines 14–19. 21. William’s foreign origins provoked anxiety even among some Whig supporters, for instance giving rise to the satirical exchange of poems composed by John Dennis, John Tutchin, and Daniel Defoe that are discussed later in this book in chapters by Williams, Punter, and Payne. See also Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, pp. 130–4. 22. For Prior’s Carmen Seculare see The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, eds. H. B. Wright and M.K. Spears, vol. 1 of 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 183. 23. Pope’s position on Augustus aligns with the sceptical position advanced by Tacitus in both the Annals and Histories, where the corruption and luxurious decadence of aristocratic life in Imperial Rome counterbalanced its glories. For discussion of Pope’s use of Augustus and of the place of the Tacitean vision in British literary history, see Howard Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in British Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), esp. pp. 292–301.

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24. As is discussed in Payne’s chapter on Defoe in this volume, below. 25. Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1714), ibid., p. 96 at lines 7–8. 26. The Spectator No. 10, 12 March 1710/11 in Donald F. Bond, vol. 1 of 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 44. 27. Again, The Spectator makes plain its intentions on its intention to address readers of both sexes. The sentiments expressed in Spectator no. 10, for instance, were foreshadowed in earlier numbers. See, for instance Spectator No. 4: ‘I take it for a peculiar happiness that I have always had an easy and familiar admittance to the fair sex. If I never praised or flattered them, I never belied or contradicted them. As these compose half the world, and are, by the just complacence and gallantry of our nation, the more powerful part of our people, I shall dedicate a considerable share of these my speculations to their service [. . .]. I shall take it for the greatest glory of my work, if among reasonable women this paper may furnish Tea-Table Talk.’ The Spectator No. 4, 5 March 1710/11, ibid., 21. 28. Discussing how the 1707 Act of Union instigated a process of revising the notion of communal belonging in Britain, Leith Davis contrasts Daniel Defoe’s prose essays on the topic with the more pointedly literary excursions of one of his (and the Acts’) chief antagonists, James Hamilton, Lord Belhaven. In summarizing his own argument, Davis points to ‘the tension between the Scottish anti-union pamphleteers’ image of the Scottish nation, one which draws on the mythic or historical past, and the representation of Britain as a heterogeneous nation joined through the medium of writing’. Leith Davis. Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiations of the British Nation, 1707–1830, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 19. 29. For discussions of approaches to the complicated implications of the Union, see Colin Kidd, Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity 1689–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Murray G.H. Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in EighteenthCentury Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Fiona Stafford, “Scottish Poetry and Regional Literary Expression” in The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1830, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 30. Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (1800), ed. Ryan Twomey (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 2014), p. 6. 31. Mary Astell, Some Reflections upon Marriage (1694; rpt. New York: Source Book Press, 1970), p. 107. 32. Mary Wollstonecraft. A Vindication of the Rights of Women with Strictures on Moral and Political Subjects (New York: Whitson, 1982), pp. 110–1. For a discussion of women’s writing on the issue of domestic governance, see Eve Tavor Bannet, The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 33. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1819), eds. Barbara M. Benedict and Deirdre Le Faye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 203.

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34. Robert Miles, “The 1790s: The Effulgence of Gothic”, in Jarold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 41–62, at p. 57. 35. Edmund Burke, A Letter from the Right Honourable Edmund Burke to a Noble Lord (1796) in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke ed. R.B. McDowell, vol. 9 of 9 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 145–87, at p. 156.

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part i

The English Revolution and the interregnum

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chapter 2

Nation, nature, and poetics: transitions and claspes in Denham’s ‘Coopers Hill’ and Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies L. E. Semler

In the 1640s–50s, the English royalists John Denham and Margaret Cavendish published innovative topographical poems – Denham’s ‘Coopers Hill’ and Cavendish’s ‘Hunting’ and ‘Island’ poems – that exhibit a blended interest in nation, nature, and poetics. Denham composed ‘Coopers Hill’ in 1641, made various manuscript revisions during 1641–42 (Drafts I–II), and published the poem in 1642 (Draft III) on the eve of the English Civil War. Denham revised the poem in 1653–54 and published the new version in 1655 (Draft IV). Cavendish composed her four ‘Hunting’ and ‘Island’ poems in 1651–52, or perhaps a little earlier, and published them in her book Poems, and Fancies in early 1653. They reappeared in slightly revised form in the next edition, Poems, and Phancies (1664), and further revised in the third edition, Poems, or, Several fancies in verse (1668). In 1653 and 1664, ‘The Hunting of the Hare’, ‘The Hunting of the Stag’, ‘Of an Island’, and ‘The Ruine of the Island’ are preceded by an untitled introductory poem commencing, ‘Give Mee the Free, and Noble Stile’, and the set of five poems is headed ‘The Claspe’. The primary texts under comparative analysis in this essay are Drafts I–IV of ‘Coopers Hill’ (as established by Brendan O Hehir) and the first published version of Cavendish’s ‘The Claspe’ (1653).1 Cavendish’s Poems, and Fancies and Denham’s ‘Coopers Hill’ are rarely analysed together beyond comparison of their royalist stag hunts.2 On the face of it, ‘Coopers Hill’ and ‘The Claspe’ share an interest in England as an island nation strained by tensions between king and subjects; a sympathetic engagement with the natural environment including an extended, allegorical stag hunt; a foregrounding of the poet as a figure currently at work in the poems; and a widespread use of rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter. These parallels are obscured by the fact that Cavendish’s book (1653) is a 214-page miscellany of 19

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poems and prose, while Denham’s (1642) is a stand-alone topographical poem of 354 lines occupying nineteen pages. The aim of the present essay is to examine how nation, nature, and poetics are blended in ‘Coopers Hill’ and in ‘The Claspe’, but to do so through a quite specific lens. The lens is each poet’s management of structural transitions between the parts or episodes within their texts. Poems, and Fancies and ‘Coopers Hill’ are overtly segmented poetic wholes that make a feature of their internal transitions. I begin with an account of the parts and transitions in Poems, and Fancies and ‘Coopers Hill’ and move to comparative discussion of how the two royalist poets reclaim authority and purpose in the face of significant political trauma via their reimagining of English nature. The national crisis between king and parliament has an alienating effect on the poets, but they re-establish their sense of home on the firmer ground of an imagined or intellectual blend of nation, nature, and poetry. The argument that mid seventeenth-century royalists recuperate a paradise within in response to an external paradise lost is not new, but my aim is to show the distinctive approaches in ‘Coopers Hill’ and Poems, and Fancies and the relevance of the transitions to them. The reader’s experience of Poems, and Fancies is one of crossing thresholds and passing through domains. The domains are established by thematically or generically clustered material that keeps the reader temporarily in aesthetic realms of relative homogeneity. There are atomic, elemental, and mathematical–geometrical pieces (1–50); dialogue poems (53–91); moral discourse poems (92–109); nature and ‘similizing’ poems (126–56); faerie poems (misnum. 148–65); battle poems (misnum. 169–92); ‘mournful verses’ (misnum. 191–98); and political allegory (misnum. 199–211). The content groupings are confirmed by thresholds such as epistles addressing the reader; major section headings for ‘POEMS’ and ‘FANCIES’; and four self-designated ‘clasps’ (the second of which is the focus of this analysis). The four texts entitled ‘The Claspe’ are, in order of appearance, these: ‘When I did write this Booke, I took great paines’ (47); ‘Give Mee the Free, and Noble Stile’ (110); ‘Phantasmes Masque’ (155); and ‘Of small Creatures, such as we call Fairies’ (misnum. 162). The first two (poems of twelve and eight lines respectively) have no additional title beyond ‘The Claspe’ and so I have given their first lines as titles. The second two (a prose piece of twenty lines and a poem of thirty lines) have their own titles (cited here) placed immediately below the common heading for each, which is ‘The Claspe’. All four are ornamented with a decorative capital or printer’s headpiece or both, and are positioned at the head of a new page as if to suggest the start of a new section of some sort. The first clasp might be

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considered no more than a single poem, and yet it heads the mathematical– geometrical cluster of four poems and two prose pieces (47–50). The second clasp could also be regarded singly, and yet it aptly heads the quartet of two hunting and two island poems (110–20). The third clasp is a short prose outline of a masque followed by a series of poetic pieces that are part description and part libretto for the masque (155–60). The fourth and final clasp is the first poem in a miscellaneous cluster of eight poems, the first three (including the clasp poem itself) being faerie poems (misnum. 162–65).3 Despite the stabilizing effect of their shared title and interest in poetics, the clasps are not formally identical or unambiguous. Their formal elusiveness epitomizes the book’s structure: the more one examines any structural pattern or indicator in the book, the more it seems to weaken and allow other patterns to gain prominence. That Cavendish thinks of her book as a structure of five parts and four clasps is implied by a paratextual remark about its structure in the prefatory material (sig. A6v). Yet, it is not until the second edition, Poems, and Phancies (1664), that the five-part structure is explicitly confirmed by the book’s division into five clearly headed ‘PARTS’ (1, 63, 148, 199, 233) accompanied by occasional other remarks inserted to clarify which ‘Part’ the reader is in (189). The third edition, Poems, or, Several fancies in verse with the Animal parliament in prose (1668), drives the text towards greater structural unification by visibly strengthening the presence of the parts (parts are indicated in the running head on every page) as the book’s privileged division. The third edition is the most clearly arranged of the three because it allows more space than the second to individual items; often starts new pieces on new pages; works hard to reduce competing organizational structures; and makes sure the reader knows which part she or he is in at all times. Anomalies and ambiguities remain, but clearly Cavendish’s book has proceeded along a fifteen-year path of refinement towards greater decorum and regularity. When the first edition is considered against the later editions’ drive to part-form regularity, its less polished structure turns out to be the ideal mode of expression for the thesis Cavendish presents in the work. With the notion of parts only implicitly apparent, the most noticeable feature of general structure in 1653 is the self-designated clasp. The second edition marks the rise of the parts (parts and clasps enjoy some cooperative independence), and the third completes the evolution by confirming the structural superiority of part over clasp (running heads confirm how parts absorb clasps). Authorial revisions shift the work towards a more conventional format that emphasizes aesthetic and ontological regularity: words and things neatly housed in their

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appropriate locales. The virtue of the 1653 edition is that rather than presenting as a stable product comprising decorous domains of content as in 1668, it presents as an unstable process of creativity that leaves a dynamic and uneven array of poems and metapoetic comment. Turning now to ‘Coopers Hill’, we begin by observing that the poem is a series of vignettes that may be geographical, historical, conceptual, or analogical. In his account of the poem’s changes through various drafts, O Hehir identifies eight sections: the Introduction and Coopers Hill; St Paul’s and London; Windsor Castle; St Anne’s Hill; the Thames; Windsor Forest; Egham Mead, the stag hunt, and Magna Carta; and the Conclusion. I accept the value of O Hehir’s eight-part structure; however, it is a subjective formulation and one could segment the poem differently depending on how one conceives of the vignettes. For example, O Hehir defines section seven as comprising Egham Mead (being Runnymede and Long Meadow), the stag hunt, and Magna Carta. This coheres as a single section because the stag hunt and the signing of Magna Carta are geographically located within Egham Mead. However, one could separate Egham Mead, the stag hunt, and Magna Carta into distinct sections based on criteria more diverse than geography. Furthermore, if we look immediately before and after section seven, we find O Hehir defines the River Thames and Windsor Forest as two distinct sections (five and six) when they could be considered one, and the poem’s Conclusion is marked as section eight despite emerging organically from the account of Magna Carta that immediately precedes it. O Hehir has established a paradigm that downplays transitions and is based primarily on geographical locales bookended by an Introduction and a Conclusion. What happens if we establish the transitions first and let them determine the sections? This is the approach I take here. My criterion for identifying a transition is that it explicitly foregrounds the fictive poet’s ‘I’ and/or ‘eye’ in the act of perceiving. In other words, the transitions, as with Cavendish’s clasps, are overt and metapoetical. In all four drafts, the poem begins with Denham’s complex appropriation of Persius’s deflationary Prologue to his Satires. In a move that signals his strident defence of English poetry and poets, Denham dissolves the transcendental authority of Mt Parnassus as a locale of inspiration and asserts the priority of poets over their poetically created origin myths. This enables him to declare in apostrophe to Cooper’s Hill: [. . .] if I can be to thee A Poët, thou Pernassus art to mee.

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Nation, nature, and poetics Nor wonder, if (advantag’d in my flight, By taking wing from thy auspicious height) Through untrac’t waies, and airie paths I flie, More boundlesse in my fancie, then my eie.

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(Draft III, 7–14)

This establishes Cooper’s Hill (‘thee’, 7) as a place of poetic inspiration even as it declares that the poet’s imaginative vision exceeds the physical view afforded by the geographical location. This passage sets up a hierarchical partnership between ‘Poët’ and ‘Pernassus’ in which poetic imagination, ‘my fancie’, is signified by ‘flight’, and physiological perception, ‘my eie’, by ‘height’. Both may be necessary to this poem’s existence, but the hill is ultimately subservient to the poet as height is to flight, sight to fancy, and proximal cause (the hill as stimulus to poetry-making) to principal cause (the poet as sine qua non of the poem). The poet may be ‘advantag’d’ in his poetry-making by being on, or being able to imagine being on, the hill, but his fancy is the power necessary to transform the actual Cooper’s Hill into the poem ‘Coopers Hill’, which is to say into Parnassus. The internal transitions of the poem keep alive the tension between Cooper’s Hill and ‘Coopers Hill’ via indices of the poet’s ‘I’ and ‘eye’ enacting perception. The transitions execute a conceptual follow-through on the promise of the introduction and maintain the poem’s metapoetic quality. John Wilson Foster is right to see ‘Coopers Hill’ as a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ as Denham ‘turns his prospect into mythic vision’.4 In the first half of the poem (where hills dominate) the views resemble, as Foster argues,5 distinct mechanical sightings rather than continuous, panning vision, but I argue that in the second half (where the river dominates) the transitions are sublimated into more fluid processes. This correlation of landscape feature to poetic mechanism may be considered part of the royalist rhetoric of aesthetic brilliance, decorum, and moderation that James Turner and Bruce Boeckel identify as masking and driving Denham’s resolute political partisanship in the poem.6 In Draft I, the reader is told explicitly that the fictive poet has physically ascended the ‘topp’ (9) of Cooper’s Hill. Once there, he feels the boundlessness of his fancy enabled by, and yet exceeding, the vista before his eyes (9–10). His physical and conceptual experience is likened to that of those who are ‘raysed in body or in thought’ above ‘the Earth or the Ayres middle vault’ and gain thereby security and understanding (11–16). It is this combined benefit that enables him to look down physically (‘my Eye’, 17) on St Paul’s and conceptually (‘My minde’, 19) on ‘the Tumult & the Crowde’ of London (17–24). This position of dual perception, marked by enhanced knowledge and distance from worldly

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cares, grants him a ‘happines of Sweete retyr’d content’ (25). This is where the Introduction ends in Draft I before the first transition (27–29) to the section on Windsor Hill. In Drafts II–IV, the brief reference to St Paul’s is expanded into an episode praising Edmund Waller and King Charles for preserving the cathedral in, respectively, commendatory verse and material renovation. This expansion of St Paul’s beyond its bare mention in Draft I means that a new transition is needed to take the reader from the end of the new section on St Paul’s to the start of the section on London, which has become a longer account of London’s disease of greed. Denham plays with the wording of this transition in every draft. In Draft I, his eye looked on St Paul’s, while his mind looked on the cloud of business and men like ants. In Draft II, his eye looks on ‘London’ (having looked on St Paul’s a few lines earlier) as a ‘place’, while his ‘minde’ surveys the crowd wrapped in a cloud of business (25–27). In Drafts I–II, the meteorological section (‘rais’d in body or in thought,’ Draft II, 11) helps establish the fictive poet’s inspired yet also physical position on Cooper’s Hill before he looks down on St Paul’s. In Draft III, the meteorological section has been moved to follow the section on St Paul’s and is used to introduce the fictive poet’s perspective on London and its avaricious populace. In Draft IV, the meteorological section is dropped entirely and the fictive poet’s physical eye ‘swift as thought contracts the space’ (13) between Cooper’s Hill and St Paul’s, but St Paul’s is indistinct and ‘may be thought a proud / Aspiring mountain, or descending cloud’ (17–18). The city too is indistinct. It rises ‘like a mist beneath a hill’ (26) and its busy crowd ‘[s]eems at this distance but a darker cloud’ which needs poetic interpretation as an endless bustle of greedy increase and ruin (28–36). It is clear that the actual locale of Cooper’s Hill and any physical points of view that this locale might guarantee have no fundamental priority. Eyesight increasingly resembles thought or presents to the mind ambiguous symbol rather than clarified view, or is a fiction constructed by thought. Another way of putting this is to say that the procession of drafts charts the transformation of Cooper’s Hill into Mt Parnassus by cumulatively confirming the liberty of the poet to assemble indices of mental and physical sight into ever-new, imaginative wholes. This process of mythologization makes good on the poet’s initial statement of intent: ‘if I can bee to thee / A Poet’ (Draft I, 7–8). In all four drafts the transition to the next section of the poem remains identical: ‘Windsore the next. . . /. . . above the Valley Swells, / Into myne Eye’ (Draft I, 27–29). Windsor ‘her gentle Bosome doth present’ and the ‘Sight’ invites ‘[a] pleasure & a Reverence’ from the fictive poet (Draft I, 34,

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37–38). In contrast to London’s mercantilism, Windsor Hill and Castle emblematize the king and queen by way of gentle grandeur, valour, piety, and fecundity. There follows the account of the ‘Heroes’ associated with Windsor and St George and the Order of the Garter. The wording of the transition to the Windsor section does not change through various drafts (except that Draft IV drops the pregnant-dame conceit) because the notion of the sight swelling into the fictive poet’s eyes gives the perfect blend of active and passive seeing, of literal and metaphoric description. The Windsor section concludes with the poet contemplating King Charles as St George. The next transition follows: Here could I fix my wonder, but our Eyes, (Nice as our tasts) affect varieties; And though one please him most, the hungry Ghuest Tasts every dish, & Runns through all the feast So havinge tasted Windsor, casting rounde My wandring Eye, an emulous hill doth bound My more contracted sight, whose topp of late A Chappell crown’d till in the common Fate The neighbouring Abby fell, may no such storme (Draft I, 119–28) Fall on our tymes, where Ruyne must reforme.

This transition keeps its form through the four drafts. The poet’s ‘wonder’ is his prolonged contemplation of Charles’ virtues, but his ‘Eyes’, as fastidious as his tastes, need to be fed by ‘varieties’. He is like a hungry guest who, having tasted Windsor, looks about for other dishes to try and sees St Anne’s Hill and the ruined Chertsey Abbey. To taste a dish is to imbue it via poetical reflection with ideological identity, and political readings since the 1970s have shown how ravenous Denham is.7 This is conspicuous consumption on a grand scale. The poem’s consumption of England, hill by hill, through time and in space, is aesthetically magnificent as Earl Wasserman’s charting of the poem’s trope of concordia discors and O Hehir’s reading of its ‘expans’d hieroglyphicks’ reveal.8 The bardic tone and captivating storytelling hide the fact that this vision of England’s landscape is not objective but only one (royalist) guest’s taste. As with the previous transition, the poet exits his intellectual perception of Chertsey Abbey by way of physical perception: Partinge from thence twixt Anger Shame & fearre Those for what’s past, & this for what’s too neere, My Eye descending from the Hill surveyes: Where Thames amongst the wanton valleys strayes. (Draft I, 161–64)

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This transition retains its form through the four drafts and may seem little more than a mundane shift from reflecting on St Anne’s Hill to reflecting on the River Thames. Yet, the significance of this transition is extraordinary. It is the last transition in the poem, which means that the internal series of transitions is this: Introduction and transition to St Paul’s; transition to London (not in Draft I); transition to Windsor Hill; and transition to the River Thames. There are only four transitions. This produces the following five parts: Introduction and Cooper’s Hill; St Paul’s; London; Windsor Hill; and the River Thames. Each part is more capacious in length and topics covered than the preceding. The Windsor Hill part elaborates on English heroes, Charles I, St George, and the Order of the Garter; and the Thames part reflects on the River Thames, Windsor Forest, Egham Mead, the stag hunt, Runnymede, and Magna Carta and ends with the conclusion of the poem. The last transition is therefore at the centre of the poem in Drafts I–III and thus the final part of ‘Coopers Hill’ in these drafts amounts to half the poem’s length. The final part does contain transitions which subdivide it, but these transitions are not of the same order as those I have identified above. The primary transitions of the poem maintain a distinction between physical and conceptual perception which emphasizes the poet’s alert management of both. The internal divisions of the final part operate differently: they are sublimated to the degree that the poet’s imagined physical context is no longer an active part of the poem. The first of the internal divisions in the final part is that between the River Thames and Windsor Forest, where the poet writes: O could my lines fully & smoothly flow, As thy pure flood: heaven should noe longer knowe Her ould Eridanus, thy purer Streame, Should bathe the God’s & be the Poets Theame. (Draft I, 199–202)

This passage, which recurs in Drafts I–III, has been regarded by critics as important primarily because it is the germ from which the celebrated ‘Thames couplets’ grow. In Draft IV, both couplets are doubled in length to produce an eight-line celebration of the Thames as the new heavenly river that will serve as the poet’s muse (Draft IV, 189–96). Yet, what is more important is that this moment in the middle of the poem signals its fundamentally dichotomous structure. The poem opens with the idea of Cooper’s Hill becoming Parnassus through poetic translation, and the second half sees the River Thames

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become Eridanus, the river constellation, through poetic translation. The first half deals with Cooper’s Hill and surrounding hills, while the second deals with the Thames and its lowland environs. The transitions in the first half are explicit, abrupt shifts of view from hill to hill, while the transitions of the second are sublimated into unobtrusive evolutions of focus through varied dimensions of perception.9 While there is a distinct transition out of the Introduction and into the body of the poem, there is no distinct transition out of the body of the poem and into the Conclusion. The celebration of the Thames as stylistic muse at the centre of the poem shifts without overt announcement to a reflection on the delights of Windsor Forest. Then it is the hill, not the poet, that looks down on the stream (Draft I, 229), and this signals a shift of attention to Egham Mead, which lies between them (229–30). It is here that the poet reveals he has, perceiving via memory, ‘seene our Charles. . . /. . . Chasing the Royall Stagge’ (243, 245), and his account of the hunt ends with the negotiated kill at Runnymede (275–80), which evokes historical reflection on Magna Carta and which in turn flows into the poem’s final reflections on monarchical power as a river (281–328). Denham’s structural shift from stark to sublimated transitions contributes to the poem’s rhetorical effectiveness as the second half delivers a beguilingly uninterrupted flow of argument that blends national history and landscape with personal memory and bardic wisdom to confirm the royalist status quo. Sublimated transitions have the dual effect of downplaying the sense of the poet as ideological interventionist in the tale told and strengthening the impression that all dimensions of lived existence harmoniously cooperate in the production of unified meaning. We return now to the transitions in Poems, and Fancies. In the third part of her book, among the nature and ‘similizing’ poems, Cavendish declares: Those Verses still to me do seem the best, Where Lines run smooth, and Wit eas’ly exprest. Where Fancies flow, as gentle Waters glide, Where Flowry banks of Fancies grow each side.

(p. 143)

These lines are suggestive of Denham’s apostrophe to the Thames, although influence cannot be proven. Cavendish’s eight-line poem that commences the second clasp (and thus immediately precedes the ‘Hunting’ and ‘Island’ poems) develops her poetic theory by declaring adherence to a natural style that is ‘Easie, Free’ and ‘wild’ (p. 110). The opening line of this poem, ‘Give Mee the Free, and Noble Stile’ (p. 110), reveals its kinship to the poem immediately preceding the third clasp, which begins, ‘Give me that Wit,

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whose Fancy’s not confin’d’ (p. 154). While Cavendish may admire ‘smooth’ poetic expression, her manifestation of it is in terms of unconstrained, wild, and natural production of poetic fancies. The editions of her book evolve towards structural regularity and decorum, but the core principle of her poetics resists containment and is thus more in tune with the formal irregularities of the 1653 edition. The first clasp captures the frenetic and forced, though also natural, creative process: When I did write this Booke, I took great paines, For I did walke, and thinke, and breake my Braines. My Thoughts run out of Breath, then downe would lye, And panting with short wind, like those that dye. When Time had given Ease, and lent them strength, Then up would get, and run another length. Sometimes I kept my Thoughts with a strict dyet, And made them Faste with Ease, and Rest, and Quiet; That they might run agen with swifter speed, And by this course new Fancies they could breed. But I doe feare they’re not so Good to please, But now they’re out, my Braine is more at ease.

(p. 47)

Given this account of poetic creation, it is unsurprising that the second clasp calls for a style that ‘runs wild about’ (p. 110) and moves immediately to ‘The Hunting of the Hare’ (pp. 110–3). The wild and ingenious flight of the hare is a manifestation of, and metaphor for, Cavendish’s fancy in operation. The hare continually ‘imploies’ his ‘[t]houghts’ in order to remain free. He runs so frantically that he must pause and rest; then, as with Cavendish’s resting thoughts in the first clasp, he rises feeling stronger. Yet, as the gasping thoughts in the first clasp were likened to the breaths of the dying, so here, although more dismally, we read that the hare’s renewed strength resembles the temporarily revived breath of the ‘dying’. Although ‘poor Wat’ will die shortly, his dying breaths call into play a faster breeding of Cavendish’s fancy. The poem rebukes men for their pride and violence as they ‘Tyrannize upon’ gentler creatures, but it nonetheless represents the kill as a captivating musical ‘Consort’ of horns and voices. The energies on display are physically and morally wild and this natural authenticity produces a pleasing harmony. ‘The Hunting of the Hare’ suggests the following poem from Philosophicall Fancies, the companion volume to Poems, and Fancies, published in the same year:

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An Epistle to Contemplation I Contemplating by a Fires side, In Winter cold, my Thoughts would hunting ride. And after Fancies they do run a Race, If lose them not, they have a pleasant Chase. If they do catch the Hare, or kill the Deere, They dresse them strait in Verse, and make good Cheere.10

Elsewhere in Philosophicall Fancies (p. 58) and Poems, and Fancies (pp. 150, 152–3) Cavendish turns the hunt and kill into pleasing aesthetic events and metaphors for poetic creation. In respect to ‘The Hunting of the Hare’, Donna Landry has noted the tension between Cavendish’s empathetic love of nature and her royalist participation in the hunt, and Nigel Smith suggests that the hare not only ‘has the free style’ but, in being subject to oppression, also signifies ‘the plight of a woman as an author’.11 ‘The Hunting of the Hare’ and its partner poem ‘The Hunting of the Stag’ (pp. 113–6) implicitly confirm the elevated social status of the author. They also empathize with the overpowered victim (as wild creature, female author, or conquered monarch) in a way that condemns the hunters. ‘The Hunting of the Stag’ functions as an allegory of the king’s courageous demise due to his forgivable ‘Pride’ (p. 113) and men’s innate ‘love of Mischiefe’ (p. 115). We read that ‘an Army against One did come’ and he died because ‘Fate his thread had spun’ (p. 116). What makes the pair of poems so interesting is their dynamic blend of poetics, politics, and nature: humankind must recalibrate its position more empathetically within the biosphere, but there remains the inevitable artistry of violent change, which has affinities with Cavendish’s emerging philosophy of nature. The ‘Island’ poems expand on the politico–environmental context of the ‘Hunting’ poems and complete the second clasp. ‘Of an Island’ (pp. 116–8) celebrates prewar England as a divinely blessed locus amoenus, a peaceful Eden of flourishing plants and happy animals presided over by an attentive Apollo. Apollo’s isle is fertile, safe, and celebratory: the ‘Birds pleasure take, and with delight do sing, / In Praises of this Isle the Woods do ring’ (p. 117). Turner observes that ‘[t]he sun and the earth make up an ideal home in Margaret Cavendish’s Island, flowers being their children and Apollo the dutiful father’.12 The subsequent poem, ‘The Ruine of the Island’ (pp. 118–20), describes how the island ‘grew proud with Plenty, and with Ease’ (p. 118) until piety collapsed and the mortals, ‘[l]ike Titans Race’, rose in thankless rebellion against the ‘Gods’ (p. 120). The island paradise devolves into an Iron Age of vice and blasphemy in which ‘Right

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was banish’d from their Lands’ (p. 120). The ruin of the garden isle is grounded in the devastation inflicted by war on the Newcastle family estates and deer parks. Gweno Williams notes that the terminology of ‘banishment’ and ‘ruin’ permeates Cavendish’s autobiographical account of the Civil Wars, and I suggest a similar vocabulary characterizes ‘The Ruine of the Island’.13 The second clasp of Poems, and Fancies is, as with the other clasps, primarily about poetry. If the island and hunt were once powerful symbols of royalist, eco-political harmony, they have now turned hostile and ruinous. In response to actual banishment and ruin, Cavendish reappropriates hunt and island as imaginative paths to understanding not only the regicide and its contexts, but also her emergent role as a public poet, a female Apollo, with wisdom for the nation. The island and hunt remain her allies, but function imaginatively as her new home which is secure, pleasurable, and creative. This is confirmed in Cavendish’s allegory of the ‘Island of the Brain’: [T]hose Brains that have rich Soils. . . are fortified with Understanding, Governed by Judgment, Civilized by Reason, Manured by Experience, whereby they reape the plenty of Wisdome, and live in peacefull Tranquillity, and being inriched with Invention, grow pleasant with Recreations, making Gardens of Pleasure, wherein grow Flowers of Delight; and planting Orchards of various Objects, which the several Senses bring in; these grow tall Trees of Contemplations, whereon the Birds of Poetry sit and sing, and peck at the Fruit of Fame with their Bills of Glory.14

The clasps of Poems, and Fancies reveal that the ruined island, hunt, and monarch are replaced (for the time being, out of necessity) by poetic surrogates that preserve hope for future renewal. Thus the Interregnum still has its monarchs in an island paradise, as Cavendish confirms in her play Youth’s Glory and Death’s Banquet: Nature, gives her Favourite Poets delights; for Poets take more delight, and pleasure in their own thoughts and conceptions, than an absolute Monarch in his power and Supremacy; for like as Birds, that hops from Bough to Bough, whereon they sit and sing, so Poets thoughts moves, from Theam, to Theam, making sweet Melody.15

This ‘sweet Melody’ moving ‘from Theam to Theam’ is a royalist song of nature exemplified in the episodic arrangements of ‘Coopers Hill’ and Poems, and Fancies.

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John Denham and Margaret Cavendish enable nature to sing for its king. The transitions and clasps in their carefully articulated works are crucial not just for joining parts to make a whole, but for clarifying the poetic process as it occurs. These royalist poets find solace and wisdom in English nature and the readers of ‘Coopers Hill’ and Poems, and Fancies, guided by the metapoetic transitions and clasps, are enabled to see their way home through the poets’ eyes.

Notes 1. I refer to Brendan O Hehir, Expans’d Hieroglyphicks: A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham’s ‘Coopers Hill’ (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969); and Margaret Cavendish, Poems, and Fancies (London, 1653), Poems, and Phancies (London, 1664), and Poems, or, Several fancies in verse with the Animal parliament in prose (London, 1668). 2. See Anne Elizabeth Carson, ‘The Hunted Stag and the Beheaded King’, SEL 45.3 (2005), 537–56; Hero Chalmers, ‘“Flattering Division”: Margaret Cavendish’s Poetics of Variety’, in Line Cottegnies and Nancy Weitz (eds.), Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), pp. 123–44, at pp. 137–38; and Donna Landry, ‘Green Languages? Women Poets as Naturalists in 1653 and 1807’, Huntington Library Quarterly 63.4 (2000), 467–89, at 469–78. 3. The clasps are discussed in L.E. Semler, ‘The Magnetic Attraction of Margaret Cavendish and Walter Charleton’, in Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman (eds.), Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 55–72, at p. 71; Chalmers, ‘Flattering Division’, p. 124; Randall Ingram, ‘First Words and Second Thoughts: Margaret Cavendish, Humphrey Moseley, and “the Book”’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30.1 (2000), 101–24, at 114; and Jennifer Low, ‘Surface and Interiority: Self-Creation in Margaret Cavendish’s The Claspe’, Philological Quarterly 77.2 (1998), 149–69. 4. John Wilson Foster, ‘The Measure of Paradise: Topography in EighteenthCentury Poetry’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 9.2 (1975–76), 232–56, at 236. 5. Ibid., 240–2. 6. James Turner, The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry 1630–1660 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), pp. 49–69, 186–95; Bruce Boeckel, ‘Landscaping the Field of Discourse: Political Slant and Poetic Slope in Sir John Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill”’, Papers on Language and Literature 34.1 (1998), 57–93. 7. See Boeckel ‘Landscaping the Field’; Turner, The Politics of Landscape; John M. Wallace, ‘Coopers Hill: The Manifesto of Parliamentary Royalism, 1641’, ELH 41.4 (1974), 494–540. 8. Earl R. Wasserman, The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), pp. 35–88; O Hehir, Expans’d Hieroglyphicks, pp. 3–73, 165–256.

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9. Wasserman (ibid., pp. 79–80) elaborates on the structural bifurcation between hill (‘static images’) and river (‘dynamic symbols’), arguing that the river symbolises ‘the concordia discors which is the pattern of the true state’. 10. Margaret Cavendish, Philosophicall Fancies (London, 1653), sig. B1v. 11. Landry, ‘Green Languages?’, 470–8; Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England 1640–1660 (1994; rpt. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 258–9. 12. Turner, The Politics of Landscape, p. 107. 13. See Gweno Williams, ‘Margaret Cavendish, A true Relation of my Birth, Breeding and Life’, in Anita Pacheco (ed.), A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 165–76, at p. 170. 14. Margaret Cavendish, The Worlds Olio (London, 1655), pp. 106–7. 15. Margaret Cavendish, Playes (London, 1662), p. 149.

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chapter 3

Home and nation in Andrew Marvell’s Bermudas A. D. Cousins

In Interregnum Britain, where ideas of home and nation were unstable and contested in the wake of civil war, the vigorous debate over those concepts brought within its scope the English colony in the Bermudas.1 How did that New World colony relate to its Old World land of origin, and in what ways might a home be found or made there? Long before the outbreak of the Civil War, Lewes Hughes had written of the Bermudas as a holy secret, a New World place of plenty reserved by God for the English.2 With the help of divine grace and hard work, he suggested, new homes could be made in a prosperous, New World extension of England. During the Civil War, Edmund Waller chose to portray the Bermudas both less devoutly and less earnestly. Throughout his mock-epic poem, The Battle of the Summer Islands, he satirized the New World settlement as an earthly paradise spoiled by the incongruous behaviour of its inhabitants.3 Parodying the myth of the Golden Age, he portrayed an actual event in the colony – the colonists’ unsuccessful attempt to kill a pair of whales – almost as if it were a latter-day battle between the pygmies and the cranes. Ideas of home and nation were caricatured in the Bermudas, he implied. Influential associates of Andrew Marvell, the Oxenbridges, however, were closely connected with the Bermudas colony, and it seems that sometime from July 1653 to late 1654 Marvell decided to write in celebration of the settlement over which his associates and their connections exercised differing degrees of governance. In apparent compliment to the Oxenbridges, he countered Waller’s elaborate satire on the colony with one of his most famous lyrics, Bermudas.4 In that poem, Marvell’s celebration of the Bermudas colony centres on a devout fashioning of myth. Taking the Exodus narrative as his point of departure he creates a typological mythos in which the Bermudas figures as the Promised Land of the New World, where God has granted to a new Chosen People not merely an alternative to England but a home at once new and archetypal. As Marvell fables, those Chosen who fled in earlier 33

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years from false religion and persecution came to an earthly paradise which was a type of Eden: their flight into the New World took them to a likeness of humankind’s most ancient home. Their quest for a surrogate patria thus involved not so much discovery of a new home as discernment that a new one was also a semblance of the oldest of homes.5 God’s providence remade a faithful few (kin to the faithful who did not seek asylum overseas) into the microcosm of a regenerated nation. Marvell seems to be suggesting that the Oxenbridges are significant players in what has been a drama of salvation unfolding at national level. Yet it is not through allusion to the Exodus that Marvell chiefly presents his devout myth of exile and homecoming. Affinities among Bermudas, the Psalms, and metrical paraphrase of the Psalms have long been recognized, not least between Marvell’s poem and George Sandys’s A Paraphrase upon the Psalmes of David (1636). In what follows I shall suggest those affinities to be somewhat more inclusive and more theologically coherent than has hitherto been perceived. I shall especially argue that Marvell’s psalm-like poem has marked correspondences – whether deliberately or otherwise – with Calvin’s thought on the necessity of distancing oneself from the world, which receives emphasis throughout his commentaries on the Psalms. Consideration of Marvell’s devout mythmaking in his poem consequently illuminates how ambitious and comprehensive is his response to Waller’s mock-heroic treatment of the Bermudas colony in The Battle of the Summer Islands. The provenance of Bermudas has been described in detail by Nigel Smith, whose account I abbreviate here: was appointed governor or tutor to William Dutton, a ward and prospective son-in-law of Cromwell. They were to lodge with John Oxenbridge, one of the new Puritan fellows of Eton College. . .. [Oxenbridge] had been a Fellow of Magdalen Hall, Oxford, one of the few centres of Puritanism in the university. He had been dismissed by Archbishop Laud in May 1634 for imposing a demanding disciplinary system on his pupils, in addition to the normal academic requirements. He fled to the New World, and spent time in the Bermudas. . .. Oxenbridge returned to England in the 1640s. . . and in 1652 was made a Fellow of Eton College. Just as Marvell arrived in Eton, Oxenbridge’s knowledge of the transatlantic world was both rewarded and exploited when he was made one of the commissioners for the government of the Bermudas. . .. Marvell’s poem ‘Bermudas’ was most probably a compliment to Oxenbridge and his wife. . . and possibly also connected with his role as tutor of Dutton.6

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If, as seems credible, the poem does form a compliment to the Oxenbridges, then a generous and graceful compliment it is indeed. It is also one that looks beyond the Oxenbridge circle and well beyond the Bermudas. The framing speaker of Bermudas introduces the voices of a chorus and a moment of communal devotion. The community united in devotion is about to enter upon a ‘grassy stage’ (11), yet it is already celebrating the glory of God as displayed throughout what Calvin called ‘[t]his magnificent theatre of heaven and earth, crammed with innumerable miracles’.7 Moreover, like ideal Calvinist spectators, the members of that chorus ‘take pious delight in the works of God open and manifest in this most beautiful theatre. For. . . although it is not the chief evidence for faith, yet it is the first evidence in the order of nature, to be mindful that wherever we cast our eyes, all things they meet are works of God, and at the same time to ponder with pious meditation to what end God created them.’8 The poem begins: Where the remote Bermudas ride In th’ocean’s bosom unespied, From a small boat, that rowed along, The list’ning winds received this song: ‘What should we do but sing his praise That led us through the wat’ry maze, Unto an isle so long unknown And yet far kinder than our own? Where He the huge sea-monsters wracks, That lift the deep upon their backs. He lands us on a grassy stage; Safe from the storms, and prelates’ rage.

(1–12)

This is a people in exile. They are singing, near their journey’s end, in wonder at God’s deliverance. Woven into their doing so is wonder at God’s creation – Marvell evokes the religious sublime through his image of the vast ‘wat’ry maze’ with its ‘huge sea-monsters’ (6, 9). If his singers are not yet voicing ‘pious delight’ in the creation, they soon will be. Here, in any event, the double focus of their awe attests to their sense of miraculous salvation. Now having been rescued by divine providence from both ungovernable natural violence and the no less irresistible force of Laudian persecution (12), they indirectly but distinctly acknowledge themselves as re-enacting sacred story, for they recognize themselves as a chosen people coming into their promised land. They have at last reached ‘an isle so long unknown / And yet far kinder than [their] own’ (7–8). On the basis of their contrast between the

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island from which they have fled and that to which they have been brought (6, 11), Marvell’s poem opposes the New World to the Old, a new body politic to an ancien régime and, by implication, it opposes a home newly given – or, more accurately, restored – to homes made uninhabitable. The exiles are arriving at a place nearer the soul’s home. Marvell’s presentation of the singers as self-consciously re-enacting an Exodus drama consciously allies itself with accounts of the Bermudas such as Hughes’s A Letter, Sent into England from the Summer Islands.9 For example, Hughes’s work starts with this: Beloued friends, the goodnes of Almighty God, in keeping these Ilands secret, from all people of the world. . . till now that it hath pleased his holy Maiesty, to discouer and bestow them vpon his people of England; is so great as should stirre them vp with thankfull hearts, to praise his holy and great name, and to send such to inhabit them as feare God, and giue themselues to serue him in holinesse and righteousnesse, that so, God may loue to dwell in those Ilands, as hee did in Sion, when he said, This is my rest for euer, here will I dwell: for I haue a delight therein. Psal 132.13.14.10

That description of the Bermudas as a divine secret reserved for the English has its counterpart in the singers’ reference to their destination as ‘an isle so long unknown’ (7) but to which they have been providentially ‘led’ (6). Early in the poem Marvell signals his agreement with Hughes that the Bermudas are a unique gift from God; later, in lines 13–28, he will elaborately concur with Hughes’s remark that in this new world ‘[a]ll they that haue grace to serue God, are sure to prosper and liue comfortably’11. Of greater importance, however, is Hughes and Marvell’s shared perception that the Psalms offer an appropriate medium for promoting the Bermudas enterprise. Yet whereas Hughes is content with mere allusion in order to suggest the islands’ sacred potential, Marvell uses the Psalms to fabricate a devout and polemical fable. Although for some time scholars have proposed that Bermudas resembles a psalm or has connections with the Psalms, C. B. Hardman first linked the poem with Sandys’s A Paraphrase upon the Psalmes of David.12 Having noted a general similarity between Bermudas and the metrical psalm, Hardman demonstrated that when Marvell’s poem seems to be echoing Psalms 107 and 104 it sounds like Sandys’s Paraphrase rather than the Authorized Version. Hardman’s recognition of Marvell’s textual preference allowed readers then to see that Marvell was not so much following Sandys as appropriating him. Smith puts it this way: ‘Sandys’ translations were popular at court, and especially with the King [to whom, as to the Queen, they were dedicated]. By 1651 they were widely recognized as part

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of the Royalist literature of lament of which Eikon Basilike was the most well-known. To transfer this kind of verse into an obviously puritanical context was to perform the kind of generic relocation characteristic of Marvell’s political poems’.13 Why, in the first place, Marvell should fashion a psalm-like poem in support of the Bermudas enterprise – and make that poem not merely psalm-like but contain actual reference to the Psalms – can be readily seen. So too can his reason for using Sandys’s versions of the Psalms rather than a strict translation. Some Psalms are concerned with the exile of the Chosen People; some affirm the Chosen People’s status as the elect of God. Others celebrate God’s mercy as shown by the deliverance of his Chosen from enemies, whether the Chosen be the whole people of Israel or individuals within Israel; yet others celebrate divine comfort given to the Chosen amid distress, or divine bounty bestowed.14 The Psalms were therefore easily and appropriately adaptable to promotion of the Bermudas enterprise if one had decided to represent it typologically, namely, as a modern reenactment of the Exodus episode from the Old Testament. No less clear is why, at various points, Marvell should use Sandys’s paraphrases rather than scripture itself. How Sandys had elaborated on scripture clearly harmonized with how Marvell wanted to accentuate his scriptural archetype. That having been said, there are nevertheless further considerations. For a start, there seem to be more likenesses between Marvell’s poem and Sandys’s Paraphrase than have been previously remarked. Marvell’s appropriation of Sandys’s work is thus more inclusive than has been thought, which enhances appreciation of his strategic finesse in Bermudas. It is true that he relocates Sandys’s versions of the Psalms; and of course his doing so involves a quiet translation of Sandys into the service of the Oxenbridges. Sandys’s poems, dedicated originally to Charles and Henrietta Maria, now facilitate celebration and advocacy of a project intimately associated with a puritan family. But my main point here is that, in the process, Sandys’s poems become entwined with Calvin’s theology of distance from the world, which is evoked by Marvell – and given political overtones – in his portrayal of the singers as re-enacting the Exodus. As I have noted above, this is a theology emphasized by Calvin throughout his commentaries on the Psalms, and it has a marked affinity with Marvell’s typological mythmaking in Bermudas, that is to say, with his mythology of nation and home. Hardman rightly identifies congruence between a passage in Sandys’s version of Psalm 107 and a couplet in Marvell’s poem. The former runs:

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a.d. cousins When they to God direct their Praires, His Mercie comforts their Despairs. Forthwith the bitter Storms asswage, And foming Seas suppresse their Rage: Then, singing, with a prosperous gale To their desired Harbour saile.

The latter is: ‘Thus sung they, in the English boat, / An holy and a cheerful note’. The first paraphrases 107: 28–30, and its rendering of verse 30 corresponds especially with Marvell’s couplet (37–8 of Bermudas).15 An additional analogue between Sandys’s Paraphrase and this part of Marvell’s text could also be cited: Be they repuls’d with infamy, Who persecute with deadly hate; Deservedly left desolate, Who, Ha! ha! in derision cry. Let all who seek Thy help, rejoice And praise Thee with a cheerful voice.

(40, st. 9)

The passage associates looking to God for deliverance with the ‘cheerful’ voicing of his praise; as such, it is pertinent to both Bermudas 37–8 and 1–12.16 Moreover, while Hardman compares excerpts from Sandys’s version of Psalm 104 with lines from Marvell’s poem, other comparisons between A Paraphrase and Bermudas can also be made. They appear in the topographia where Marvell’s singers gratefully specify the riches awaiting them in their New World. When the exiles praise God for having led them to ‘an isle. . . far kinder than [their] own’ (7–8), they thank him not merely for having brought them to a more ‘benevolent’ place than that they have fled. They thank him likewise for having brought them to one more ‘natural’ – a conventional play by Marvell on the double senses of ‘kind’. Their New World island is more ‘benevolent’ than its Old World counterpart because it is free from the violence of Laudian persecution; and it is more ‘natural’ because rich with nature’s plenty. Marvell’s singers are entirely aware that ‘all things [there] are works of God’, and quick ‘to ponder with pious meditation to what end God created them’: He gave us this eternal spring, Which here enamels ev’rything; And sends the fowls to us in care, On daily visits through the air. He hangs in shades the orange bright, Like golden lamps in a green night.

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Home and nation in Andrew Marvell’s Bermudas And does in the pom’granates close, Jewels more rich than Ormus shows.

39 (13–20)

Presenting the Bermudas as a site of ‘eternal spring’ (13), the singers identify it as an earthly paradise. Imaging its plenitude in terms of ‘fowls’ sent ‘to [them] in care / On daily visits’ (15–6), and so recalling the provision of quails to the Israelites on their way to Canaan (Exodus 16:13), they reveal it as the Promised Land of the New World. They indicate with ‘pious delight’, then, that they have arrived not simply at the Bermudas but rather at the Bermudas correctly recognized as a type of Eden. Their New World destination is their Promised Land, yet in being a type of the original earthly paradise – the semblance of Eden regained – it is also paradoxically the oldest of homes. The Old World nation they have fled, the old homes they could not keep, have been providentially replaced by the Promised Land set aside for them in the New World, which offers them a ‘kinder’ environment and virtual repossession of the first human home. According to Marvell’s devout mythos, the New Chosen discern their surrogate nation and home (England having proved unable to accommodate them) in a divinely granted, sanctified space that points beyond itself to the ultimate homeland and home that lie in the presence of God. Behind their voices, in the lines already quoted and thereafter in this topographia, one hears again the voice of Sandys. But in these cases Marvell captures the spirit of Sandys’s verse rather than echoes its letter. Paraphrasing 37:9, Sandys writes: ‘God will cut off the bad, the faithful bless; / Who shall the ever-fruitful land possess’ (37, pt 1). His lines differ markedly from their scriptural antecedent: ‘For euil doers shall be cut off: but those that waite vpon the Lord, they shall inherite the earth’. Yet very clearly they coincide with how Marvell later wishes to accentuate his scriptural archetype, expansively insisting upon plenty. Similar in vision, too, is Sandys’s rendering of 16:6, which in the Authorized Version runs: ‘The lines are fallen vnto mee in pleasant places; yea, I haue a goodly heritage.’ His paraphrase reads: ‘I have a pleasant seat obtain’d, / A fair and large possession gain’d. / The Lord will I for ever praise.’ Sandys writes as if David has been granted a handsome and flourishing estate, a prosperous home in the country. Marvell may not share that almost country-house perspective, but he does represent his exiles as having been granted a new home – and as recognizing that God, in giving them a new home, has at the same time brought them to a likeness of humankind’s archetypal home. Marvell’s fashioning Bermudas as a psalm-like re-presentation of the Exodus story has, however, a dimension beyond its polemical

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appropriation of Sandys and deployment of scripture. I have proposed that insofar as he brings together the Psalms, Sandys’s A Paraphrase, and the Exodus narrative into a typological mythos, he aligns the Bermudas enterprise, and hence the Oxenbridges’ investment in it, with Calvin’s theology of distance from the world. He connects it unmistakably, closely, and whether by intent or not, with that landmark Protestant reformer’s version of contemptus mundi. His poem consequently has greater theological coherence than has been hitherto acknowledged, and a theological gravitas that compliments the Oxenbridges while contributing, as will be shown below, to his tacit if obvious disparagement of Waller’s The Battle of the Summer Islands. Calvin’s form of contemptus mundi, far from contradicting his assertion that Christians should take ‘pious delight in the works of God’, in fact encompasses and affirms it. At the start of Institutes 3.9.1, ‘Meditation on the Future Life’, he writes as follows. ‘Whatever kind of tribulation presses upon us, we must ever look to this end: to accustom ourselves to contempt for the present life and to be aroused thereby to meditate upon the future life.’ He reformulates that maxim at the section’s conclusion. ‘For this we must believe: that the mind is never seriously aroused to desire and ponder the life to come unless it be previously imbued with contempt for the present life.’ It is logical then for Calvin to remark in his commentary on Psalm 90:4, using the intimately domestic trope of a nest, that one of the ways in which we can most harm ourselves (‘nobis ipsi molesti sumus’) is by foolishly imagining that we have an unending home in this world: ‘quia perpetuum nidum stulte nobis fingimus in mundo’.17 Yet Calvin does not propose that the regenerate should therefore altogether turn away from the world; his view is, rather, that they need to understand its true value and respond accordingly. In short, they need to use it appropriately and not enjoy it for its own sake – an Augustinian distinction recurrent in Calvin’s thought. After all, he writes in his commentary on Psalm 37:9, ‘[T]he possession of the earth, of which David here speaks, is not taken away from the children of God; for they know most certainly that they are the rightful heirs of the world’.18 Calvin takes David himself as exemplifying right use of the world. In the commentary on Psalm 23:6, he remarks: [D]avid makes a manifest distinction between himself and ungodly men, who take pleasure only in filling their bellies with luxuriant fare. And not only so, but he also intimates that to live to God is, in his estimation, of so great importance, that he valued all the comforts of the flesh only in proportion as they served to enable him to live to God. He plainly affirms, that the

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end which he contemplated in all the benefits which God had conferred upon him was, that he might dwell in the house of the Lord.

He continues, a little later: ‘It is, therefore, certain that the mind of David, by the aid of the temporal prosperity which he enjoyed, was elevated to the hope of the everlasting inheritance’.19 Any earthly home thus merely anticipates that true home which is ‘the house of the Lord’.20 All earthly goods are to be used appropriately, that is to say, enjoyed insofar as ‘they. . . enable [their recipient] to live to God’. It is clear, as a result, that ‘pious delight in the works of God’ extends for Calvin beyond a devout appreciation of the creation. The idea includes a devout thankfulness for the worldly goods that God grants the regenerate, and a thankful awareness that in this life one’s ‘nest’ – however secure and pleasant a home it may be – is provisional. All homes are transitional until we reach God. In this wider context of understanding ‘pious delight’ as conceptualized by Calvin, his commentary on Psalm 147 has an illuminating relevance. Of the initial verse he writes: [the Psalmist] speaks of are such as God extends to all men indiscriminately, it is plain that he addresses more especially God’s people, who alone behold his works in an enlightened manner, whereas stupidity and blindness of mind deprive others of their understanding. Nor is his subject confined to the common benefits of God, but the main thing which he celebrates is his mercy, as shown to his chosen people.21

And of verse 19: Although the blessings formerly mentioned are not to be depreciated, they fall far short of this, that he has condescended to be the teacher of his chosen people, by communicating to them that religious doctrine which is a treasure of everlasting salvation. How little would it avail the Church that it were filled with the perishing enjoyments of time, and protected from hostile violence, did not its hope extend beyond this world. This, accordingly, is the grand proof of his love, that he has set before us in his word the light of eternal life. On this account it is appropriately mentioned here as the crowning part of true solid happiness.22

Anyone could be grateful to God in some vague or general way for his gifts, Calvin suggests. But only the regenerate can have an accurate understanding of them, and will be mindful especially of his mercy. Most of all, says Calvin, God’s chosen will appreciate the gift of his word. It is that gift which completes and transcends all the temporal goods given to humankind. So Calvin’s way of thinking here is evident. To his mind, contemptus mundi and ‘pious delight in the works of God’ co-exist in easy harmony. His version of

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the former involves despising undue attachment to the world, not the world itself: that would be blasphemy, since the world was made for us and we should duly rejoice in it, taking advantage of it on our journey towards God yet never letting it take advantage of us. Of course, in such a case our concupiscentia would be misusing the world and ourselves; the world itself would not be misusing us. And to comprehend Calvin’s thought here, as articulated in particular through his commentaries on the Psalms, is to recognize the major theological context of the psalm-like song voiced by Marvell’s rowers as they prepare to land in the Bermudas. How Marvell’s myth of nation and home corresponds to Calvin’s form of contemptus mundi – to the latter’s concept of gratefulness for the world yet necessary distance from it – can be readily demonstrated. At the poem’s beginning, Marvell’s narrator stresses geographical distance when he refers to ‘the remote Bermudas’ (1). Soon after, Marvell’s singers make physical distance between the New World and the Old signify both political and religious distance between them. His singers identify their Old World homeland and home place with Laudian persecution and hence with the royalist politics inseparable from the ecclesiology of the Church of England (12). By contrast, they identify their Promised Land in the New World with true religion. In coming to their new native land and so in fact returning home, they have reached a space designated by God as a home of his word: ‘[He] makes the hollow seas that roar / Proclaim the ambergris on shore. / He cast (of which we rather boast) / The Gospel’s pearl upon our coast’ (27–30). Exiles because, when still in England, they chose to distance themselves from what they saw as the falsification of religion, they now microcosmically inherit the earth and are granted a haven for true religion. Indeed, before them and with them God has effected here not a translatio imperii et studii but verae religionis. Like Calvin, Marvell’s singers view ‘the word’ as God’s greatest gift to ‘his chosen people’; and for them, too, this is ‘the crowning part of true solid happiness’. If the devout exiles recognize that they have been led to a new Promised Land, in this sanctified space they also perceive awaiting them a temple made by divine art. God, they assert, ‘in these rocks for us did frame / A temple, where to sound His name’ (31–2). Divine Providence has granted them ‘the word’ – and therefore ‘that religious doctrine which is a treasure of everlasting salvation’ – along with ‘[a] temple’ in which, by implication, ‘the word’ can be preached as well as God proclaimed. Especially for this reason, then, they again desire to offer God their praise. But this celebration of God they hope to be

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transformative, impacting upon the Catholic territories of Spain. As they would have it: ‘Oh let our voice His praise exalt, / Till it arrive at heaven’s vault: / Which thence (perhaps) rebounding, may / Echo beyond the Mexique Bay’ (33–6). God willing, there will be yet further translatio verae religionis. Thus Marvell presents his singers’ arrival at the Bermudas as a moment of festal homecoming informed by ‘pious delight’, yet he does not present them as having reached the end of all journeying or believing that they have done so. They gratefully acknowledge that one phase, to be sure, is now over. There are rest and plenitude to be appreciated in their new homeland. Nevertheless, the singers’ emphasis on themselves as travellers under the guidance of Divine Providence indicates their understanding that they are still in transition: their typological self-representation implies their plain and happy understanding that earthly journeys have an end only with God, that patria and home lie ultimately beyond even the New World. Marvell’s speaker can justly remark, when he has finished reporting their words: ‘Thus sung they, in the English boat, / An holy and a cheerful note’ (37–8). Marvell’s subordination of his mythmaking in Bermudas to imperatives at once theological and political means that he offers the Oxenbridges – given his poem’s likely provenance – not so much an idealized image of their New World colonial enterprise as something more. He presents them with an image of how that project could be interpreted if one were to look beyond contingency and incongruity, if one were prepared to ask and able to grasp what, finally, it signifies: if, for so the course of his compliment would in effect run, one were numbered among ‘God’s people, who alone behold his works in an enlightened manner’. Precisely that shaping of his poem disparages Waller’s The Battle of the Summer Islands and thereby seeks implicitly to discredit both the royalist poet’s portrayal of the Bermudas colony and the poet himself. Waller’s poem trivializes the Bermudas colony. Mock-heroic in genre, The Battle of the Summer Islands expresses wonder at the climate of the Bermudas and at what grows on the island but amused or contemptuous amazement at what occurs there – and refuses to see any large significance in the colony itself. Insofar as Waller alludes to myth he deploys it for broadly comic effect, in order to heighten the incongruity he posits between the riches of the island and the uncouthness or meanness of its inhabitants. Thus he presents his narrative, and hence the Bermudas colony, in terms of classical myth or history rendered little or grotesque: an aggressively secular and unflattering portrayal. As the opening of his poem suggests, we are on the road to Hudibras.

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a.d. cousins Aid me, Bellona! while the dreadful fight Betwixt a nation and two whales I write. Seas stained with gore I sing, adventurous toil, And how these monsters did disarm an isle.

(1.1–4)

Insofar as Waller is making myth, his classical allusions contribute to a fabling of the Bermudas as the New World wherein the world is turned upside-down: in which, despite an exceptionally benevolent climate and environment, the Golden Age is parodied rather than restored. The colony is not, in Waller’s version of it, a triumph of Divine Providence; it is hardly to be considered the Promised Land conferred anew on a latter-day Chosen People. It offers no staging of the sacred. Rather, it merely contains a theatre of the ludicrous – ‘[a] goodly theatre’ is Waller’s ironic phrase at 2.46 – where natural struggle and defeat are enacted between the colonists and two whales. A few examples will illustrate the extent to which Waller differs from Marvell in portraying the Bermudas colony, and therefore how comprehensively Bermudas implies a determination to overwrite The Battle of the Summer Islands. Straight after the lines quoted above, Waller’s narrator continues: Bermudas walled with rocks, who does not know? That happy island where huge lemons grow, And orange trees, which golden fruit do bear, The Hesperian garden boasts of none so fair; Where shining pearl, coral, and many a pound, On the rich shore, of ambergris is found. The lofty cedar, which to heaven aspires, The prince of trees! Is fuel for their fires; The smoke by which their loaded spits do turn, For incense might on sacred altars burn; Their private roofs on odorous timber borne, Such as might palaces for kings adorn.

(1.5–16)

Bermuda recalls the Fortunate Isles of myth, we are told (‘That happy island’, 6), and can be favourably contrasted with ‘[t]the Hesperian garden’ (8). ‘[W]alled with rocks’ (5) much like the isle of Aeolus, it produces a splendid abundance of exotic food and also of things otherwise valuable – such as ‘pearl’, ‘ambergris’, and ‘cedar’ (9–11). It is a land of perpetual spring: ‘For the kind spring, which but salutes us here, / Inhabits there, and courts them [the colonists] all the year’ (1.40–1). Yet if in its luxuriance the island seems an earthly paradise, the colonists themselves turn it into a parodic locus amoenus. They seem oblivious of the riches they consume, taking them for

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granted. Squandering them in the service of the commonplace, they turn the world upside-down in the process. What Waller’s narrator calls ‘[t]he prince of trees’ they subject to mean use: ‘fuel for [the] fires’ on which they cook (12). The very smoke of those fires might more fitly be incense on ‘sacred altars’ (13–4). Timber fit for kingly palaces they use in domestic roofing (15–6). In this spoiled paradise, Waller suggests, the ideas of nation and of home are caricatured.23 Here can be found little that is decorous, and nothing truly heroic is to be expected – but the grotesquely mock-heroic can certainly be anticipated. Around the Bermudas colony he creates a fable of wryly, perhaps sourly, amusing inversion and failure. Several details of Waller’s poem recur in Marvell’s, particularly those referring to the environment of the Bermudas, and scholars have agreed that Marvell deploys them to highlight his contradiction of Waller’s satire on the colony. In The Battle of the Summer Islands, for example, oranges, pearls, ambergris, and cedar signify the luxuriance of a parodic Fortunate Isle or Garden of the Hesperides. In Bermudas, on the other hand, the same phenomena are identified as part of an Edenic paradise (18, 25, 28–30). Marvell’s patently oppositional use of such specifics led Annabel Patterson to remark: ‘[I]t is rather surprising, given what we know of Marvell’s other responses to Waller, that his borrowings in this instance have not been generally recognized for what they are – an ideological corrective of a “pagan” poem’.24 In the essay where that quotation occurs, Patterson is primarily concerned with how Bermudas relates to the protestant poetics that developed round analysis of the Psalms as devotional literature, and therefore with how its aesthetic implicitly corrects that manifested in The Battle of the Summer Islands. Marvell’s subsuming of specifics in Waller’s poem does indicate an attempt to envelop its secular aesthetic, its entirely secular perspective on the world, in the sacred. Thus, to cite a further example, Waller writes of the Bermudans as enjoying an ever-present spring and portrays their good fortune through a gracefully classical personification (1.40–1). Marvell has his devout exiles explicitly identify the Bermudas’ climate as a gift from God: ‘He gave us this eternal spring’ (13). Yet Marvell’s looking beyond the aesthetic of Waller’s mockheroic poem forms part of a greater ambition. Marvell aims to repudiate Waller’s parodic fable about the Bermudas colony by supplanting it with a typological mythos that sanctifies the project in which the Oxenbridges were then participants. Sanctifying it, he seeks both to disparage The Battle of the Summer Islands and to discredit Waller: to make trivialization of the Bermudas colony in Waller’s poem itself look small – not so much a misrepresentation as an irrelevance – and

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Waller to seem a poet of unenlightened vision. Marvell’s strategy of sanctification implies that Waller cannot transcend the limitations of his merely classical, merely natural perspective. Consequently, The Battle of the Summer Islands shows his failure to perceive the Bermudas project as effecting at once renovatio of the nation in microcosm and a sacred homecoming. When writing of the Bermudas he can only produce a fable of the world turned upside-down and of defeat. Marvell’s response is, as we have seen, to fashion a psalm-like song of providential triumph, a devout and polemical myth that appropriates religious verse by one royalist poet, Sandys’s metrical paraphrases, in order to overwrite the satirically secular verse of another. Waller’s comedy of inversion and failure is therefore challenged by what might be called Marvell’s divine comedy, which he fashions – whether intentionally or not – as theologically coherent in its affinities with Calvin’s thinking on the necessity of distance from the world. Perhaps not the least telling aspect of Marvell’s engaging with Waller on behalf of the Bermudas project is that whereas The Battle of the Summer Islands expansively unfolds its mock-heroics, Bermudas seeks in effect to offer non multum sed omnia in parvo.

Notes 1. Among many studies on that debate, see, for example, Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 154–294; David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 192–378; Robert Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism 1628–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 308–48; Derek Hirst, ‘Literature and National Identity’, and Helen Wilcox, ‘Literature and the Household’, in David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (eds.), The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), respectively at pp. 633–63 and 737–62; Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 116–325; Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England 1603–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 385–525. 2. Lewes Hughes, A Letter, Sent into England from the Summer Islands (1615; rpt. London: EEBO Editions, 2012). 3. The Battle of the Summer Islands was printed in 1645. Reference is from The Poems, ed. G. Thorn Drury (1893; rpt. New York: Greenwood ßPress, 1968), pp. 66–74. 4. Reference to Marvell’s verse is from Nigel Smith (ed.), The Poems of Andrew Marvell, rev. edn (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007). On the date of the poem,

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6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

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see p. 54. See also Nicholas Von Maltzahn, An Andrew Marvell Chronology (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 39, who likewise dates the poem 1653–54. Accounts of Marvell’s response to Waller are usually brief. See, for example, Annabel Patterson, ‘Bermudas and The Coronet: Marvell’s Protestant Poetics’, ELH 44 (1977), 478–99, at 488–9 (this discussion will be cited as Patterson, Bermudas); Philip Brockbank, ‘The Politics of Paradise: “Bermudas”’, in C. A. Patrides (ed.), Approaches to Marvell: The York Tercentenary Papers (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 174–93, at pp. 184–5; Robert Wilcher, Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 143–4; Smith, Poems of Andrew Marvell, p. 55; Takashi Yoshinaka, Marvell’s Ambivalence: Religion and the Politics of Imagination in Mid-Seventeenth Century England (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), p. 253; Paul Davis, ‘Marvell and the Literary Past’, in Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 26–45, at p. 29; Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Adversarial Marvell’, ibid., pp. 174–93, at p. 179. More extended discussion occurs in J. B. Leishman, The Art of Marvell’s Poetry, 2nd edn (London: Hutchinson, 1968), pp. 278–82. In Bermudas, then, I take Marvell’s mythmaking as indirectly aetiological: his singers are not the first English arrivals, but identify the origins of the colony with flight from religious (and hence political) persecution. See Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 110, 113. Institutes 2.6.1 in John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill and trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols. Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960). Quotation from the Institutes and reference in general are to this edition. The ‘stage’ is at once a landing stage and a theatrical space (cf. Smith, Poems of Andrew Marvell, p. 57). Institutes 1.14.20. See Brockbank, ‘Politics of Paradise’, pp. 177, 180–1, and thereafter Smith, Poems of Andrew Marvell, pp. 54, 56–7. Hughes, A Letter, A3ͬ . ͬ Hughes, A Letter, B3ᵛ–B4. C. B. Hardman, ‘Marvell’s “Bermudas” and Sandys’s Psalms’, Review of English Studies 32 (1981), 64–7. See also Hardman, ‘Marvell’s Rowers’, Essays in Criticism 27 (1977), 93–9, and Hardman, ‘Row Well Ye Mariners’, Review of English Studies 51 (2001), 80–2. Smith, Poems of Andrew Marvell, p. 55. If examples were needed here, one could cite 3–7, 11, 16–7, 23, 44, 47, 66, 68, 81, 114, 137, and 149. The passage from 107 is quoted here as printed by Hardman, on page 65 of his 1981 essay. Further quotation from Sandys’s A Paraphrase, unless otherwise noted, will be from George Sandys, The Poetical Works, ed. Richard Hooper, 2 vols. (London: John Russell Smith, 1872).

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16. In the Authorized Version, the relevant verses are at 40:14–16. They are as follows: ‘Let them be ashamed and confounded together, that seeke after my soule to destroy it: let them be driuen backward, and put to shame that wish me euill. Let them be desolate, for a reward of their shame, that say vnto me, Aha, aha! Let all those that seeke thee, reioyce and bee glad in thee: let such as loue thy saluation, say continually, The Lord be magnified.’ Reference to the Authorized Version is from The Holy Bible: Quatercentenary Edition, intro. Gordon Campbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 17. See Ioannis Calvini, In Librum Psalmorum Commentarius, ed. A. Tholuck, Partes Tres (Berolini: Apud Gustavum Eichler, 1836), Pars Secunda, p. 140. Calvin uses the ‘nest’ trope likewise in his commentary on 37:9. 18. Commentary on The Book of Psalms, trans. James Anderson, 5 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979), vol. 2, p. 26. 19. The quotations are from Anderson, Commentary, vol. 1, severally at pp. 399 and 400. 20. Cf. Calvin’s commentary on Psalm 119:54, which runs: ‘The saints are pilgrims in this world, and must be regarded as God’s children and heirs of heaven, from the fact that they are sojourners on earth. By the house of their pilgrimage, then, may be understood their journey through life.’ (Anderson, Commentary, vol. 4, p. 440.) 21. Anderson, Commentary, vol. 5, p. 292. Cf. Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel According to John, trans. William Pringle (1847; rpt. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979), 6:11, vol. 1, p. 230. 22. Ibid, p. 302. 23. As regards caricature of the idea of nationhood, see 1.2 with its clearly parodic use of ‘nation’. 24. Patterson, ‘Bermudas’, p. 488.

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chapter 4

Anne Clifford and Samuel Pepys: diaries and homes Helen Wilcox

On 11 June 1709, the English architect and playwright Sir John Vanbrugh wrote a fervent defence of the practice of preserving old houses. In his view, such ancient buildings were capable of moving ‘more lively and pleasing Reflections (than History without their Aid can do) on the Persons who have Inhabited them; On the Remarkable things which have been transacted in them, Or the extraordinary Occasions of Erecting them’.1 Vanbrugh’s observation offers an elegant summary of the reasons why the homes of the past are such a fascinating and fruitful subject for study: they speak of people, events, and circumstances, in ways that particularize and enliven our understanding of history. Keeping these ‘Reflections’ in mind, this essay will focus on the homes, both physical and metaphorical, of two ‘extraordinary’ seventeenth-century English characters, the diarists Anne Clifford and Samuel Pepys. Both were strong individuals who recorded their daily lives in careful and often revealing detail; in both cases, their houses were evidently vital to their sense of selfhood. By analysing the contrasting attitudes to home expressed in the pages of the Clifford and Pepys diaries, this chapter will highlight the issues of class, gender, and self-fulfilment implicit in the writers’ attitudes to the buildings in which they lived. Both Clifford and Pepys witnessed what Vanbrugh would certainly have called ‘Remarkable things’ in and around their homes; their re-making of these experiences and locations, by means of remembering and writing, is the subject of this chapter.

‘The place of Selfe fruition’ Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676) should have been the heir to the northern estates and five castles of her father, the Earl of Cumberland, who died when she was fifteen. However, he chose to leave these vast homelands to his brother instead, and it was almost another forty years before the male line died out and Anne Clifford finally came, by accident as it were, into 49

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her inheritance. In the meantime, she and her mother had always maintained her right to the estates and rugged residences in the Pennines: this Englishwoman’s home was now most definitely her castles. The very idea of home, therefore, was a contentious one for much of Clifford’s life; the ‘business’, as she called it, of her outstanding claim to the Cumberland inheritance dominated her marriage to Richard Sackville, Earl of Dorset, who even took her before the King in 1617 in an effort to persuade her to accept a cash settlement instead.2 Clifford was indomitable and, having outlived this spendthrift first husband, went on to marry Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, whom she left once she had, finally, come into her northern inheritance. Both of her husbands possessed great houses – Knole in Kent and Wilton in Wiltshire – but to Clifford these were only temporary residences. As she wrote in a vividly reflective moment, ‘the marble pillars of Knole and Wilton were to mee oftentimes but the gay Arbours of Anguish’ (p. 94). These pillared houses, however grand, were not homes to her, but marble shells within which she suffered as though in exile; echoing the language of the Bible, she likened herself to an ‘Owl in the Desert’ when living at Knole (p. 33).3 In contrast to this image of life in the wilderness, Clifford perceived her arrival in her own family homes as an entry into the Promised Land. Delighting in her ‘settled aboad’ in the ‘ancient Houses of mine Inheritance’ in 1651, she quoted a more cheerful Psalm: ‘The Lott is fallen to mee in a pleasant place. I have a fair Heritage’ (p. 112).4 Once she was mistress of her own homes, Clifford set about restoring them after their many years of neglect, and repairing the damage done to them during the recent Civil War. When they were habitable again, she resided in each of her castles in turn, often for several months at a time and occasionally for as long as a year, especially in her apparent favourite, Appleby Castle. When she ‘removed’ to another of her homes, Clifford travelled with her entire household, referring to her servants as her ‘family’ (p. 124) and defying the elements and her own increasing ill health as though she were on a royal progress across the rough Cumberland terrain. Clifford transformed these ancient and in many ways non-domestic homes into seats of hospitality, authority, and devotion, as meals, legal sittings, and church services were all held at her behest within their walls. Her diary entries reveal that she took pride in her houses principally because of the layers of dynastic history that they represented. She clearly relished the responsibility she had gained for the care of these ancestral homes, even if it was at ‘exceeding great Cost’ to her. As she wrote in September 1661:

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And the 16th day of this month did I remove out of Appleby Castle into Brough Castle in Westmerland where I now lay for three nights together, the first night in that halfe round Tower call’d Cliffords Tower, and the other two nights in the second Roome of the great Tower call’d Roman Tower, both of which Towers and Castle were newly repaired by mee to my exceeding great Cost and Charges after they had layen desolate ever since the Timber thereof was casually burnt in the yeare 1521, some two yeares and a little more before the death of that Henrie Lord Clifford, my Auncestor who was father to Henrie Lord Clifford first Earle of Cumberland. (p. 152)

There is an overwhelming sense of history in this passage: the family history of ‘Auncestors’, emphasized in the repeated use of the family name (her own maiden name which she kept all her life, despite her two marriages); the origin of the Earldom of Cumberland and the honour done to the family through the second Henrie Clifford; the damage done to Brough Castle by fire more than a hundred years previously; and at the deepest level of all, the reference to ancient, pre-medieval history in the ‘great Tower call’d Roman Tower’ in which she slept for two nights. Clifford’s home – and her diary, its textual counterpart – is a record of the accidents and quirks of history, a composite physical memorial to the layers of the past. In a recent fascinating account of Home: The story of everyone who ever lived in our house, Julie Myerson observes that houses are repositories of the memory of repeated events, by which ‘past, present, and future collid[e] in a single home’.5 To Anne Clifford, the significance of her castles was precisely this capacity to contain and express the convergence of events and the coincidence of place. Her diary reveals that these collisions of past, present and future could even be focused on individual rooms in her houses, as in an entry from 1653/4: The ninth day of December I removed from Appleby Castle into Brougham Castle in Westmerland, where I continued to lye in the Chamber where my Father was borne, and my Blessed Mother dyed, till the eleventh of Aprill following that I removed thence to Skipton. And I had not layne in this Brougham Castle in Thirty Seaven yeares till now. (p. 120)

This passage confirms that Clifford’s perceptions of home always took a simultaneously personal and historical perspective, even when she was recounting an event from her immediate contemporary experience. Her involvement with Brougham Castle is not simply one of restoring stonework and repairing roofs – for this house of hers had indeed been ‘verie ruinous and much out of repaire’ just two years earlier (p. 110) – but also one of self-construction through the intersection of time and place. Her

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father’s birth and mother’s death frame her life, and by her rhetoric it is clear, in passing, that her preference is for the notably ‘Blessed’ mother who took her part in the battle over her inheritance of these very castles. These moments of birth and death, and the span of the two lives which gave rise to her own, are identified specifically with one ‘Chamber’ from which she had been symbolically absent for her entire married life. To have returned to this place of origin and self-definition was to have come ‘home’ in the sense of the word that we associate with a computer keyboard nowadays: to go back to the beginning of the line. Although this may seem a particular concern of our own day, the idea of home as a place of origin and self-fulfilment is not only implicit in Clifford’s written account of her castles (as we have seen) but also explicitly explored in these diaries. In 1651, taking enormous pleasure in rebuilding three of the ‘ancient Houses of mine Inheritance’ and making a ‘settled aboad’ in their chambers, Clifford admits that houses and personalities are identified with one another: I doe more and more fall in love with the contentments and innocent pleasures of a Country Life. Which humour of mine I do [wish] with all my heart (if it bee the Will of Almightie God) may be conferred upon my Posteritie that are to succeed mee in these places, for a Wife and Lady oneself, to make their owne houses the place of Selfe fruition and bee comfortably part of this Life. (p. 112)

In the somewhat entangled syntax of this prose, Clifford implies that her houses are the setting in which she will become more completely herself, as a ‘Wife and Lady’. But at the same time she emphasizes the importance of ensuring the future, envisaging her daughters also as wives and ladies in these same houses, instituting a female line to maintain and continue the pleasures of this ‘innocent’ country life. Here ‘Selfe fruition’ is a distinctly female concept, building (literally) on the foundations of her male ancestors but finding its anticipated fulfilment in the light of the religiously sanctioned ‘Posteritie’ in the persons of her daughters. Interestingly, in the very same year Clifford ‘was present at the laying of the first foundacion stone of my Almshouse or Hospitall here in Apleby Towne’ (p. 110), a building designed for a rather different kind of posterity, creating secure if modest homes for the poorer women of the district. The phrase ‘Selfe-fruition’, which lies at the heart of Clifford’s sense of the function of houses, is a fascinating encapsulation of an almost organic sense of home as a setting in which growth, whether physical or psychological, takes place. While in Clifford’s text the phrase has particularly feminine

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overtones – it is her own fruitfulness which has ensured that the northern castles will have an ancestral future – it is curious to note that the very same words are used in relation to houses by a male contemporary, the seventeenth-century learned diplomat and writer, Sir Henry Wotton: Every Mans proper Mansion House and Home, being the Theatre of his Hospitality, the Seate of Selfe-fruition, the Comfortablest part of his own Life, the Noblest of his Sonnes Inheritance, a kinde of private Princedome; Nay, to the Possessors therof, an Epitomie of the whole World: may well deserve by these Attributes, according to the degree of the Master, to be decently and delightfully adorned.6

To Wotton, as to Clifford, a ‘House and Home’ is a place of comfort in both material and personal ways, and it is the ‘Theatre’ of many actions, including the fulfilment of the individual self. Not surprisingly, however, Wotton’s account is firmly masculine in its vocabulary and assumptions: the house is an emblem of the patriarchal line, from ‘Princedom’ to ‘Sonnes Inheritance’. The parallels with Clifford’s matriarchy, in which self-fruition, inheritance, and authority were solidly female achievements, suggest the boldness of her identification with the male landowning mentality of the early modern period. For both Wotton and Clifford, the house was an emblem of hospitality in which the host could be ‘Master’ – or Mistress – of its propriety. A ‘Mansion’ was an ‘Epitomie of the whole World’, a microcosm in which the individual and the nation, the historic and the immediate, met and merged.

‘Home to dinner’ While Anne Clifford was becoming mistress of her castles in the ‘Princedom’ of the north, the young Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) was beginning to make his way in the mercantile and governmental circles of Restoration London. These two colourful personalities, Clifford and Pepys, have two features in common: a love of houses, and an inveterate diary-keeping instinct. However, a great deal divides them, in addition to the obvious differences of gender and generation. In terms of social class, Pepys was considerably lower than Clifford. She was part of the aristocracy by birth and marriage, whereas he was one of the new civil servants of the Restoration government, working in the Naval Office; his main contacts among aristocrats were his patrons, not his equals. Clifford kept diaries, genealogies, and event books until the day she died, at age 86, while Pepys’s painstakingly devoted diary-keeping lasted for nine years, from 1660–69,

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until his eyesight began to fail. This decade, however, represented the formative years of his career and of the new political culture after the Commonwealth period, and during it the diary reveals the importance to Pepys of his gradually improving residences. Pepys was eager to possess his own ‘proper Mansion House and Home’, as Wotton termed it, but the crucial contrast between his situation and Clifford’s was that she inherited her castles – in the end – whereas Pepys had to work his way upwards in the Restoration housing stakes. While Clifford’s homes represented her ancestral past, the houses in which Pepys lived symbolized his current status and hoped-for future advancement. In both cases, their own identities lay at the heart of the home, but their discourses of self-expression took inspiration from very different sources: ancient castles and early modern domesticity, respectively. Ironically, both Clifford and Pepys had difficulty in realizing their ideal households. Clifford was forced to wait several decades before being able to inhabit the houses which in her view rightly belonged to her, and Pepys never quite fulfilled the norms of ‘family, intimacy, and a devotion to the home’ which are said to typify seventeenth-century domestic life.7 Pepys and his young French wife were apparently unable to have children, and Pepys’s sexual infidelities with serving maids and other women form a continuous undertone – and sometimes even a significant melody – in his diary. This metaphor is deliberately chosen, since music, whether performed by others or played in his own chamber with friends, was one of Pepys’s chief delights. Typically, the pleasure that he took in making improvements to his home in Seething Lane, in the City of London, centred on his music room. This formed a significant extension to the house and he gave it much attention; in the diary entry for 9 April 1666, he speaks of discussing with his ‘Joyner’ the plans to convert his serving-boy’s room to make a bigger communal chamber, ‘purposing it shall be a room to eat and for to have Musique in’.8 By 27 April, the alterations have advanced to the point where he can hang the pictures on the wall and take pride in the new space: Abroad to many several places about several businesses: to my Lord Treasurer’s, Westminster, and I know not where. At noon to the Change a little, and then bespoke some maps to hang in my new Roome (my boy’s room), which will be very pretty. Home to dinner; and after dinner to the hanging up of maps and other things for the fitting of the room, and now it will certainly be one of the handsomest and most useful rooms in my house—so that what with this room and the room on my leads, my house is half as good again as it was. All this afternoon about this, till I was so weary,

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and it was late, I could do no more, but finished the room; so I did not get out to the office all the day long. At night spent a good deal of time with my wife and Mercer, teaching them a song; and so after supper, to bed. (p. 610)

In a familiar and candid tone, Pepys outlines his day, and it is evident that the house and its new room are the absolute centre of his energies. He dismissively refers to his errands for work, including a visit to the ‘Change’ [Exchange], and does not even take the trouble to list the places where he goes, but simply sums them up as ‘I know not where’. When he is out and about on ‘several businesses’, he is distracted enough to order some ‘very pretty’ maps to decorate the walls of the new room. And once he is at home working on the preparation of the room, he tires himself out with these domestic improvements to such an extent that he does not ‘get out to the office’ at all. Home is the place where he wants to be on this particular day: getting out, or going ‘I know not where’, is apparently nowhere near as exciting. He begins the day with a bit of placename-dropping, but soon tires of this and the external world it represents, as the attractions of domesticity loom: ‘Home to dinner’. The pleasures of home are material and satisfying, marked by a mixture of pride and practicality: the description of the new room as both ‘handsome’ and ‘useful’ brings together the aesthetic and the quotidian, as is typical of Restoration pragmatism and highly appropriate in the diary mode. The day ends with one of Pepys’s favourite codas: music, female company, and ‘so. . . to bed’. What appears to matter to Pepys is to have a house furnished with tangible goods: books, musical instruments, maps, wardrobes of fashionable and well-made clothes (after all, he was the son of a tailor), clocks, fine food, and drink, and – an equally collectible item – people. When Pepys records his visit to Sir Robert Brookes’s house in the first part of his diary entry for 14 May 1665, the juxtaposition with his own home and its values is telling: Up, and with my wife to church, it being Whitsunday. My wife very fine in a new yellow birds-eye Hood, as the fashion is now. We had a most sorry sermon. So home to dinner, my mother having her new suit brought home. After dinner my wife and she and Mercer to Tho. Pepys’s wife’s christening of his first child. And I took a coach and to Wanstead, the house where Sir H. Mildmay did [live] and now Sir Rob. Brookes lives, having bought it of the Duke of Yorke, it being forfeited to him. A fine seat, but an old-fashion house and being not full of people, looks desolately. (p. 490)

The day begins well: it is the Lord’s day and there is a chance to show off his wife in her yellow outfit at church, even if the sermon is a disappointment. The interlude at his house – once again, ‘home to dinner’ – is a time for

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sustenance and good company, before the women depart for the christening and Pepys goes to look at another man’s house. His observations are intriguing, and suggest that the significance of this larger, grander house is its political and mercantile background: he is interested in who owned it, to whom it was forfeit after the Civil War, and what its sad current state might be, even though it is in principle a ‘fine seat’. In contrast to the mistress of his own home, who is definitely in ‘fashion’, Brookes’s house is condemned as being out of fashion – a major fault in Pepys’s eyes – and, most importantly, the house appears empty of people, its life-blood. Without the bustle of inhabitants, the house ‘looks desolately’ and is not, it would seem, a home. If Anne Clifford had visited the same house at Wanstead, no doubt she would have approved of its ‘old-fashion’ impression; the antiquity of her castles was a key element in their attractiveness to her, and the pedigree of past owners, particularly her own ancestors, defined the value of a residence. Pepys, on the other hand, estimated the status of houses on the grounds of their current rather than past inhabitants. People mattered to him, and the steady flow of visitors to his own house is carefully noted in his diary. Indeed, he measured the success of his own home improvements in terms of the impact they had on his visitors – suggesting that acquaintances were not only of significance for his social contacts and career advancement, but also for his domestic pride. The entry in his diary for 7 January 1664 is particularly revealing on this score: At noon all of us to dinner at Sir W. Pens [sic], where a very handsome dinner. Sir J. Lawson among others, and his lady and his daughter, a very pretty lady and of good deportment – with looking upon whom I was greatly pleased. . . . But to see how Sir W. Penn imitates me in everything, even in his having of his chimney piece in his dining-room the same with that in my wife’s closet and in everything else, I perceive, wherein he can. (p. 341)

The unashamedness of Pepys’s material observations here are especially striking: his time at Sir William Penn’s house is remembered for the ‘handsome’ food and women, but also for the secret pleasure of knowing that his own taste in household decoration has been copied by his host. Since Pepys invested so much of his self in his house – his aesthetic judgement, his passion for books and music, his sense of good company, in addition to a fair amount of his anxiously accumulated money – it is not surprising that the Great Fire of London in September 1666 was a terrifying personal threat, as well as a vivid experience recorded in great detail in his diary. As the ‘extremely dreadfull’ flames encroach upon his neighbourhood,

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Pepys removes all the goods from his home, takes his ‘money and Iron chests’ to the cellar, and buries his wine and ‘parmazan cheese’ in the garden (pp. 664, 662, 664). After several nights of sleeping at his office and days of surveying the devastation – ‘our feet ready to burn, walking through the town among the hot coles’ (p. 666) – he is able to return home, knowing that his house has been saved. The anxiety, however, continues, as the entry for 14 September records: Up, and to work, having Carpenters come to help in setting up bedsteads and hangings; and at that trade my people and I all the morning, till pressed by public business to leave them, against my will, in the afternoon; and yet I was troubled in being at home, to see all my goods lie up and down in the house in a bad condition, and strange workmen going to and fro might take what they would almost. (pp. 670–1)

This unsettled ‘being at home’ after the Great Fire suggests how difficult it was for Pepys to feel ‘at home’ in his disrupted household, with the belongings that define him having being displaced and rendered vulnerable. His domestic identity has been invaded by London’s disaster, and in describing the demands of work as ‘public business’ Pepys articulates an emerging sense of the opposition of public and private in the understanding of home. Anne Clifford did not experience the Great Fire at first hand, but recorded it in her diary once the news of it had reached her in the north of England: The 2nd day of this September being Sunday, about 2 a clock in the morning, whilst my Daughter of Thanet and her three youngest Daughters lay here in Skipton Castle with me, . . . did a great fire break out in severall places and Houses within the Walles of the Citty of London, which continued raging there for about 4 dayes together before it could be quenched. And in that time consumed and burnt downe not only Baynards Castle, but Great Dorsett House and Little Dorsett House (in which place I had spent much of my time when I was Wife to my first and second Husbands), but also did consume that ancient and Noble Church of St Paules. (p. 183)

Clifford’s perspective is framed by her awareness of dwelling-places: the preamble locates her at home in Skipton with her daughter and granddaughters staying there, and the account of the fire itself focuses on the loss of her past residences, as well as the destruction of the medieval cathedral. Where Clifford looks back, through ‘ancient and Noble’ places and dynasties, Pepys looks forward. For while he is struck by the melting of monuments around him, he worries about the future, in material terms both

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personal and national: he hopes that the porters who returned his wine to the cellar of his house did not notice his money-chests there, and is troubled by the thought that ‘the rents of houses lost [in] this fire in the City comes to 600000 l per annum’ (p. 671).

‘Be thou thine owne home’ As the episode of the Fire of London reminds us, Clifford and Pepys were writing their diaries, and re-making their homes, in the same period as one another, despite the fact that Clifford was some forty years older than Pepys. She had come into her inheritance late in life and had only been able to inhabit her northern castles once the Civil War was over; Pepys was a young man making his way in the political turmoil of Restoration London. Simultaneously, therefore, Clifford was rebuilding and restoring houses from the past, while Pepys was furnishing and improving the homes for his future. This contrast may unsettle some of our gender stereotypes: Clifford the woman ‘enjoyed [her] selfe in Building and Reparacons’ (p. 106) and was concerned with dynasty, while Pepys the man liked to embellish his houses and was concerned with domesticity. However, in other ways the differences between the two suggest the changing idea of home in the later seventeenth century. Clifford represented the values of the hierarchical society that came to an end with the execution of Charles I in 1649; Pepys was part of the changing culture of England after the revolutionary experiences of the mid seventeenth century. Clifford was, we might say, one of the last of the medievalists in her aristocratic sense of home as an inherited tradition, whereas Pepys was among the first of the bourgeois individualists, moving up the ladder in housing and career terms and perceiving his home as a statement of his position. Thus he created and experienced homes sequentially, moving from a smaller house in Axe Yard to the larger residence in Seething Lane during the diary years; Clifford, on the other hand, owned all her ancestral castles concurrently and transferred her household from one to the next on a regular basis. While both diarists were acutely aware of where they slept, recording this in faithful detail, Clifford notes the coincidences which form the history of the castle, chamber, or even bed in which she passes the night, in contrast to the simplicity of the steady formula with which Pepys closes his diary entries: ‘so home and to bed’. Beyond these intriguing contrasts of lifestyle and perspective, Clifford and Pepys are united by their desire to record in written form their relationships with the houses in which they lived. As Zoe Heller observes

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in her novel, Notes on a Scandal, memory is not an ‘obedient’ faculty, and it is hard to know what detail will ‘unlock’ the memories of a particular house in the future: and so the writer persists in ‘making [her] little inventory, trying to nail down [her] recollections’.9 Clifford and Pepys were so committed to these inventories of recollections that we call diaries, that they went to enormous lengths to preserve them. Clifford left behind her a veritable library of carefully written volumes of family history and personal journals, with the new page for the day of her death marked up and ready to be filled; and when Pepys’s house actually did burn down, not in the Great Fire but by accident seven years later, his diaries were among the few favoured possessions that he was able to save.10 It is clear that the keeping of a diary provided Clifford and Pepys with a kind of parallel home: a place of security and self-expression, made of language and textuality rather than stone or brick. Their diaries were a kind of safe haven, protected by the keeping of copies (in Clifford’s case) or by writing in code (as Pepys famously did). By recording their lives in protected words, they were building storehouses of memories, or galleries of anecdote and experience to be revisited – and it is no coincidence that these metaphors are architectural. Michel de Montaigne wrote in his Essayes that memory itself is like a building stocked full of ammunition, more potent even than imagination: ‘the Magazin of Memorie’, he observed, ‘is peradventure more stored with matter, then is the storehouse of invention’.11 The diary is a textual place from which to see off oblivion. In this sense, then, Anne Clifford and Samuel Pepys were remaking their homes daily; they may have worked with and through stone-masons and carpenters to restore their castles and improve their lodgings, but they themselves used the quill to reconstruct their homes as the place of ‘Selfe fruition’, to quote the expressive phrase used by both Clifford and Wotton. Whereas castles revealed their vulnerability to warfare and weather, and houses were shown to be combustible, the diaries of Clifford and Pepys, their portable metaphorical homes, survived. As the poet John Donne, an acquaintance of Anne Clifford during her first marriage,12 wrote to his friend Sir Henry Wotton on the subject of houses and homes: Be thou thine owne home, and in thy selfe dwell; Inne any where, continuance maketh hell, And seeing the snaile, which every where doth rome, Carrying his owne house still, still is at home. Follow (for he is easie pac’d) this snaile, Bee thine owne Palace, or the world’s thy gaole.13

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Writers of diaries are indeed like snails who carry their own houses with them and are therefore always ‘at home’; a diary is a textual shell, within which, as though within themselves, they ‘dwell’. The diaries of Clifford and Pepys may not be ‘Palaces’ their written structures are repetitive, as in any diary, and their styles are idiosyncratic, as befits such characters – but these texts were undoubtedly sites on which selves were made and remade. ‘The home is a place of paradoxes’, writes John Rennie Short,14 and this is above all true of its capacity to remain a fixed point of reference while evolving with those who inhabit it, whether the home is a material or a linguistic dwelling-place.

Notes 1. Christopher Ridgeway and Robert Williams (eds.), Sir John Vanbrugh and Landscape Architecture in Baroque England, 1690–1730 (Stroud: Sutton, 200), p. 191. 2. Lady Anne Clifford, The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. D.J.H. Clifford (Stroud: Sutton, 1990), pp. 31, 45–7. All subsequent references to The Diaries will be cited in the text. 3. See Psalm 102:6. 4. See Psalm 16:5. 5. Julie Myerson, Home: The story of everyone who ever lived in our house (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), p. 66. 6. Sir Henry Wotton, The Elements of Architecture (London, 1624), p. 82. 7. Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 75. 8. Samuel Pepys, The Shorter Pepys, ed. Robert Latham (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 605. All subsequent references to The Shorter Pepys will be cited in the text. 9. Zoe Heller, Notes on a Scandal (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 239. 10. Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 297. 11. Michel de Montaigne, Essayes, trans. John Florio (London, 1603), p. 15. 12. Richard T. Spence, Lady Anne Clifford (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), p. 14. 13. John Donne, The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C.A. Patrides. (London: Dent, 1985), p. 258. 14. John Rennie Short, ‘Foreword’, in Irene Cieraad (ed.), At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), pp. ix–x, at iv.

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chapter 5

Home and away in the poetry of Andrew Marvell and some of his influences and contemporaries Nigel Smith

In this essay I take a close and literal-minded look at the word ‘home’ in Marvell’s poetry, with ‘homeland’ as a secondary consideration. I am not so much interested in the various constructions of narratives of home and homecoming that have been convincingly found in Marvell’s verse, with both transcendental and transatlantic resonances, as in the work that the very word ‘home’ does.1 It will lead in turn to some unusual comparisons both within Marvell’s verse and with that of some of his contemporaries. There is little sense of home as a domestic space in Marvell’s poetry. Rather, home is the homeland, the patriotic threshold, patria: Not full sails hasting loaden home, Nor the chaste Lady’s pregnant womb, Nor Cynthia teeming shows so fair, As two eyes swoll’n with weeping are.2

(33–6)

In a conceit Thomas Carew imagines the love letters his mistress has just demanded back travelling ‘Home to their native soil from banishment’.3 The sense is the same in Marvell’s The Character of Holland, albeit introduced with irony: if the drunken brawling Dutch can maim each other so brutally while at home among themselves, how will they behave towards foreigners when in other countries? ‘But when such amity at home is showed; / What then are their confed’racies abroad?’ (101–2). In The First Anniversary of the Government under his Highness the Lord Protector, this division is given a diplomatic, international relations cast, as Lord Protector Cromwell’s excellence is judged in his ability to be no more than another citizen in the eyes of his countrymen at home, while viewed from abroad he seems a king. Thus, in the words of the awed and jealous foreign monarch, probably Felipe IV of Spain: He seems a king by long succession born, And yet the same to be a king does scorn. 61

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nigel smith Abroad a king he seems, and something more, At Home a Subject on the equal Floor.

(387–90)

A negative inversion of the dualism is applied to Cromwell’s opposite, The Earl of Clarendon, Charles II’s first chief minister, who, in The Third Advice to a Painter: ‘Abroad all princes disobliging first, / At home, all parties but the very worst’ (259–60). Elsewhere, in Tom May’s Death, for instance, there is a sense of home as dwelling, but poets are not wealthy and the prospects are not great: ‘And with the public gravity would come, / When thou hadst drunk thy last to lead thee home’ (83–4). It turns out that ‘home’ is a tomb, a common enough usage, where Tom May is the unworthy inhabitant: If that can be thy home where Spenser lies, And reverend Chaucer, but their dust does rise Against thee, and expels thee from their side, As th’eagle’s plumes from other birds divide.

(85–9)

In A Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda, Dorinda claims that her humble dwelling with Thyrsis is their Elizium, but Thyrsis will instruct her that ‘home’ (7) is the afterlife in heaven. Yet a home is a simple dwelling for Marvell’s mowers: I am the mower Damon, known Through all the Meadows I have mown. On me the morn her dew distills Before her darling daffodils. And, if at noon my toil me heat, The sun himself licks off my sweat. While, going home, the ev’ning sweet (Damon the Mower, 41–8) In cowslip-water bathes my feet.

This sense is echoed by the evocation of domestic simplicity in The Third Advice to a Painter where with mock-heroic precision the Duchess of Albemarle, by birth a farrier’s daughter, waits in a homely manner for her husband to return, as it were, from a hard day’s work in the fields: The sad tale found her in her outer room Nailing up hangings, not of Persian Loom, Like chaste Penelope, that ne’er did roam, But made all fine against her George came home; Upon a ladder, in her coat most shorter, She stood, with groom and porter for supporter.

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(173–8)

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The word is used to ram the bathos of home later in the poem: ‘For shame come home, George; ‘tis, for thee, too much / To fight at once with Heaven and the Dutch’ (411–2). In Marvell’s controversial prose work Mr. Smirke; or, the Divine in Mode (1676), the adjectival sense of ‘homely’ points in the same way: ‘Which has occasioned the homely Scotch Proverb, that, An Ounce of Mother-Wit is worth a Pound of Clergy.’4 It is indeed vulgar wisdom, occasioning the ironic comment in The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672) that Marvell the anonymous speaker should not treat Samuel Parker too meanly: ‘But I must ask his pardon if I treat him too homely. It is his own fault that misled me at first, by concealing his quality under such vulgar comparisons as De-Wit and the Burgomasters.’5 ‘Home’ is a decidedly vernacular word, and we find denser usages of it in writers less well-educated and immersed in ancient and contemporary European languages than Marvell. A cursory analysis of the usage of ‘home’ and ‘homely’ in English conversion narratives and related literature, including John Bunyan and John Rogers, bears this contention out. In a more expansive but decidedly classical mood, Marvell can make the mower speak of ‘home’ in the sense of a certain identity of self, of a being at one with himself: Your courteous lights in vain you waste, Since Juliana here is come, For she my Mind hath so displaced That I shall never find my home. (‘The Mower to the Glow-worms’, 13–6)

He’ll never find his way home to his humble cottage; he’ll never be content with himself again, since she has so disturbed him; he’ll always be displaced. One of the key source texts for Marvell’s poem is Virgil’s first Eclogue, where the loss of a homeland is the fundamental reality for the two pastoral speakers, Tityrus and Meliboeus: ‘nos patriae fines et dulcia linquimus arva. / nos patriam fugimus’ (3–4; I from my sweet fields, And home’s familiar bounds, even now depart. / Exiled from home am I.). Home here is two things: the sense of dwelling and home as patria are mixed together. That is not the case in the eponymously titled verse satire where the poet-lutanist-priest Richard Flecknoe is imagined as so offended by a performance of his verse that he retires to his tiny garret (which has been described in unusual detail by Marvell) in order to have a refuge: Whereat, I, now Made mediator, in my room, said, ‘Why, To say that you read false Sir is no lie.’

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nigel smith Thereat the waxen youth relented straight; But saw with sad despair that ‘twas too late. For the disdainful poet was retired Home, his most furious satire to have fired Against the rebel, who, at this struck dead, Wept bitterly as disinherited. (‘Flecknoe, an English Priest at Rome’, 154–62)

Nonetheless he is an Englishman abroad, albeit an English Roman Catholic in his second home, Rome. The different senses of home resonate in this poem. Home is the last resort: it is where you go to lick your wounds, and it can be your tomb. It guarantees a coming together of the self that the world will fracture. Above all, the word ‘home’ expresses a refuge that is always somewhat unstable because somewhat undefined. Indeed what do we see of such ‘home’ in Marvell? In the prose works, the very frequent invocation of ‘home’ in the sense of ‘here in England’ and not abroad leads the reader to the further sense that ‘home’ is also simply not the public arena. It is not somewhere that need be or deserves to be described; it is simply that which is away from the political agora, so to speak, and might as well be a place of banishment rather than a gratefully embraced retreat: But because it appears not that all these, and many others of more secret nature, passed the Royall Assent, it sufficeth thus far to have mentioned them. Only it is most certain, that although the English Parliament was kept aloof from the business of War, Peace, and Alliance, as improper for their intermedling, & Presumptuous. Yet with these 3 Estates of France all these things were Negotiated and transacted in the Greatest confidence. And so they were Adjourned from New-Market to London, and there continued till the return of the English Parliament, when they were dismissed home with all the signs and demonstrations of mutual satisfaction.6

Oddly it is a bishop’s house where for once in Marvell we see the singular detail of a feast: ‘They were used Sozom. l. 2. c.16. at Alexandria to keep yearly a solemn Festival to the memory of Peter one of their former Bishops, upon the same day he suffered Martyrdom, which Alexander having Celebrated at the Church with publick Devotion, was sitting after at home expecting some guests to dine with him, Sozom. l.2.c.16.’7 There is more information about what home might actually be in some of the contemporary poets who most influenced Marvell, as opposed to Marvell’s writings themselves. Robert Herrick actually creates a pastoral scene of staying at home when he imagines his collection Hesperides (1648) as a young woman, his muse:

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Whither Mad maiden wilt thou roame? Farre safer ’twere to stay at home: Where thou mayst sit, and piping please The poore and private Cottages. ... Stay then at home, and doe not goe Or flie abroad to seeke for woe. Contempts in Courts and Cities dwell; No Critick haunts the Poore mans Cell: Where thou mayst hear thine own Lines read By no one tongue, there, censured. (2. To his Muse, 1–4, 19–24)8

It is a rural world where conviviality and poverty or dearth live sometimes side by side. Indeed there are shortages everywhere: ‘Huncks ha’s no money (he do’s sweare, or say) / About him, when the Taverns shot’s to pay. / If he ha’s none in’s pockets, trust me, Huncks / Ha’s none at home, in Coffers, Desks, or Trunks.’ (463. Upon Huncks. Epig.) Herrick’s setting for his poems is both the country and the city, so that the cottage is juxtaposed with an urban identity, fusing Rome and London: I am a free-born Roman; suffer then, That I amongst you live a Citizen. London my home is: though by hard fate sent Into a long and irksome banishment.

(713. ‘His returne to London’, 11–5).

Cottage industry is plainly visible: the ploughman returns from work to his spinning wife. But even in the country there are ways more associated with the city. Slouch the petty merchant goes abroad, and his wife entertains in their dwelling. We can just begin to see a little detail here: ‘Meane time that he from place to place do’s rome, / His wife her owne ware sells as fast at home.’ (753. Upon Slouch, 3–4). Moreover, shoddy domestic dinner parties are just as likely to occur in town as in the country, as recounted in ‘The Invitation’. On the other hand some people just live it up by entitlement: O Pompe of Glory! Welcome now, and come To re-possess once more your long’d-for home. A thousand Altars smoake; a thousand thighes Of Beeves here ready stand for Sacrifice. Enter and prosper. (961. TO THE KING, Upon his welcome to Hampton-Court. Set and Sung, 5–9).

Behind Herrick is the certain presence of Martial, with home (the domus) as the refuge from the caustic public sphere of Rome, as he says to his

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books: ‘I, fuge! sed poteras tutior esse domi’ (‘Go, fly, but home were yet thy safer road’).9 This epigram is even more obviously behind Herrick: ‘Philo nere sups at home he swears: tis true, / For not invited crib must want his due.’10 There are many others.11 The appeal of Martial’s love of rural simplicity is further evident when Mildmay Fane, second Earl of Westmorland (a more socially elevated poet than Herrick, but no less close in literary terms to Marvell), translates ‘convictus facilis, sine arte mensa’ (Martial, Epigrams, X.xlvii.8) as ‘Homely fare, not sought from far; / The table without art’s help spread.’12 Yet when all is said and done, home as opposed to abroad is the most common definition in all of Marvell’s writing, and this dichotomy relates intrinsically to his poetic mapping of nationhood. His stated version of the island kingdom and its sanctity, isolated from Europe’s wars, if wracked by civil war itself, may be found in its simplest form in ‘Upon Appleton House’: Oh thou, that dear and happy isle The garden of the world ere while, Thou Paradise of foúr seas, Which heaven planted us to please.

(321–4)

Panegyric demands this premium affirmation, as also does satire, although it is in Marvell’s first anti-Dutch satire that he begins to find the very terms in English that he uses to mock the Dutch for their watery nation reflecting back on the nature of Englishness itself. Borders begin to dissolve in these circumstances: Hence some small dyke-grave unperceived invades The power, and grows as ’twere a King of Spades. But for less envy some joint States endures, Who look like a Commission of the Sewers. For these Half-anders, half wet, and half dry, Nor bear strict service, nor pure liberty. (The Character of Holland, 49–54)

As I have noted elsewhere, the poetic ingenuity of these lines reflects as much upon the terms of English identity and the wet, flat, eastern English landscape as they do upon the Dutch, and their complex, essential network of water barriers.13 The poem shows, despite its explicit satirical intentions, the continuity between English and Dutch landscape, terms, and culture. The sea becomes the centre of this arena of fusing identities, picking up on a much earlier period when English, Irish, and northern Europeans might have regarded the sea that enabled them to trade as their primary domain, the land as the relatively impassable division between them.14

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Most of the poetry written by Marvell about the sea is his poetry about the Anglo-Dutch wars, the three somewhat religious but mostly political and mercantile conflicts of 1651–54, 1664–67, and 1672–74. It is indeed in printed material produced during these wars that Marvell and other poets, English and Dutch, approached a plethora of materials: The Medway raid was celebrated in Holland by a large and various body of publications, including printed maps and charts, detailed scenic engravings, letters from naval commanders in ships anchored in the Thames and Medway, and verse. M[arvell]’s later confession that Dutch satirical iconography of the English rendered a more truthful picture of the English than any native assessment. . . presupposes a knowledge of Dutch anti-English literature. It is highly likely that M[arvell] saw some of this material, and used it, or at least was helped by its perceptions, to fashion his critique of the government’s mismanagement of the war.15

Some of the triumphalism in Dutch satire addressing the Chatham Raid was cited as a cause of the next war by the bellicose and easily affronted Charles II (when he wanted to appear offended), such as the apotheosis of the Dutch naval administrator Cornelis de Witt. As ever, our interest as far as the poetry goes must begin with the extraordinary description in the Last Instructions to a Painter (1667) of De Ruyter, the Dutch admiral sailing with his squadron up the Thames. Earlier in the poem a panicky and cowardly Charles and a bewildered Clarendon beseech Louis XIV to ask the Dutch to lay off: ‘the Hollanders do make a noise, / Threaten to beat us, and are naughty boys /. . . Pray him to make De Witt and Ruyter cease, / And whip the Dutch unless they’ll hold their peace’ (429–30, 437–8). But at line 523 the reader meets this: Ruyter the while, that had our ocean curbed, Sailed now among our rivers undisturbed, Surveyed their crystal streams and banks so green And beauties ere this never naked seen. Through the vain sedge, the bashful nymphs he eyed: Bosoms, and all which from themselves they hide. The sun much brighter, and the skies more clear, He finds the air and all things sweeter here. The sudden change, and such a tempting sight Swells his old veins with fresh blood, fresh delight. Like am’rous victors he begins to shave, And his new face looks in the English wave.

(523–34)

Few could fail to be impressed by the remarkable generic moves Marvell makes here. It is neither menacing nor martial, but a fusion of epyllion,

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pastoral, and libertine romance; neither wholly epic nor mock epic. Making the waves his shaving mirror, as he fancies his chances with the Kentish sea nymphs, De Ruyter is presented as a Polyphemus, in line with Marvell’s portrayal of Damon the Mower. This is not a sea raid: it’s a date! The naked nymphs in this mythopoeia represent the vulnerability of the English and their natural fecundity, which should be protected by the men folk but is not. The obvious point to be drawn from the passage is that the generic irregularity is a consequence of the failed administration. De Ruyter should be finding it hard, but Marvell shows him tacking down the Medway un-resisted as if in a pleasure boat, not a man of war. I can hear an echo of Enobarbus’s panegyric of Cleopatra in the following passage where the martial and generic irregularity becomes explicit: His sporting navy all about him swim And witness their complacence in their trim. Their streaming silks play through the weather fair And with inveigling colours court the air, While the red flags breathe on their topmasts high Terror and war, but want an enemy. Among the shrouds the seamen sit and sing, And wanton boys on every rope do cling.16

The scene depicts invasion, yet it is not a rape so much as a collective Dutch wooing. The following lines, 543–50, depicting the sea deities helping the Dutch along (described as ‘the provident’), does indeed begin to look like the Dutch engravings that celebrated the victory. When there is an exchange of fire between the Dutch navy and the shore defences it is disarmingly rendered as part and parcel of this luxuriant scene. The Dutch men of war are described as clouds imparting thunder and lightning, as if to suggest that it is the painting of the events, rather than the events themselves, which is most interesting: Their airy sterns the sun behind does gild; And gentle gales them steer, and heaven drives, When, all on sudden, their calm bosom rives With thunder and lightning from each armèd cloud. (Last Instructions to a Painter, 554–7)

And finally upon arrival, the men of war are imagined as merchantmen: ‘at Sheerness unloads its stormy sides’ (560). This is both witty poetry and ekphrasis: poetry about painting. An international trade war is represented as healthy commercial exchange; invasion, in effect a naval rape, is

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represented as a jolly seduction, and it serves the King’s administration right. After a civil war, a thoroughly avoidable invasion of the homeland: what could be more humiliating. The context in which I would place this passage is one that is now commonly accepted among early modern historians. The Dutch and the English are neighbours and friends as much as enemies. This worked with a specific dynamic driven by the divisions in each country’s politics. The house of Stuart was intermarried with the House of Orange, and English royalists and supporters of the restored monarchy tended to ally themselves with the Prince of Orange, who since 1578 had been stadholder of most of the United Provinces. Parliamentarians and out and out republicans in England could see a common cause with the Dutch republicans, focused on the Estates General in Amsterdam. When in 1650 the then stadholder Willem II threatened to invade Amsterdam in pursuit of greater funds for military expenditure, the Estates General looked to Westminster for possible support. In 1651 a union of the two states was proposed so that they would become, as it were, home to each other.17 Marvell wrote his decidedly untrusting Latin poem for Oliver St. John when he went as ambassador to the Netherlands in 1651, with some intention of avoiding war.18 If St. John was bellicose, Walter Strickland, who had been resident at The Hague for the English free state, was far more friendly towards Dutch intentions. Marvell himself was possibly in the Netherlands in intelligence work in the early 1650s (he had already been a tourist in 1643–44), and was certainly present again in 1663–64, probably working for the resident George Downing in helping to arrest fugitive regicides.19 In the 1670s, although with limited success, Marvell was probably a member of an advance guard of incognito opposition figures making alliance with the stadholder Willem III, once he had returned to politics at the beginning of the decade. Marvell knew various Dutch figures in England and in the 1660s and 1670s they played an important role in issuing pro-Dutch propaganda, although many Englishmen would not need such persuasion to make them see that Charles II was risking the nation’s well-being by such an aggressive military policy, especially in the Third Anglo-Dutch war. In particular, Marvell knew Abraham Vanden Bemde, a naturalized Dutchman with Yorkshire associations living in Westminster. In March 1673, Vanden Bemde was seen lobbying MPs on behalf of the Dutch as he walked through Westminster Hall and the Court of Requests.20 The question that might be asked next is, if, and to what extent, Marvell’s painter poems are specifically indebted to particular Dutch poems, and how do they represent their own homeland? On the face of

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it, the answer to the first question is not promising: of the several Dutch printed poems on the Second Anglo-Dutch War, and the raid on the Medway in particular, none depart from asserting a spectacular and very bloody heroism. Take for instance the great poet-playwright Joost van den Vondel’s ‘Zeegevier der vrye Nederlanden op den Teems’ (1667).21 Amsterdam’s Rome to England’s Carthage (it is the other way around in Marvell’s ‘The Character of Holland’) is a governing framework in which unprovoked English aggression, represented by James, Duke of York, figured as Neptune, is properly met by intrepid Dutch sea courage. The English sea commanders, York and Monk, are rogues, and despite defensive preparations, decidedly more effective than in Marvell’s poem, although finally they are no match for the skilful De Ruyter. Vondel’s poem is in fact one of intelligent military and economic strategy: in destroying so much of the Royal Navy, the Dutch have removed the threat in every sense from the English. This is symbolized poetically by the focus on the burning ships in the estuarial waters, an echo, as countless Dutch publications saw it, of the providential punishment wrought by the Great Fire of London in the previous year.22 In one printed version Vondel’s verse was accompanied by another poem by Johannes Laurentius: ‘Naa-Klachte van den Britsen Konning’ (‘Complaint of the English King’), where Charles II is made to speak bitterly about how his pride has been avenged by the Chatham Raid.23 Perhaps this is more promising satire for comparison with Marvell. Laurentius’s version of Charles’s voice verges on a mockery induced by dramatic irony: ‘Now Dutch thunder also on the Thames is heard / And roars in her ear, burns my city.’ The economic message is as clear here as in the Vondel poem: that with the peace there should be sufficient prosperity, and that the extent of the world’s trade can be shared between the English and the Dutch: Then shall God’s destruction in full measure be seen To fulfill England’s punishment and free from oppression; And Holland shall, bedecked as with a golden rain, With this our conquered Kingdom speak of their great fortune. Then shall the merchant know through Thetis’ help, Reassured by the enemy’s frustration, to advantage, and gain To the World’s another end, stretching from East to West, And bring profit, and ships fully laden, Then shall peace reign between Britons and Batavians At sea, on land, and towers are built, Each with renown, triumph and joyfulness Instead of houses, towns, and ships in flames.

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Another kind of voice enters with Joachim Oudaen’s Op de Brittannische Verneedering door de Zeemagt van hare hoog mogentheden, Onder het hooge Staats-gezag van den Heldhaftigen Heere Mr. Cornelis de Witt, Ruwaard van Putten, &c. (1667). (On the British Humiliation by the States’ navy, under the high authority of the State hero My Lord. Cornelis de Witt.) In the sphere of drama Oudaen regarded himself as Vondel’s pupil, but here he goes beyond Vondel in offering a distinctly political and economic reading of the situation, one consistent with the strong Dutch republican we know Oudaen to have been. Charles II is regarded as a personal tyrant, dangerous to the liberty of the United Provinces because he insists on the English monarch’s claim to own the right to navigate the North Sea approaches to the Netherlands. Cornelis de Witt’s bravery is stirred by this patriotism in the cause of liberty (Oudaen is conveying more or less directly the ideology of the Regent class so identified with the de Witt brothers), and so, like Agricola leaving his estate to fight a war, Cornelis de Witt takes to the high seas: ‘Of citizen qualities / Extended to Roman dimensions’. He could have conquered the east had he persisted. There is a resistance in Oudaen’s aesthetic to classical elements, which he saw as a misleading idolatry, yet, as we might expect from a Mennonite, an understanding that violence is part of history.24 In keeping with the violence that is characteristic of the Dutch stage at this point in time, and to which Oudaen was fully committed, tyranny is understood naturally to produce a violent reaction: See here the tyrant killed, In his ports, on his shores, Burned Ship-buildings, By felled Cable Ropes, Magazines exploded, Masts, which must be felled.

This is a response to what is seen as the preposterous boast in Charles II’s coronation triumph, celebrating him as the British Neptune, and in addition to naming him king of the four kingdoms and parts of France, he also claimed ‘at whose discretion the Sea be open or closed’: a red rag to a Dutchman. Charles is reminded that the Royal Charles, the English Admiral, which the Dutch captured at Chatham and sailed back to Holland, was formerly called the Naseby, so that the king is also reminded of his father’s and the English monarchy’s nemesis. (In 1649 however, Oudaen himself, like most Dutchmen, reviled the regicide.25) Oudaen likens de Witt to Popilius, another citizen solder, who drew a line in the sand around Antiochus and forbad him to cross it until he promised not to

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attack the Romans’ allies. The Chatham raid as it were provides a seamark or buoy beyond which Charles must not go. The irony will be evident to any Marvellian, since, as we have seen, Marvell’s 1651 Latin poem addressed Oliver St. John as Popilius going to draw a line in the sand around the Estates General.26 One wonders whether Marvell’s poem was seen by anyone, not least Oudaen, in the Netherlands. Jan Vos’s Scheepskroon der zeehelden van de vrye Neederlanden (1666) (The Naval Crown of the Heroes of the Free Netherlands)27 engages in a complex mythic and epic explanation of the sea war: Freedom, her helmet adorned with laurels, Showed herself entirely [and was] into a harness riveted: They saw her with helmet, her spear aloof, flaunting: In the midst of her shield showed a federation, The seven united provinces, so one sees that each part Through unity since each mutually guards the rest. ‘O Water Heroes!’ said Freedom in high words: ‘The British tremble for your manhood; A rapacious people who bully all seas.’

And Marvell replies with no denial of this scenario but an English poetic description that acknowledges failed English administration, one mighty own goal.28 The generic corollary of these sea battle/painter poems would be the country house or estate poems: retreat after victory, otium post negotium. If English country house poems praise the patron, the house, and the estate, they also avoid an explicit sense of celebrating the home or homeland. Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ is exceptional for praising the humility of the architecture: ‘Humility alone designs / Those short but admirable lines’ [of the house] (41–2). Man’s lust for grand designs leads only to ‘hollow palaces’, homes far too big for their inhabitants, and seemingly full of nothing but specks of dust. Lord Fairfax is the exception in having a home where everything is appropriately proportioned, ‘orderly and near’. Less is more: ‘Things greater are in less contained’ (44). Utility (‘ev’ry thing does answer use’ (62)) and ‘neatness’ (63) rule, and pride is banished by the absence of grand proportions: we approach Edenic architecture. Instead of an imposing entrance, poor people come to the door for alms, and the only ‘furniture’ inside are friends (65–8). The same cannot be said of Dutch estate poems. The most famous one of them all, Huygens’s Hofwyck (1651), is volubly boastful:

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73 (33–4)29

The Hofwyck estate at Voorburg is superior to Spanish and English competitors: ‘Brenght Pijl en Koker toe, laet Spaensche Bogen buygen, / En beter’ Engelsche dan daer men heden siet.’30 Other English country house or estate poems usually praise the impressive nature of the house and estate, and focus more on the grounds rather than the building(s). An exception would be Mildmay Fane’s ‘A Peppercorn or Small Rent Sent to My Lord Campden for the Loan of His House at Kensington, 9 February, 1651.’ Here the description of the interior of the house, and as such, the home, is detailed and is so in order to exemplify the virtue of the patron, with panel paintings, ‘Tablets of pots and flowers rare / Present a garden on the stair’ (54–5), or the passage describing a rural game dinner (the house in question, Campden House, was at the time of composition, 1651, in the rural western suburban area, between Kensington Palace and Holland House): A table in the Hall besides That shows how from one silver glides: There round about those gossips meet Frequent Cheapside and Gratio’s Street, With cock and hen, partridge and pheasant, Or other cates to diet pleasant; And though we are not fed thereby These cure the hunger of the eye.

(132–9)31

It may have helped that Fane had his own country house, Apethorpe Hall, Northants.32 Yet the description in ‘A Peppercorn or Small Rent’ is not ‘home’ as such, and while astonishing architecture and pleasurable grounds are centrally part of every poem, there is no sense of this as home or homeland. Nearly all of the English estate poems are written by patronized poets, or others, of property that they do not own. Huygens might be said to be in a relationship of desire with his own property, judging from the exuberant tone of his poem. Another Dutch country house poem that might be regarded as closer to Marvell’s is Huygen’s imitator Jacob Westerbaen’s Arctoa Tempe. Ockenburgh, woonstede van den Heere van Brandwyck in de Clingen buyten Loosduynen (1654). Westerbaen might not have been the intellectual heavyweight that Huygens was (he was the son of the ropemaker who became a Remonstrant minister and physician, then married ‘up’ and gained a landed estate, and the means and the leisure to be a man of letters). He is considered to be a libertine poet, and that is so, but what strikes the

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reader in this long poem is the degree of reflection that starts with the home of the estate, but moves out to many different facets of Dutch life and global influence. The poem comes with extensive prefatory verse so that we know clearly from the poem the circles in which Westerbaen moved: he is very much at the heart of Dutch intellectual life, being close to Huygens, as well as Cats, Blasius, and Vos. When the pro-Remonstrant Oldenbarnevelt was executed, Westerbaen retained possession of the pensionary’s walking stick. It is far easier to locate Westerbaen in neoclassical literary tradition than it is by considering Huygens’ Hofwijk alone. The degree of reflection on what is outside the estate even as the speaker contemplates his house and land is the means by which senses of both ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ are established. Extensive footnote annotations take the reader from the poet’s seeing eye to the myriad learned, political, and religious associations triggered by the view. These elements are generally ignored by modern anthologists.33 Since Westerbaen is happy to include the history of the Remonstrant crisis, which naturally greatly concerned him, ‘home’ is a difficult place. But it is also luscious and marvellous throughout the seasons, and this sense is enhanced by a prefatory two-page engraving depicting the house, some of the grounds, and a hunting scene. Further commentary on the engraving exists in two prefatory poems. Westerbaen makes more explicit than Huygens the connection between nature, the appreciation of nature that is your own property, and the sense of home. Perhaps this is obvious. Yet we do not find it in English estate poetry, and Westerbaen’s evocation of the feeling of owning is remarkable: Daer sie ick, al sick wil, uw Beel, uw Esch, uw Eycken, Uew sparr’ en mastenwoud tot aen de sterren Rycken Uw Linden wyd ontsdaen, en vind een blaeder-dack Als waer ick in Verhout in ‘t Haeghse Ioffren-rack. Maer al sick u begae al blyfick in myn Huysje, Myn eensaem Ockenburgh, daer ick het avond-uyr, Dat myne Zonne dock verwandel of betruyr Son, die niet weder rees, Sone van twee lieve oogen Wel eertyds in myn Ziel van vriendelijk Vermoogen So vind ick myn voortaen van Ockenburgh bestreen Dat my uyt spit en nyd bevecht met dese reen.34

That Westerbaen takes the trouble to identify his literary sources makes this complex sense of mixed possession and belonging even more complex: Homer, Lucian, Virgil, Ovid, Sinesius, Erasmus, and Heinsius are listed on one page.35 His references are capacious and stretch from antiquity to the

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present; Huygens confines himself to classical and patristic sources only. In this way that sense of possession stretches from the earliest history of the Netherlands to the painful dimensions of the Remonstrance Controversy itself. The wealth generated in the Dutch enabled notable social elevation, so that the son of a ropemaker could make friends with a prince’s humanist courtier. Worlds did not collide, they met and assimilated, and home expanded so that, in Westerbaen’s case, the extent of your mind mirrored the extent of your land. But for the English, home was far less certain. For the most part it signified secure destination in a large vernacular literature that was the bedrock of the new genre of autobiography. But in Marvell’s more rarefied literary world, and the literary space he shared with a number of fellow writers, it was not at all clear what home was. Its indistinct nature certainly signifies it unimportance to contemporaries, but when it did command attention, it seems to unsettle by that indistinctness, or to point to that space of borders and crossing, home and abroad, where definite identities become decidedly lost.

Notes 1. See A.D Cousins, ‘Home and Nation in Marvell’s Bermudas’ in this volume. 2. Andrew Marvell, ‘Eyes and Tears’, 33–6, in Nigel Smith (ed.), The Poems of Andrew Marvell, rev. edn (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007), p. 52. All references to Marvell’s poetry are taken from this edition. 3. Thomas Carew, ‘My Mistris commanding me to return her letters’, 12, in Carew, Poems (London, 1640). 4. Annabel Patterson, Martin Dzelzainis, Nicholas von Maltzahn, and N. H. Keeble (eds.), The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), vol. II, p. 39. All references to the prose works follow this edition, subsequently cited as MPW. 5. MPW, vol. I, p. 49. 6. Marvell, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (1677), in MPW, vol. II, p. 342. 7. Marvell, A Short Historical Essay (1676), in MPW, vol. II, p. 134. 8. Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (eds.) The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), vol. 1, pp. 7–8; all references to Herrick’s poetry follow this edition. 9. Trans. R. Fletcher (1651), 2. 10. Fletcher, 41. 11. See e.g, Fletcher, 124,

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12. Fane, ‘A Happy Life’, 13–4, in Alastair Fowler (ed.), The Country House Poem: A Cabinet of Seventeenth-Century Estate Poems and Related Items (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), p. 223. 13. Smith, Poems, pp. 248–50. 14. See Alastair Moffat, The Sea Kingdoms: The History of Celtic Britain and Ireland (London: Harper Collins, 2001). 15. Smith, p. 367. 16. See Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra: The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, Burn’d on the water . . . purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them . . . on each side her Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, With divers– colour’d fans . . . the silken tackle Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands, That yarely frame the office. From the barge A strange invisible perfume hits the sense (II.ii.915–38) Of the adjacent wharfs. 17. Steven C. A. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–68 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 18. In Legationem Domini Oliveri St John ad Provincias Foederatas, in Smith, pp. 257–8. 19. Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 401–4; Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 92, 94, 170–2. 20. Smith, Andrew Marvell, pp. 263, 281–2. 21. The Early Modern Pamphlets Online (TEMPO), No. 09507, s/sh, tempo. idcpublishers.info/. For Vondel’s life and writings, see Frans-Willem Korsten, Sovereignty as Inviolability (Hilversum: Franz Willem Korsten & Verloren Publishers, 2009); Jan Bloemendal and Frans-Willem Korsten (eds.), Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679): Dutch Playwright in the Golden Age (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012). 22. Wim van Nispen, De Teems in brant: een verzameling teksten en afbeeldingen rond de Tweede Engelse Zeeoorlog (1665–67) (Hilversum, 1991). 23. TEMPO, No. 09508, s/sh. 24. See Marijke Spies, Rhetoric, Rhetoricians and Poets: Studies in Renaissance Poetry and Poetics (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), pp. 103–5; Nigel Smith, ‘Literature, Politics and Religion in the Dutch Republic: “True Freedom” and An Anglo-Dutch Perspective’ (forthcoming, 2015). 25. See Helmer Helmers, ‘The Cry of the Royal Blood. Revenge Tragedy and the Stuart Cause in the Dutch Republic’ in A. van Dixhoorn, E. Strietman, and J. Bloemendal, (eds.), ‘The Sharpness of a Honed Tongue’. Literary Culture and

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Public Opinion in the Low Countries, 1450–1650 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 219–250. See above, note 18. TEMPO, No. 09313. Smith, Poems, pp. 323–96. Constantijn Huygens, Gedichten, ed. J.A. Worp, 9 vols. (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1892–99), vol. IV, p. 267. Huygens, Gedichten, ed. Worp, vol. IV, p. 279. See Fowler, The Country House Poem, p. 241. Fowler, The Country House Poem, p. 213. See Jacob Westerbaen, Gedichten, ed. Johan Koppenol (Amsterdam: Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep, 2001), pp. 99–107, 162–5. Jacob Westerbaen, ‘Ockenburgh’ in Gedichten (The Hague, 1657), 4th bk., p. 41. Westerbaen, ‘Ockenburgh’, p. 45.

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part ii

Restoration, glorious revolution, and Hanoverian succession

Published online by Cambridge University Press

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chapter 6

‘Home to our People’: nation and kingship in late seventeenth-century political verse Abigail Williams

A Joy like this Great Charles our gracious King Did to a sad afflicted Nation bring, When homewards bent proud swelling seas he crost, As strangely found as Romulus was lost.1

These lines, written in 1689 by a young Anglican clergyman, Thomas Rogers, celebrate the accession of William and Mary, and they do so through a double comparison with the founding of Rome, and the restoration of Charles II in 1660. The allusion to Charles was a bold stroke on Rogers’s part. His favourable comparison of the return of an exiled Stuart monarch after twenty years of interregnum with the invasion of a Dutch king to dethrone the Stuart James II would have been an abomination to many Jacobites and Stuart supporters. Neither would it have pleased former republicans. Yet while the comparison is controversial, the poem illustrates the way in which the two moments could be linked through a rhetoric of return, nationhood, and restoration. In this essay I will examine the depiction of the accessions of 1660 and 1688–89, exploring the way in which contemporary writers addressed the complexities of political circumstance. In focusing on the ways in which return and homecoming were used in accommodating political change, we can see how writers exploited the flexibility of the idiom of nationhood to model positive images of controversial political settlements. On 29 May 1660, Charles II arrived in London after a nine-year absence in continental Europe. He was met at Dover by crowds and ceremony, which trailed him in his progress to the capital, and the visible public celebration of his arrival was matched by hundreds of print publications commemorating his return.2 A royal proclamation offered an official summary of recent events: it hath pleased Almighty God to manifest his own immediate Goodness, Wisdom, and Power, in his Late Providence towards Us and Our Kingdoms 81

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abigail williams [. . .] he hath by the interposition of his own Power and Wisdom, after a long and tedious Exile, returned Us Home to Our People, and, after a long, and seemingly Invincible Interruption, restored our People and Kingdoms to their Ancient Rights, Liberties, and Government.3

The language of the king’s proclamation typifies that of many official and non-official publications. The change of political ruler is depicted as an act of Providence, and as a ‘return’, and the nation seen as united with and behind their new king. It is clear from this and other documents that the Restoration of Charles II was a historical moment which demanded a rhetoric of national unity and confidence. But how was this constructed, and how did writers negotiate the realities of recent political history? How did they present the restoration as either natural or inevitable in the context of a nation that had decapitated one king and expelled another? As the lines above on ‘a king come home to our people’ show, the idiom of return was crucial to the positive depiction of the Restoration in 1660, and references to Charles ‘coming home’ proliferate in Restoration panegyrics.4 The idiom of joyful re-entry enabled writers to present Charles’s accession not as a sudden moment of political change, but as a long awaited and rightful development. By all accounts, the arrival of Charles II in May 1660 was greeted by many with genuine jubilation, and numerous historians and literary critics have documented the predominant sense of marvel generated by the events of the late spring of 1660.5 For a brief moment, England was a nation almost overwhelmed with wonder at the apparently miraculous restoration of political stability. Contemporary observers bear witness to the general euphoria that greeted the new king. Here is John Evelyn’s account of Charles’s entrance to London on 29 May: This day came in his Majestie Charles the 2d to London after a sad, & long Exile, and Calamitous Suffering both of the King & Church: being 17 yeares: This was also his Birthday, and with a Triumph of above 20000 horse & foote, brandishing their swords and shouting with unexpressable joy: The wayes straw’d with flowers, the bells ringing, the streetes hung with Tapissry, fountaines running with wine: The Major, Aldermen, all the Companies in their livers, Chaines of Gold, banners; Lords & nobles, Cloth of Silver, gold & vellvet every body clad in, the windos & balconies all set with Ladys, Trumpets, Musick, & of people flocking the streetes & was as far as Rochester, so as they were 7 houres in passing the Citty, even from 2 in the afternoone ‘til nine at night: I stood in the strand, and beheld it, & blessed God.6

Evelyn’s description of national enthusiasm was coupled with his desire to show his own personal commitment to the new regime. But even those

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less politically sympathetic testified to the initial popular support for Charles’s return: Ralph Josselin, an Essex clergyman with puritanical tendencies and millenarian interests who had served as a chaplain in the parliamentary army, conveys his fatalistic resignation in a diary entry of 6 May 1660: ‘the nacion runneth into the King as Israel to bring backe david, lord make him the like blessing to our England, and lett gods counsell bee in the worke’.7 Diary entries such as these show the way individuals strove to shape an important event that affected their lives.8 But the private forms in which they narrated recent history were in part determined by the public written accounts of the king’s arrival. Evelyn’s description of the heady days of early summer 1660 was written months or even years after the events it describes, and is in part derived from published accounts of the welcome in publications such as Englands Joy (1660). The pamphlet describes Charles’s entrance into the City of London: he found the Windows and Streets exceedingly thronged with people to behold him; and the walls Adorned with Hangings and Carpets of Tapestry and other costly stuffe; and in many places sets of Loud Musick; all the Conduits as he passed running Claret Wine, & the several Companies in their Liveries, with the Ensignes belonging to them; as also the Trayned Bands of the City standing along the streets as he passed, welcoming him with joyful Acclamations.9

In reading the printed accounts of the Restoration, one becomes aware of the tension between description and projection. There was undoubtedly a popular momentum behind the return of Charles II, but there was also a need to will it into being through embodiment in written forms. In his Ode Upon the Blessed Restoration and Returne of His Sacred Majestie, Charls the Second (1660), Abraham Cowley writes: He’s come, he’s safe at shore, I hear the noise Of a whole Land which does at once rejoyce, I hear th’united People’s sacred voice.10

John Dryden imagines similarly the scenes of popular joy at Dover in his accession panegyric Astraea Redux: Methinks I see those crowds on Dover’s strand, Who in their haste to welcome you to land Choked up their beach with their still growing store, And made a wilder torrent on the shore.11

(276–9)

In writing these lines – again, imagined retrospectively rather than experienced in the moment – Dryden projects the ideal image of rapturous

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reception that was key to the responses to the Restoration. Elsewhere in the poem he describes a nation where ‘at home the hateful names of parties cease’ (312) and where ‘reformed by what we did amiss / We by our sufferings learn to prize our bliss’ (209–10). As David R. Evans has observed, panegyric of this period often illustrates a circular strategy: by showing England united behind the restored king, Dryden, Cowley and other writers played a role in constituting universal assent to the Restoration. ‘Their representations of the welcome the English extended to Charles essentially deauthorize dissent: if enough writers say that “everyone” is happy with the king’s return, it must be so.’12 This projection of national unity was a political necessity. The Civil War years and execution of Charles I marked a profound alteration in conceptions of the monarchy, whose sacred and divine character had been challenged by the radical politics of mid-century England.13 And in more recent months, the complex series of political negotiations from Richard Cromwell’s accession onwards had bred multiple alternative possibilities of government, rather than a uniform impetus behind the exiled king. Popular support for the return of Charles II did not solidify until the very eve of the Restoration, and Charles’s return, however welcome, took the nation by surprise.14 This in itself posed a representational problem. If the king’s return had not been universally longed for, coming gradually to seem inevitable and right, how then could it summon up so much apparently spontaneous and genuine jubilation?15 The task of pamphleteers and panegyrists writing in 1660 was to find ways of conveying this euphoria, while at the same time locating it within a context which made it seem natural and unsurprising, and it is here that the figuration of accession as homecoming played an essential role. Within Astraea Redux, Dryden developed various motifs to depict Charles’s accession as an event both anticipated and preordained. So, for example, we find the notion of a deferred romance between king and nation, in which England is a bride greeting her long-awaited husband: ‘While our cross stars denied us Charles his bed / Whom our first flames and virgin love did wed’ (19–20). He also drew on biblical typology, casting Charles as a banished David, who ‘spent abroad his time, / When to be God’s anointed was his crime’ (79–80). Comparisons such as these offered fictional or historical models of homecoming that gave order to recent history, and we can see the same strategies in other writings of the era, which compared the king’s return with the homecoming of Aeneas, or Ulysses, or the sufferings of Job.16

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One of the key themes developed by the Restoration panegyrists and pamphleteers writing in 1660 was the idea of Charles’s exile as a form of Christian suffering and redemption. In patterning Charles as Christ and England’s people as penitents, writers could find a role for absence and wrongdoing within a longer story: in Astraea Redux Charles is ‘forced to suffer for himself and us’ (50), and in his Poem to His Most Excellent Majesty, Henry Beeston commends ‘Your Patience, which You may singly own,/Since none (but You) suffer’d into a Throne.’17 Within a Christian narrative of salvation, Charles I’s execution, and Charles II’s recent arrival was merely the completion of a cycle of repentance and redemption. In Abraham Cowley’s Ode Upon the Blessed Restoration, the king’s return is no less than a ‘second Birth’, or resurrection: For loe! thy Charls again is Born. He then was born with, and to Pain; With, and to Joy he’s born again.

(p. 2)

This reworking of seventeenth-century political history not only ennobled the new political leader, but it also redeemed his people, cleansed by their own mid century sufferings. Henry Beeston writes: The Nation’s Criminal! Almost each one Lep’rous by Nature or Contagion: Yet now are cleansed by the tears they shed.

(p. 7)

Within the conceit of the Restoration as resurrection, there is an implication that the previous twenty years were a necessary part of the process – not just a time of political chaos, but a period of redemptive national suffering essential to the completion of the Christian cycle. Yet one of the problems inherent in the redemption model was that it was essentially an argument based on succession – a son righting the wrongs done to the father – and no amount of panegyric could entirely occlude the fact that the mythology of divine right monarchy had been significantly challenged by the events of the mid seventeenth century. So panegyrists also developed more secular perspectives on the Restoration which enabled them to represent Charles II’s European exile as a period of learning, in which he became a better ruler.18 Edmund Waller’s panegyric makes this argument very clearly: And though it be our sorrow, and our crime, To have accepted life so long a time Without you here, yet does this absence gain No small advantage to Your present Reign: For, having view’d the persons and the things,

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abigail williams The Councils, State and strength of Europe’s Kings, You know your work; Ambition to restrain, And set them bounds, as Heav’n does to the Main. We have you now with ruling wisdom fraught, Not such as Books, but such as Practice, taught. So the lost Sun, while least by us enjoy’d, Is the whole night, for our concern imploy’d: He ripens spices, fruit, and precious Gums, Which from remotest Regions hither comes.19

Similarly, according to Thomas Fuller’s A Panegyrick to his Majesty on His Happy Return (1660) Charles has spent his time perfecting the arts of state: ‘Of fforeign States you since have studied store, / And read whole Libraries of Princes o’re’ and, developing an imperial theme, Fuller describes the king enriched by his sojourn overseas: Your SELF’s the Ship return’d from foreign Trading, England’s Your Port, Experience the Lading, God is the Pilot; and now richly fraught, Unto the Port the Ship is safely brought.20

Within these versions of the Restoration, both king and nation gain by Charles’s time abroad. Charles gains patience, experience, and statecraft during his exile, and can use this to enrich his people. What we also see in Fuller’s lines, through the reference to ‘God is the pilot’, is the notion of 1660 as a sign of Providential delivery. Providence provided a way of representing the suddenness of the accession within a model of divine order. Again and again writers reached for the phrase ‘blessed change’ within their descriptions of the Restoration, an expression that simultaneously conveyed both political volte-face and divine order. For some, the notion of Providential delivery took the Restoration beyond analysis or even comprehension. Sir Harbottle Grimston, the speaker of the House of Commons who greeted Charles on his majesty’s reentry into London, declared that the Restoration could not be understood or even expressed: the restitution of Your Majesty to the exercise of Your just and most indubitable Native Right of Soveraignty, and the deliverance of Your people from Bondage and Slavery, hath been wrought out and brought to pass, by a miraculous way of Divine Providence, beyond and above the reach and comprehension of our understandings, and therefore to be admired, impossible to be expressed.21

The rhetoric of Providential delivery was not unique to 1660. The very different, but equally challenging constitutional circumstances of

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William III’s accession also made it an essential part of the political vocabulary in 1688–89. On 5 November 1688 a Dutch army arrived at Torbay, in Devon. Six weeks later, it occupied London, expelling the Catholic James II from the capital. By mid February, Prince William of Orange had been proclaimed king of England, and in doing so, became the last monarch to gain the crown by force of arms. As historians of political thought have described, the invasion of William in 1688 and his subsequent accession provoked a debate about the nature of allegiance and the justification of revolution that was unparalleled in earlier political culture.22 Yet as we have seen, those writing in response to the Restoration of 1660 had also sought to depict a sudden act of succession as the completion of a divinely ordained pattern of history. They too needed to find ways of accommodating political change within acceptable forms of panegyrics. While the lineal succession of Charles II from Charles I was less problematic than the invasion of William III, as Deborah Payne Fisk has commented, there was a tension within Restoration panegyric whereby the emphasis on the rapturous response to Charles II enacted a ‘cultural oxymoron—a divine right kingship “restored” by common consent of the populace’.23 Those writing in support of 1688 drew on many of the strategies used by writers in 1660 to shape recent political history. One of the most prominent, and popular, arguments in defence of the accession was the divine right of providence: that is, that the very success of the revolution demonstrated that it had divine sanction: the favourable winds that blew the fleet ashore; the swiftness of William’s success, so sudden and so surprising was proof that nothing but an Almighty hand could have performed it. On 23 December 1688, barely a week after the Prince of Orange had entered London, William’s chaplain and chief apologist, Gilbert Burnet, preached a sermon in front of him based on Psalm 118: ‘it is the Lord’s doing and it is marvellous in our eyes’. Speaking of recent events, Burnet announced excitedly: We have before us a Work, that seems to our selves a Dream, and that will appear to Posterity a Fiction: A Work about which Providence has watched in so peculiar a manner, that a Mind must be far gone into Atheism, that can resist so full a Conviction as this offers us in favour of that Truth.24

The notion of an accession justified by divine sanction gained ground in Anglican defences of the Revolution because it was less radical than theories of contract, force, or popular election, and it provided a way of accommodating the unprecedented change of monarch while preserving the notion of divine right. While not all defenders of the Revolution used

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providential divine right theory as the sole justification for the accession, nearly every publication acclaimed the broadly Providential nature of recent history.25 Anglican clergymen and pamphleteers argued that God had raised up William of Orange as the deliverer of England and English Protestantism, and that his recent success could be plotted onto a prehistory of providential rescue. So in some ways, an unprecedented divine intervention enabled writers to plot the arrival of the new Dutch king onto a very English past. Popular national history represented a series of fortuitous escapes from Catholic conspiracy, which could be traced through the defeat of the gunpowder plot, the vanquishing of the Spanish armada, and finally, and most gloriously, the deliverance by the Prince of Orange.26 The clergyman Rogers offers a potted history of the sixteenth and seventeenth century that illustrates such thinking: What a long Catalogue of Wonders runs through the Reigns of Edward the Sixth, and Queen Elizabeth of ever blessed Memory, when God was pleased to magnifie his own Strength in the Weakness of a Child, and of a Woman? How many Attempts afterwards, Plots and Conspiracies have been form’d against our Church, and yet how miraculously defeated? And how, above all Examples of former Ages, did he make his aim bare in our late preservation, when Ruine star’d us in the very Face [. . .]?27

Providence was thus both a form of justification: it is right because it has succeeded, and a theory of causation: history is determined by God’s benificent concern for his Protestant church. And as the 1690s progressed, this reading of recent history further solidified. A Revolution that was providentially directed was providentially protected, and with each success against the forces of the Papist antichrist in Ireland and in France, William’s wars assumed the nature of a blessed crusade. As we have seen, responses to the Restoration of 1660 often claimed the miraculous nature of the accession, so remarkable that it was comparable with mythological tales of rescue. We see a continuation of a similar vein of argument in the poems and pamphlets written in 1688 and 1689. And in the case of the accession of William III, the notion of an accession which was without recent historical precedent was, of course, particularly pertinent, since there was no constitutional precedent for the abdication of James II and the accession of the Dutch king. Thus John Tutchin, author of a lengthy poem upon the Revolution, An Heroick Poem upon the Late Expedition, posits not legal or historical arguments for the installation of the new king, but instead, a form of justification by fiction:

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Here all the Ancient Stories are made good, Where Tears of weeping Friends augment the Flood. One Curses Winds and Tides that must Convey Her Mars, her Husband, and her Guard Away. One Theseus to his Briny Fortress flies, Whilst on the Shore his Ariadne lies: Ere this, the Princess has the Story told, Of Jason’s Warlike Enterprise of old. . . . . . the Argonauts expand their wings, Whilst Roar of Cannon their Departure sings.28

So William’s enterprise is a new take on an old story – the departure from the Hague is not a political event but a mythical one, and is justified on those terms. And as a result Tutchin argues from typology to justify the Revolution, and his poem is put together not from descriptions of the actual events of 1688 but from a range of texts describing other heroic journeys. William’s arrival is that of Theseus and Jason, Moses and Caesar. He also compares William to Charles II, as he picks up the detail of Dryden’s representation of Charles’s arrival and uses it for William: in Absalom and Achitophel ‘The joyful people thronged to see him Land, / Cov’ring the Beach and black’ning all the strand’ (271–2) and in the Heroick Poem ‘Strait a num’rous Crowd overspread the Sand, / To welcome their Deliverer on Land’29 (p. 10).

An English king But although there might have been something divine, and even mythic about the revolution of 1688, nothing could disguise the fact that not only was William III not English, but worse still, he was Dutch. As other essays in this volume demonstrate, English hostility to the Dutch had a history which spanned most of the seventeenth century, and was focused around the three Anglo-Dutch wars of 1652–4, 1665–7, and 1672–4. The historiography of the period has traditionally located the source of this hostility in the commercial rivalry between the two nations which had flared up in their conflict over colonial possessions and in particular the East Indies.30 Over the course of the century anti-Dutch feeling had generated well-worn stereotypes which were articulated in a range of forms, from Marvell’s The Character of Holland (1653) to the anonymous The Dutch-mens Pedigree or a Relation, Shewing how they were first Bred and Descended from a Horse-Turd. . . (1653).31 This thriving tradition was a major obstacle for William’s propagandists and in order to provide a corrective to

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anti-Dutch sentiment after the Revolution, Sir William Temple, former ambassador to the Hague, began publishing his memoirs and letters, all of which stressed that England’s true interest in foreign policy lay in co-operation with the Dutch, and in helping them to preserve the Spanish Netherlands from the aggression of Louis XIV.32 Yet at the same time as redefining the Dutch as natural allies, there was also a very obvious need to redefine William as an English king. As Stephen Zwicker observes, ‘the problem of claiming an English identity both for the Revolution and its resistance was a real difficulty’.33 There were a number of ways in which writers and propagandists set about providing the new regime with a number of nationalizing and normative constructs. One of those constructs was the appropriation of the king into a typological history of the English monarchy. Writing in the Cambridge University panegyric collection on the Revolution, Beaupre Nowers, a fellow of Christ’s College, wonders: What will not England hope from such a Reign? In You, her lov’d Eliza lives again, In your Dear Lord are all the Virtues met, And Greatness of an Old Plantagenet. . .34

Nowers establishes William’s hereditary legitimacy by locating him in a fictional family, constructed out of the popular hero-monarchs of earlier English history. One of the most appropriate of the earlier English monarchs was Elizabeth I, who figures heavily in the typology of English history established to integrate the Dutch Calvinist king into the nation’s dynastic tradition. She is evident both in the terms of popular culture, Now Good Queen Elizabeth’s Laws In full Force and Power shall stand, To maintain the Protestant Cause, And make this a flourishing Land. . .35

and those of high culture – John Glanvill’s poem commemorating the war of the Spanish Succession establishes King William and Queen Elizabeth as ‘the Hero and Heroine of the Piece’. Elizabeth check’d Oppression, shelter’d Liberty, Shew’d what Her just and equal Rule must be ..... When Foes well chosen and a well urg’d War Brought Honour home, and carried Terror far. ..... How might almost a Century intervene

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Ere a brave William did restore the Scene! On its old Base he set our Empire right, And taught us where to War, and how to Fight. . .36

Glanvill draws on the powerful idiom of restoration so well developed in 1660 as he observes in William the return of a more energetic monarchy, and the revival of the militant Protestantism which had long been associated with Elizabeth. The queen’s martial efforts in defence of her national religion had been invoked from the political tracts of the Restoration onwards, and most recently in the context of the Exclusion Crisis of 1678–82. So references to Elizabeth after 1688 not only represented a revival of the issues of the late sixteenth century, they also connected William to the queen through the narrative of the papist threat that had developed over the course of the intervening period. For those keen to read recent history in these terms, the fact that the landing at Tor Bay took place on November 5, and that 1688 was the hundredth anniversary of the English triumph over international Catholicism, was, literally, a godsend.37 We can see here the ways in which popular national history was remodelled in order to embed political change. William’s arrival in 1688 was swiftly incorporated into the rich history of militant Protestantism that had grown up around the model of Elizabeth I. And as the reign progressed, with the declaration of war against France in May 1689, the sense of contemporary history as a resumption of earlier contests grew. When England began pitting herself against the satanic forces of popery at large on the continent, William acquired other forebears. Not only did his deliverance of 1688 relate him to Elizabeth, but his increasing militarism made him the type of a whole host of early English soldier kings. Apart from the fact that William had no very recent models of successful fighting monarchs, his newly aggressive anti-French, anti-Catholic foreign policy was a radical departure from the policies of the previous two Stuart kings, whose relationship with France had been marked by ‘acquisitive amity or sympathetic neutrality’.38 So William’s enterprise is located in terms of a previous tradition of English kingship in contemporary poems: Then our lov’d Edward’s and fifth Henry’s Fame, In France shall yield to Nassau’s conquering Fame, Cressey and Agen-Court new dy’d in Blood, Shall make his Title to the Lillies good.39 Our British Youth, unused to rough alarms. . . Renew their ancient conquests on the main, And act their fathers’ triumphs o’er again.40

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In these poems the whole nature and purpose of English national identity is established by reference to William’s foreign policy, whose retrospective nature makes the new Dutch king more English than the Englishmen he replaced.

The Stuart inheritance Yet while this focus on William’s position in Europe stressed his difference from his immediate predecessors, there is much evidence to suggest that William could also be identified with a Stuart inheritance.41 Up until the premature death of Queen Mary in 1694, many supporters of the new regime were only able to rationalize their allegiance to William by maintaining that they were being loyal to the daughter of a Stuart king, making Mary II the pivotal point of William’s claim:42 Queen Mary his Royal Consort, Invested with fame and renown, She is the bright Star of the Court, As being true heir to the Crown.43

If James III was discredited as illegitimate, the main obstacle to a full recognition of William’s Stuart credentials was James II. By presenting William as the immediate successor of Charles II, and bypassing the figure of James II, William could be appropriated into the very dynasty he was accused of usurping, and his invasion in 1688 could be slotted into a pattern of absence and arrival which again connected him with the Restoration of 1660.44 So, not surprisingly, although Zwicker claims that the Restoration is ‘a comparison that panegyrists tactfully avoid’ there were in fact many literary parallels made between 1660 and 1688, as we have seen in Tutchin’s panegyric, and in Rogers’s description of William III45: A Joy like this Great Charles our gracious King Did to a sad afflicted Nation bring, When homewards bent proud swelling seas he crost, As strangely found as Romulus was lost.46

There are obviously problems with too close a parallel – Charles’s movement ‘homewards bent’ being one of them – but what is significant is that Williamite writers did not shy away from popular and functional images from the solidifying Stuart mythology. Those images became heavily contested ground for both parties, and typology from Restoration panegyrics reappears in 1689. The image of Astraea which had come to symbolize ‘the mystical justice of the [Stuart] monarch’s person and polity’

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was used by Dryden in Astraea Redux to celebrate the return of the goddess of justice, and to mark the restoration of constitutional government in 1660.47 So in 1689 the return of Astraea was again an appropriate image for an event which was being figured in thousands of poems and pamphlets as the end of the lawless and arbitrary rule of James II. In Robert Smythies’ panegyric, Awfull Astraea with her sacred Train Of Virtue, Freedom, Innocence, (Who had with her been banisht hence) Soon as the Land was Heal’d again, Return’d, and in her welcome hands she bore Peace, Plenty, Right.48

Similarly, Augustus also reappears in the Revolution panegyrics. The identification of an ‘Augustan age’ first occurs in Atterbury’s preface to Waller’s Poems (1690), in which he firmly links the concept of the ‘Augustan’ to the return of the Stuart king. Yet Augustus is also happily inserted into the circumstances of 1688: Tutchin’s Revolution panegyric welcomes the arrival of a king, and the return of a typology: Now is Augustus to Augusta come, And Crouds of Joyful People shout him home: The Joyful Sound fills Villages Remote, And Neighb’ring Ecchoes lengthen ev’ry Note.49

This use of figures such as Augustus and Astraea not only appropriates the images of the Stuart monarchy – it also appropriates the whole idiom of return and restoration which critics such as Murray Pittock see as fundamental to the strategies of Jacobite writing. William III might not literally have been returning to his homeland, but he represented the return of liberty, stability and Protestantism – values associated with an earlier phase of English history, which enabled Tutchin to declare that ‘Crouds of Joyful People shout him home’. Williamite poets used cyclical figures drawn from the powerful archetypes of Stuart mythology to suggest a place for William III within the patterns of recurrent history. As this discussion has shown, both the accession of Charles II in 1660 and the invasion of William III in 1688 were events that demanded explanation and positive representation for a public fearful of continued political uncertainty. As panegyrists sought to create patterns of order and continuity, they drew on an enabling rhetoric of nationhood to present the surprising, and the unorthodox, as part of a history of miraculous deliverance and heroic exile. What we see in this literature of accession is the way

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in which narratives of nationhood were remodelled to create a logic and context for recent events. Whether the nation had been rescued by Providence, Christian redemption, epic journeying, or a return from biblical exile, the ever-flexible idea of homecoming offered an empowering way of explaining the rapidly evolving relationship between king and country.

Notes 1. Thomas Rogers, ‘To the Queen’, in Lux Occidentalis: Or, Providence Display’d (London, 1689), pp. 15–6. 2. For fuller accounts, see Nicholas Jose, Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature, 1660–71 (London: Macmillan, 1984); Judy A. Hayden, ‘From Caroline Tears to Carolean Laughter: Re-Historicizing the Restoration of Charles II’, English: The Journal of the English Association 49 (2000), 109–26; Jessica Munns, ‘Accounting for Providence: Contemporary Descriptions of the Restoration of Charles II’, in Dan Doll and Jessica Munns (eds.), Recording and Reordering: Essays on the Seventeenth– and Eighteenth-Century Journal (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006), pp. 102–21. 3. By the King. A proclamation for setting apart a day of solemn and publick thanksgiving throughout the whole kingdom (London, 1660), p. 1. 4. See, for example, Thomas Fuller, A Panegyrick to His Majesty on His Happy Return (London, 1660); Thomas Mayhew, Upon the joyfull and welcome return of His Sacred Majestie (London, 1660); Carew Reynell, The fortunate change: being a panegyrick to His Sacred Maiesty (London, 1661); Francis Synge, A panegyrick on the most auspicious and longed-for return of the great example of greatest virtue (Dublin, 1661). 5. See especially Jose, Ideas of the Restoration, pp. 3–35. 6. E.S. de Beer (ed.), The Diary of John Evelyn, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), vol. 3, p. 246. 7. Alan MacFarlane (ed.), The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616–1683 (London: British Academy and Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 463. 8. On diary responses to the Restoration, see Munns, ‘Accounting for Providence’. 9. Englands Joy or a Relation of the Most remarkable passages, from his Majesties Arrivall at Dover to his entrance at Whitehall (London, 1660), p. 8. 10. Abraham Cowley, Ode Upon the Blessed Restoration and Returne of His Sacred Majestie, Charls the Second (London, 1660), p.16. 11. John Dryden, Astraea Redux: A Poem on the Happy Restoration and Return of his Sacred Majesty, Charles the Second (1660), in Paul Hammond (ed.) The Poems of John Dryden, volume 1, 1649–1681 (Harlow: Longman, 1995), p. 51. Line numbers for further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the main text.

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12. David R. Evans, ‘Charles II’s Grand Tour: Restoration Panegyric and the Rhetoric of Travel Literature’, Philological Quarterly 720 (1993), 53–71, at 57. 13. For a fuller discussion of the symbolic implications of the regicide for the conception of the bond between king and people, see Harold Weber, Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship under Charles II (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), pp. 4–5. 14. Jose, Ideas of the Restoration, p. 13. 15. Jose, Ideas of the Restoration, p. 6. 16. For fuller discussion, see Jose, Ideas of the Restoration, pp. 45–7. 17. Henry Beeston, A Poem to His most Excellent Majesty, Charles the Second (London, 1660), p. 5. 18. For a full discussion of this theme in Restoration panegyric, see Evans, ‘Charles II’s Grand Tour’. 19. Edmund Waller, To the King, Upon his Majesties Happy Return (London, 1660), p. 5. 20. Fuller, A Panegyrick to his Majesty, pp. 1, 11. 21. Sir Harbottle Grimston Baronet, Speaker of the Honorable House of Commons, to the Kings most Excellent Majesty (London, 1660), pp. 3–4. 22. For an analysis of the range of arguments deployed in defence of the Revolution, see Mark Goldie, ‘The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument: an Essay and an Annotated Bibliography of Pamphlets’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 83 (1980), 573–664. 23. Deborah C. Payne, ‘“And Poets Shall by Patron-Princes Live”: Aphra Behn and Patronage’, in Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (eds.), Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theater, 1660–1820 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991), pp. 105–99, at p. 106. 24. Gilbert Burnet, A Sermon Preached in the Chapel of St James’s, Before His Highness the Prince of Orange, 23rd of December, 1688 (Edinburgh, 1689), p. 1. 25. Tony Claydon has argued that the arguments from Providence were employed within the reformation of manners movement largely as a way of getting round the dubious legality of the accession. See Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ch. 1–3. 26. On this tradition of anti-Catholic, providentialist history, see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 27. Thomas Rogers, Lux Occidentalis, a2v. 28. John Tutchin, An Heroick Poem upon the Expedition of His Majesty, to rescue England from Popery, Tyranny, and Arbitrary Government (London, 1689), p. 5. 29. Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel (1681), in Hammond (ed.) The Poems of John Dryden, volume 1, 1649–1681, p. 478. In fact, as F.H. Ellis observes, few were present on the beach at Torbay. Poems On Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse 1660–1714, ed. George deF. Lord et al., 7 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963–75), vol. 6, p.232.

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30. Steven Pincus has challenged this reading of British foreign policy in the Anglo-Dutch wars by arguing that the wars were fought for ideological purposes. See Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–68 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 31. For a fuller history of anti-Dutch abuse, see P. G. Rogers, The Dutch in the Medway (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 7–13. 32. Sir William Temple, Memoirs of what past in Christendom, from the war begun 1672 to the peace concluded 1679 (London 1691); Letters written by Sir William Temple during his being Ambassador at the Hague. . . (London 1699). 33. Steven Zwicker, ‘Representing the Revolution’, in Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp.173–99, at pp.180–1. 34. Beaupre Nowers, ‘To the Queen’, Musae Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1689), b3r. 35. The Subjects Satisfaction; Being a New Song of the Proclaiming King William and Queen Mary (London, 1688), p. 2. 36. John Glanvill, ‘Upon the Successes of the War’, in Poems, Consisting of Originals and Translations (London, 1725), pp. 52–5. 37. See some of the republications of 1688: A Speech made. . . in Parliament, anno 1593. . . concerning the Spanish Invasion. . . (London, 1688), and Queen Elizabeth’s Opinion concerning Transubstantiation, with some Prayers and Thanksgivings composed by her Imminent Dangers (London, 1688). Yet as Jonathan Israel and Geoffrey Parker have recently shown, the most obvious parallel between 1688 lay in the similarities between the Spanish Armada and the Dutch armada – a parallel William’s propagandists were keen to play down. See Jonathan I. Israel and Geoffrey Parker, ‘Of Providence and Protestant Winds: the Spanish Armada of 1588 and the Dutch armada of 1688’, in Jonathan I. Israel (ed.), The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 335–64, at pp. 335–7. 38. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688–1783 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 140. 39. An Essay in Verse On the Fourth Day of November, Signaliz’d by the Birth of William Henry, Late Prince of Orange (London, 1690), p. 3. 40. Joseph Addison, A Poem to His Majesty (1695), in A. C. Guthkelch (ed.), The Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Addison (London: G. Bell and sons ltd., 1914), vol. 1, p. 42. 41. See J.C.D. Clark on William’s Stuart credentials: English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice During the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 127. 42. The decline in William’s popularity after her death, and the rise in anti-Dutch xenophobia that came with it, suggests that she was a fundamental of the king’s conditional status as a Stuart king. 43. The Subjects Satisfaction, p.1.

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44. See Stephen Baxter, ‘William II as Hercules: the political implications of court culture’, in Lois Schwoerer (ed.), The Revolution of 1689: Changing Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 95–106, at p. 101. And Lois Schwoerer’s study of the form of the coronation of 1689 has shown the way in which the ceremony was used to provide the new sovereigns with symbols of authority, to paper over whatever might be unorthodox or unsteady about the new regime, and that a large number of those symbols were derived from rituals and images associated with Charles II. ‘The Coronation of William and Mary, April 11 1689’, in Schwoerer (ed.), The Revolution of 1689, pp. 107–30, at p. 107. 45. Steven Zwicker, ‘Representing the Revolution’, p. 178. 46. Thomas Rogers, ‘To the Queen’, pp. 15–6. 47. See Murray Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 14–8. 48. Robert Smythies, ‘On the Late Happy Revolution, A Pindarique Ode’, Musae Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1689), a3v. 49. Tutchin, A Heroick Poem upon the Late Expedition of His Majesty, p. 11.

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chapter 7

‘Yet Israel still serves’: home and nation in Milton’s Samson Agonistes William Walker

In the epistle he affixed to Samson Agonistes (1671), Milton emphasizes that good tragedy is ‘grave’. ‘Tragedy, as it was antiently compos’d’, he observes, ‘hath been ever held the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other Poems’. Philosophers and ‘other gravest Writers’, he goes on to observe, frequently cite the ‘Tragic Poets’. The best of such poets, Milton avers, avoid the error, all too common in tragedies of his day, ‘of intermixing Comic stuff with Tragic sadness and gravity’.1 In his dramatic poem, Milton conforms with these ideas about what tragedy ought to be by representing the terrible suffering of Samson, his lamentations, a series of impassioned encounters between him and his friends and enemies, and his final deed that results in the destruction of himself and thousands of his enemies. But the high seriousness, authority, severity, and importance that Milton has in mind when he uses the term ‘grave’2 and that he associates with good tragedy also derive from the poem’s stern teachings about nations, the conditions under which one may serve one’s nation, the moral quality of national service, and the results and significance that great acts of national service can have. At the outset of the poem, Samson bitterly laments his condition of being blind, destitute, dirty, enslaved by an enemy, despised by all around him, and open to their ‘gaze’ and ridicule. Most in that condition would, but Samson has an additional reason for lamenting: he believes that being in this condition renders him incapable of serving his nation as it was prophesied he would do. Why, he bitterly asks, was his birth foretold by an angel, and ‘some great act / Or benefit reveal’d to Abraham’s race’ (28–9), given that he now obviously cannot perform such an act? How, he bitterly asks, can he perform any ‘great exploits’ if he is going to ‘dye / Betray’d, Captiv’d, and both my Eyes put out, / Made of my Enemies the scorn and gaze; / To grind in Brazen Fetters under task. . .’ (32–5). Surely he cannot fulfil the ‘Promise’ that he would ‘Israel from Philistian yoke deliver’, now 98

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that he is ‘Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves, / Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke’ (41–2). After Manoa enters the scene, Samson expresses his confidence that ‘the God of Abraham’ ‘will arise and his great name assert’ (465–7), but he is just as ‘sure’ that, given his circumstances, he will play no part in it. That is not all bad, since it will allow him to do some other things he wants to do: ‘let me here’, he tells his father, ‘As I deserve, pay on my punishment; / And expiate, if possible, my crime, / Shameful garrulity’ (488–91). Manoa, too, feels that ‘God will vindicate the glory of his name’ (475), and he at first agrees with Samson: God, he surmises, will perhaps provide means for Samson to return ‘Home to thy countrey and his sacred house’ (518), but once he is there he will not deliver Israel from the Philistines but merely ‘bring thy off’rings, to avert / His further ire, with praiers and vows renew’d’ (519–20). Samson does indeed implore God’s pardon, but asks, ‘as for life, / To what end should I seek it?’ (521–2). Discussing his temperance and noble past with the Chorus, he then reasserts his sense of uselessness to his nation: by which means, Now blind, disheartn’d, sham’d, dishonour’d, quell’d, To what can I be useful, wherein serve My Nation, and the work from Heav’n impos’d, But to sit idle on the houshold hearth, A burdenous drone; to visitants a gaze, Or pitied object, these redundant locks Robustious to no purpose clustering down, Vain monument of strength;

(562–70)

In response to Manoa’s brighter suggestion that God might restore his sight with the result that he could again exert his strength (which has returned with his locks) and ‘serve him better then thou hast’ (585), Samson insists that he will remain blind, that he has run his ‘race of glory’, and that he will ‘shortly be with them that rest’ (597–8). While Samson is right about shortly being with them that rest, he is wrong in thinking that he is useless to his nation, wrong in thinking that his end, in the sense of a purpose or aim, is merely his end, in the sense of a death that would do nothing for Israel (the paranomasia runs through the entire poem). There are numerous intimations of this fact, one of which comes in his encounter with Harapha, who also feels that Samson is ‘good for nothing else, no better service’ than ‘to grind / Among the Slaves and Asses’ (1161–3). Though he does not explicitly identify it as service to his nation, Samson sees the hand-to-hand combat he proposes with the giant

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as an encounter that would prove that God gave him his strength (1150), that his god is stronger than the giant’s god, Dagon (1155), that the god of Israel is in fact ‘God’ (1176). Defiantly asserting this, Samson must believe that he can at least in some way serve his nation’s god. While immediately following this exchange Samson is still thinking of his own death as a good riddance, he also surmises that it may be the occasion for the ruin of his ‘deadliest foe’ (1262). The Chorus presents what seems a rather unwarranted upbeat reading of this surmise as a case of God putting into the hands of a deliverer of just men ‘invincible might / To quell the mighty of the Earth’ (1270–2). Samson refuses to go to the temple but suggests that if he did go he still might serve some important cause, such as God or Israel (1377–9). He then observes that that very day might be ‘remarkable’ in his life ‘By some great act’ (1389), and in a remarkable volte face, agrees to go along with the Messenger to the Philistine temple, insisting that if he does not serve and benefit them, he at least will do nothing that would dishonour God, Israel, its laws, or himself (1385–6; 1408–9; 1424–5). The Chorus sends him on his way, wishing that the Holy One Of Israel be thy guide To what may serve his glory best, & spread his name Great among the Heathen round.

(1427–30)

And immediately prior to the off-stage catastrophe, Manoa expresses his belief that God permitted Samson’s strength to return in order ‘To use him further yet in some great service’ (1499). In the eyes of several of the characters, Samson does indeed serve Israel and its god one last time, though they also see his final act as one of vengeance, an evaluation that Samson nowhere affirms. Responding to the Hebrew Messenger’s detailed account of what happened, the Chorus exclaims, O dearly-bought revenge, yet glorious! Living or dying thou hast fulfill’d The work for which thou was foretold To Israel.

(1660–3)

The Semichorus supports this assessment when it observes that God had sent ‘a spirit of phrenzie’ among the Philistines who, ‘Drunk with Idolatry, drunk with Wine’ (1670), were men who, ‘Fall’n into wrath divine’, invited ‘thir own ruin on themselves’ (1669–84). Samson ‘With inward eyes illuminated / His fierie vertue rouz’d / From under ashes into sudden flame’ and performed his final heroic act (1687–91). Manoa, too, claims

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that his son has benefited his nation as well as his house, for he completed his heroic life ‘With God not parted from him, as was feard, / But favouring and assisting to the end’ (1719–20). In short, Samson’s end was also the fulfilment of his end. One of the leading authorities on Milton’s nationalism claims that it is ‘the freedom guaranteed by a public sphere so enlarged and secure as to enable individual agency of “free will” to realize its divinely sanctioned potential . . . that is the central defining characteristic of Milton’s imagined nation’.3 Many of Milton’s writings support this claim, but one of the things Milton dramatizes in Samson Agonistes is that, while living in the kind of nation Milton imagines is desirable, it is not necessary in order freely to fulfil our divinely sanctioned potential. For in pulling down the temple upon the Philistines and himself, Samson proves just how wrong he had been in thinking that he could not freely serve his nation and its god in his dire circumstances. He demonstrates that we still have free will and that we can exercise it effectively in the service of our nation (and our god) even though we may be ‘Blind among enemies’ (68), ‘Despis’d’, and ‘thought extinguish’t quite’ (1688).

*** The poem’s teachings about the moral value and significance of national service are just as severe. For the poem shows that serving one’s nation is not necessarily virtuous or heroic. Indeed, acts of national service may be void of all ethical value – it depends on the kind of nation you serve, how you serve it, and why you serve it. Consider, for example, Dalila. She served her nation – at least she claims to have done so, and claims she will be celebrated by her countrymen for having done so (865–70; 980–96). But her national service impresses neither Samson, nor his God, nor the Chorus, nor many readers of the poem. This is not simply because the Philistines are the ‘enemy’ and ‘foe’ of Israel. It is because, first of all, what she and the Philistines refer to as their ‘nation’ and ‘country’ is not really a nation. As Samson observes to Dalila, if aught against my life Thy countrey sought of thee, it sought unjustly, Against the law of nature, law of nations, No more thy countrey, but an impious crew Of men conspiring to uphold thir state By worse then hostile deeds, violating the ends For which our countrey is a name so dear; Not therefore to be obey’d.

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Countries and nations, Samson claims, are communities which behave justly, by which he means in accordance with the law of nature and the law of nations. They act in accordance with the ‘ends’ for which countries are established and which make them dear to their members. He does not specify those ends, but if we take this as a reference to ancient GraecoRoman discussions of the law of nature, the law of nations, justice, patriotism, and the ends of government and political societies, they perhaps include the happiness and welfare of the members of the nation, the preservation of their private property, a noble and honourable life, and the fulfilment of what man is by nature. In order for national service to be of any moral value, it must be service to an authentic nation, where a nation is a community of individuals who are acting with the aim of achieving these ends, and not merely service to a community that, while calling itself a ‘nation’ and ‘country’, is no more than a bunch of individuals intent on serving themselves and maintaining their power over others. Since, in betraying Samson, Dalila served a crew rather than a nation, what she and her people see as action designed ‘to save / Her countrey from a fierce destroyer’ (984–5) and ‘the piety / Which to my countrey I was judg’d to have shewn’ does not count as the fulfilment of duty or obedience to valid commands (993–4). It is therefore not ‘Vertue, as [she] thought’ (870). The episode thus does not show that the law of nations and the law of nature can ‘provide a justification for Dalila’s actions’.4 It presents us with a Samson who interprets and uses the law of nations and the law of nature in order to deny Dalila’s society the status of nationhood. He thereby delegitimizes that society’s commands over its members and nullifies the moral integrity of those, such as Dalila, who obey them. In so doing, Samson shows how easy it is to cite the law of nations and the law of nature to declassify one’s enemy as a nation, to destroy the ethical sanction claimed by its supporters, and, indeed, to justify acts of aggression against it – something that Locke’s Two Treatises also shows, and that the North American indigenous peoples at the time were learning all too well.5 Neither is national service virtuous unless the god of one’s nation is, if not the one and only god, then at least a true god. Responding to Dalila’s claim that, subjected to the arguments of her ‘countrey’s’ (851) priests, magistrates, and princes, she was possessed of and acted on the maxim ‘that to the public good / Private respects must yield’ (867–8), Samson retorts,

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(896–900)

Even if there were more than one authentic god, Samson observes, no agent that promotes its interests by committing or promoting in its followers ‘ungodly deeds’ qualifies as such a god. Since Dagon did so, Dagon is not a ‘God’. While, as Dalila insists, her service to the Philistines is very much like Samson’s service to Israel, and she might be celebrated by her people just as Jael was by the Israelites, that service is thus fundamentally different from Samson’s in that it is performed in the name of a people devoted to a false god – an ‘idol’ as Samson and his people often call it – whereas Samson’s is performed in the name of a nation devoted to a true god, what in his encounter with Harapha he refers to not as one of the ‘Gods’, but as ‘God’. That is just one more reason that Dalila’s service to her ‘Nation’ (857) does not qualify as virtue, as she thought. We reasonably infer from other passages in the poem that the moral quality of Samson’s national service also depends on the reasons he has for performing it. In particular, we see that the ethical quality of his acts of national service derive in part from the fact that he believes, and in some cases claims to know, that they fulfil the work God has assigned to him. Samson says that he married ‘the daughter of an Infidel’ (221), the woman from Timna, for example, because he ‘knew / From intimate impulse’ that this was from God and that ‘by occasion hence / I might begin Israel’s Deliverance, / The work to which I was divinely call’d’ (224–6). In his opening discussion with the Chorus, he describes his past deeds as ‘great acts which God had done / Singly by me against’ the Philistines (243–4), and then speculates that ‘Nations grown corrupt’ often despise those ‘Whom God hath of his special favour rais’d / As thir Deliverer’, as though he himself was such a man (268–74). Both he and the chorus then see him as another in the line of divinely sanctioned judges. Responding to the Chorus’s reference to him as one whom God reared as his ‘mighty Champion’ (556), Samson, as we have seen, laments that he cannot serve his nation, where that service is ‘the work from Heav’n impos’d’ (565). When he defends himself against Harapha’s charge of being ‘A Murtherer, a Revolter, and a Robber’ (1180), he claims, ‘I was no private but a person rais’d / With strength sufficient and command from Heav’n / To free my Countrey’ (1211–3); ‘I was to do my part from Heav’n assign’d’, he adds (1217). And according to ‘The Argument’ with which Milton prefaces the

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work, the reason Samson accedes to the Officer’s request that he accompany him to the temple is that he believed doing so was what God wished: ‘at length perswaded inwardly that this was from God, he yields to go along with him’ (p. 463). We have, finally, seen that Manoa and the Chorus on many occasions confirm Samson’s belief that in serving his nation as he did, he was indeed obeying divine commands, completing divinely assigned work, and playing the part God gave to him. While that work might disgust some modern moral sensibilities and appear to be something that could not possibly fulfil God’s will,6 there is little reason to think that Milton wishes us to reject that assessment of it. After all, that assessment is implied though not explicitly stated by the narrative Milton took to be the word of God: in Judges, it seems that God condones Samson’s final act since Samson commits it immediately after calling out to God and saying, ‘O Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes’ (Judges 16:28). Many figures in the tradition of Reformed commentary on Judges, some of whom Milton knew, also asserted that Samson’s mighty deeds against the Philistines were just, in part because he was raised by god to do them.7 This characterization of these deeds would, finally, be in keeping with Milton’s citation of Old Testament accounts of the Israelites’ utter destruction of the Canaanites to justify English subjugation of the Irish.8 Samson’s deeds of national service, then, qualify as truly virtuous, heroic deeds because they are just and consistent with the law of nature, the law of nations, and the laws of his nation (which are also those of his religion); they are performed in the service of an authentic nation; they are performed in the service of a nation that worships a, if not the, true god; one of the main reasons he has for performing them is that he believes God wills him to do so; and they do in fact fulfil the work God assigns to him. Defining his hero in this way, Milton downplays the importance of patriotism – in the sense of love of one’s nation – as a ground of Samson’s service to his nation. True, Samson shows some affection and concern for those in the Chorus, and he remarks to Dalila that, in general, ‘our countrey is a name so dear’ (894). But we note that in ‘The Argument’, Milton identifies the members of the chorus not as members of Samson’s nation, Israel, but as ‘friends and equals of his [Samson’s] tribe’, and that under ‘The Persons’ he lists it as a ‘Chorus of Danites’ (p. 463). Samson, moreover, never addresses the chorus members as his ‘Countreymen’, as the Hebrew messenger does at the end of the poem (1549), but consistently

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addresses them as his ‘friends’ and ‘brethren’, as though his sympathies lie not so much with Israel as with a smaller group, such as a tribe, a circle of friends, or family. And it is perhaps out of respect for this fact that, after his son has been killed, Manoa says he will send not for his ‘countrymen’ and stage some kind of national homecoming, but for all my kindred, all my friends To fetch him hence and solemnly attend With silent obsequie and funeral train Home to his Fathers house.

(1730–3)

Though not of his own accord, Samson, like Jesus at the end of Paradise Regained and Abraham at the end of the tragedy Milton considered writing about him,9 will return home. Home is here understood not so much in terms of nation as in terms of the smaller, more private and quiet familial household, but perhaps also in terms of God’s presence, for as Jesus informed Peter after Peter said he would lay down his life for the sake of Jesus, ‘in my Father’s house are many mansions’ (John 14:2). Prior to that final homecoming, Samson nowhere displays any feelings for what the Chorus fondly refers to as ‘Eshtaol and Zora’s fruitful Vale’ (181), the larger territory that contains that vale and that had been allotted to the tribe of Dan, or the yet larger territory that included the lands that had been allotted to all the tribes of Israel: Canaan, the promised land, the land of milk and honey, the land that spewed out the Canaanites for their abominations. He neither misses his country, nor displays any desire to return ‘Home to thy countrey’ as his father asks (518). Indeed, we have seen that he finds no joy in imagining himself back in his father’s house in the land of the tribe of Dan. Moreover, he nowhere displays anything like the fervent pride in and love of country that the Roman heroes of Livy and Sallust display, or that Cicero so frequently expresses and recommends in his writings. On the contrary, disgust, shame, anger, and disappointment dominate Samson’s feelings for his nation, for in his eyes that nation had proven itself to be servile, unworthy, ungrateful, and cowardly (1213–6). Such intense negative feelings may of course still be grounded in positive feelings for his nation, but there is little explicit expression of love of country on the part of Samson anywhere in the poem. But this is one more thing that distinguishes his national service: though he is profoundly disappointed in it, exiled from it, and has no desire to return to it, he nevertheless serves his nation. Samson serves his nation out of his sense that it still is and ought to be a nation, that it is God’s nation, that it worships God (on a good day), and that God commands him to

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serve it. His service to his nation is virtuous and heroic because it is grounded not so much in patriotism as in faith, as indeed the apostle Paul observes in his letter to the Hebrews (Hebrews 11:32–40).

*** But what, according to this poem, are the results and significance of heroic national service, such as that of Samson? Again, nothing necessarily, and Milton grimly insists on this point. It is first of all important to see that Samson, Manoa, and the Chorus highlight the fact that by the time he is grinding at the ‘publick Mill’ (1327, 1393), he has already performed great deeds in the service of his nation, but all to no avail. Thus, it is because Samson has already performed heroic deeds that the Chorus describes him as ‘The glory late of Israel’ (179). Responding to Samson’s claim that he married non-Israelites with the aim of oppressing ‘Israel’s oppressors’, the Chorus then remarks that, in general, In seeking just occasion to provoke The Philistine, thy Countries Enemy, Thou never wast remiss, I bear thee witness: Yet Israel still serves with all his Sons.

(237–40)

Samson’s dutiful efforts at serving Israel in the past, that is, have done nothing to fulfil the work of delivering it from its enemy. Harapha makes the point when, after saying he has heard much of Samson’s ‘prodigious might and feats perform’d’ (1083), he sharply responds to Samson’s challenge: ‘Is not thy Nation subject to our Lords?’ (1182). And though refuting the giant’s accusations that he is a murderer, a revolter, and a robber, Samson concedes that, in spite of his efforts, ‘to this day they [the Israelites] serve’ (1216). Moreover, as the Chorus does early in the play, we might remember that there is indeed a precedent in Israel for this kind of thing. For while perhaps succeeding as ‘deliverers’ in the short run, earlier judges such as ‘the matchless Gideon’ and ‘Jephtha’ (280–3) were scorned by their own people and failed to achieve liberty for Israel in the long run. Having done great things to no avail just as they had, Samson himself bitterly observes, ‘Of such examples adde mee to the roul’ (290). The hard reality is, as everyone in the poem says and knows, that Israel still serves in spite of the fact that Samson has already performed what Samson refers to as ‘acts indeed heroic’ (527) and ‘mightiest deeds’ (638). There is, moreover, little reason to think that his final heroic deed will be any different. For however stupendous it may seem, it is in important respects just more of the same. This is suggested by the similarity between the descriptions of some of his earlier deeds and the description of his final

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deed: reviewing his record of achievement at the beginning of the poem, the Chorus observes that in Ramath-lechi Samson used the jaw-bone of an ass to destroy ‘the flower of Palestin’ (144), while Samson claims that on this occasion ‘with a trivial weapon [he] fell’d / Their choicest youth’ (263–4). At the end of the poem, the Messenger claims that Samson pulled the roof of the temple down upon ‘Thir choice nobility and flower, not only / Of this but each Philistian City round’ (1654–5). It seems that Samson is doing what Samson has been doing all along – destroying the Palestinian elite. This time around, he has just killed more of them (but also himself), as indeed the Chorus explicitly observes: Samson’s ‘slaughter’d foes’ were ‘in number more / Then all thy life had slain before’ (1667–8). Here Milton closely follows the account of Samson’s final act in Judges: ‘so the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life’ (16:30). Reiterating this terse account in his source, Milton presents Samson’s final deed not as a singular event, but as the last in a series of deeds of the same kind, one that resulted in merely a higher tally of dead Philistines. As Manoa observes, ‘Samson hath quit himself / Like Samson, and heroicly hath finish’d / A life Heroic’ (1709–11). This is no doubt a good thing, but the ploce (Samson . . . Samson) followed hard by the polyptoton (heroicly . . . Heroic) also highlights the fact that in performing his final deed, Samson was just doing again (or more of) what he had been doing all along. Why would one more heroic deed, though his last, ever make Israel free, if none of his other heroic deeds had done so? It cannot, it will not, and Samson knows it. In his first dialogue with the Chorus, Samson remembers some of ‘those great acts which God had done / Singly by me’ against the Philistines, and sees them not as deliverance, but as ‘Deliverance offer’d’ (243–6). ‘Israel’s Governours, and Heads of Tribes’ neither ‘consider’d’ nor ‘Acknowledg’d’ that offer (242–6). Indeed, ‘the men of Judah’ (256) turned him over, bound, to the Philistines. It was on that occasion that Samson killed a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. But ‘Had Judah that day join’d, or one whole Tribe’, Samson observes, ‘They had by this possess’d the Towers of Gath, / And lorded over them whom now they serve’ (265–7). The reason Israel failed to do so is, Samson goes on to explain, that they had become one of those ‘Nations grown corrupt’ (268). As he later admits to Harapha, it is because ‘the servile minds’ of the Israelites ‘would not receive’ their deliverer that they still serve (1213–6). Commenting in this way on the heroic deeds he had already accomplished, Samson expresses his knowledge that he alone cannot deliver Israel. He can only do things which amount to an ‘offer’ of freedom to

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his nation, which provide an ‘occasion’ for it to become free. In order for it actually to do so, Israel must accept the offer, make good on the occasion, and Samson knows all too well that, in the past, Israel had declined to do so. This holds for Samson’s final act as well. Responding to the Messenger’s claim that ‘Gaza yet stands, but all her Sons are fall’n’ (1558), Manoa describes the event not as the destruction of or liberation from an enemy nation, but as merely ‘the desolation of a Hostile City’ (1561). True, after hearing the full account, he sums up by saying, ‘To Israel’ Samson in his final act ‘Honour hath left, and freedom’, but he then adds, ‘let but them / Find courage to lay hold on this occasion’ (1714–6). Like his son, Manoa knows that deeds of national service, even spectacular ones such as the one his son has just performed, cannot on their own free the nation; at best they amount to occasions of which the nation itself, exercising virtues such as courage, must take advantage. As many readers of the poem would know, Israel did not have the courage to lay hold on the occasion and therefore did not achieve freedom in the long run: there was civil war (an account of which brings the Book of Judges to a close), monarchy, and the division of Israel into two rival kingdoms, the northern kingdom (Israel), which eventually came under the domination of Assyria, and the southern kingdom (Judah), that eventually came under the domination of Babylon. Then came the Persian, Greek, and Roman subjugations of Judah. As it did following his earlier heroic deeds in the service of his nation, so after his final deed of national service, Israel still served. But this, after all, is consistent in an important way with the promise that the angel of the Lord made to Samson’s mother: the angel said not that Samson shall deliver Israel, but that ‘he shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines’ (13:5, my emphasis). And we have seen that Samson himself remembers this detail of the prophecy when he observes that God appointed him ‘To begin Israel’s Deliverance’ (225). Samson may well have begun this deliverance; the problem is that Israel did not finish it. But even if Samson’s final act of national service failed to bring about the liberation of Israel, even if it was a failed beginning, as Milton feared the establishment of the ‘Commonwealth and Free State’ in 1649 would be for England, and as he eventually came to believe it was,10 is it still not significant as a type of the acts of Christ, as a figure and promise that will be fulfilled by the New Testament antitype? There certainly was a strong tradition of seeing Samson in this way, one that Milton knew, and some critics have argued that his dramatic poem places him in this tradition.11 But there is little evidence of such a conception of Samson in the poem. No

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one in the poem is declaiming the Old Testament mantra that, however disastrous its history may be, all nations shall be blessed in Israel, and there is nothing like the explicit invocation of typological readings of Old Testament history that we get in the final books of Paradise Lost. When Samson and the Chorus look to the future, one of the things they see is others regarding him as merely an ‘example’ of a fallen great man and unappreciated leader (166, 290, 765). When Manoa looks to the future, he sees a ‘Monument’ to Samson which will be visited by ‘the valiant youth’ and ‘Virgins’ (1734–44). It is, moreover, difficult to see how the comparisons of Samson to a ‘Grave’ (102), a ‘Lion’ (128, 139), Atlas (150), a ‘Dungeon’ (156), ‘Angels’ (343), an ‘Army’ (346), a ‘Plant’ (362), Tantalus (499–501), a helpless ‘child’ (942–3), ‘the force of winds and waters pent’ (1647), ‘an ev’ning Dragon’ (1692), ‘an Eagle’ (1695), and a phoenix (1699–1707) would support the view that Milton wishes us to see Samson as a type of Christ, or his final act as a promise of the apocalypse. They seem rather to support David Loewenstein’s contention that Milton ‘muted the story’s typological implications’ and Stanley Fish’s more general observation that the poem resists all efforts ‘to place him in a tradition that makes his life intelligible’.12

*** Being blind, enslaved, and in the hands of an enemy people does not deprive you of the freedom to serve god and nation, and is therefore no excuse for not serving them. Be not deluded: what you may think is virtuous service to your nation may well not be. In order for your service to your nation to be virtuous and heroic, your nation must be an authentic nation and not a crew, it must worship ‘God, besides whom is no God’ (or at least an authentic god), it must conform to the laws of nations and nature, you must serve it out of the belief that God wants you to serve it, and God must want you to serve it. In some cases, God regards the enemies of his chosen nation as inhuman members of a crew and wills that they be annihilated, with the result that true national service may take the form of annihilating entire cities and peoples. In such cases, the annihilation of cities and peoples – ones that claim to be nations but are really only crews – would also be in keeping with the law of nature and the law of nations. If you do succeed in serving your nation well, your nation may well not benefit from it, it may have absolutely no significance or value to your nation or anyone else in the long run, and you may be destroyed as a result. That, however, would not mean you have failed, for real heroism in this life is a matter of serving God, who doth not need man’s works. These are some

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of the thoughts one might reasonably entertain while reading and reflecting upon Milton’s dramatization of the pain, passions, mistakes, and mighty deeds of Samson. These are some of the teachings by virtue of which Samson Agonistes is a grave and moral tragedy, and so, on Milton’s own criteria, a tragedy of the highest quality.

Notes 1. John Milton, Samson Agonistes, A Dramatic Poem, in Stella Revard (ed.), Complete Shorter Poems (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 461. Further references to the poem are to this edition and are included in brackets in the text. 2. See ‘grave’ in Laurence Sterne and Harold H. Kollmeier (eds.), A Concordance to the English Prose of John Milton (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1985). 3. Paul Stevens, ‘Milton’s Polish Pamphlet and the Duke of Monmouth: Longing for a Hero’, Milton Studies 48 (2008), p. 72. See also Paul Stevens, ‘How Milton’s Nationalism Works: Globalization and the Possibilities of Positive Nationalism’, in Paul Stevens and David Loewenstein (eds.), Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2008), p. 276. 4. Victoria Kahn, ‘Disappointed Nationalism: Milton in the Context of Seventeenth-Century Debates about the Nation-State’, in Stevens and Lowenstein (eds.), Early Modern Nationalism, p. 265. 5. See James Tully, ‘Rediscovering America: the Two treatises and aboriginal rights’, in An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 137–76. 6. See John Carey, ‘A work in praise of terrorism?’ Times Literary Supplement, 6 September 2002, p. 15. For discerning critiques of this and other ‘revisionist’ readings of the poem, see Alan Rudrum, ‘Milton Scholarship and the Agon over Samson Agonistes’, Huntington Library Quarterly 65 (2002), pp. 465–88; Tobias Gregory, ‘The Political Messages of Samson Agonistes’, SEL 50 (2010), pp. 175–203; Feisal Mohamed, Milton and the Post-Secular Present (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011). 7. See R. W. Serjeantson, ‘Samson Agonistes and “Single Rebellion”’, in Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 626, 629. 8. See Paul Stevens, ‘“Leviticus Thinking” and the Rhetoric of Early Modern Colonialism’, Criticism 35 (1993), pp. 441–61. 9. See ‘Milton’s Outlines for Tragedies’, in Maurice Kelley (ed.), Complete Prose Works of John Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), vol. 8, p. 558. 10. See Second Defence of the English People, in Don M. Wolfe (ed.), Collected Prose Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), vol. 4, part 1, pp. 673–86, at p. 685; Robert W. Ayers (ed.), The Readie and Easie Way,

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Collected Prose Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), vol. 7, pp. 421–3. 11. See Michael F. Krouse, Milton’s Samson and the Christian Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949); William Madsen, From Shadowy Types to Truth: Studies in Milton’s Symbolism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); Barbara Lewalski, ‘Samson Agonistes and the “Tragedy” of the Apocalypse’, PMLA 85 (1970), 1050–62. 12. David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 182–3; Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001), p. 441.

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chapter 8

‘A thing remote’: Defoe and the home in the metropolis and New World Geoffrey Payne

Daniel Defoe played a significant role in constructing a sense of British national identity in the early years of the eighteenth century, yet his attitude towards the nation that was forming remains a matter for debate. The discussion that follows explores the parameters of Defoe’s complex attitudes to nationhood via a study of his representations of the different functions of the home space when viewed in light of the systematic social world presented in his texts. It begins with an analysis of the home as depicted in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), arguing that the novel presents a vision of a troubled home-space that is employed to emphasize the falseness and instability of the material world, and to cast doubts upon the long-term viability of nationhood when viewed from the perspective of Dissenting Protestant religious beliefs. The discussion will then consider The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) in order to understand how the unstable and troubled vision of the national homeland signifies in a broader context. In embarking upon that discussion, it is important to register that I am talking about home as a myth that is connected to points of origin, nativity, and refuge, and not as designated architectural structures. Such a view of the home, I argue, emerges from the manner in which Defoe’s novels connect individuals to the networks of power that define the social sphere in the world he describes via his texts. In discussing Defoe’s great nonfictional account of the British Nation, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1725), Betty A. Schellenberg identifies at least four formal schemes that inform Defoe’s portrait of British national identity: figures that cast the nation as ‘aestheticized landscape, [. . .] as body, [. . .] as centred circle, and [. . .] as network’.1 Those categories, I argue, afford a fair model of Defoe’s practices, not only in the Tour but throughout his texts, and in the discussion that follows, the final two elements – nation as centred circle and nation as network – will feature prominently in 112

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exploring how categories of ‘home’ inform and reflect issues relating to the representation of a national homeland. In A Journal of the Plague Year, Defoe employs the idea of home in two significant ways. The first locates the home at the centre of debates about liberty, where it is situated as a site both of refuge and of imprisonment, instigating the problematic tension implicit in the domestic ideology that came to dominate the discourse of the novel in the ensuing centuries.2 The second links to an idea analogous to Schellenberg’s observations made in relation to The Tour, in that Defoe locates the home of his narrator, H.F., at the centre of a network of geo-political and narrative spaces that ultimately spread to stand for the nation itself. This dual-layered systematic presentation creates a highly alluring (but also troubled) material home that can be exploited for political effect, especially in undermining a complacent vision of the national home that was contrary to the broad tenor of Defoe’s religious beliefs. That liberty is a paramount thematic concern in the Journal is established via extensive attention to regulations about the shutting up of houses, which are set in competition with notions of individual sovereignty in the private sphere that derived from the dominant Whiggish philosophical vision of the day.3 On one side of the equation, homes are presented as emblems of the individual Breton’s right to liberty of action in the private sphere, exploiting a notion that was already a central pillar of antiCatholic ‘nationalist’ polemics that sought to present the supremacy of the British political system over that of other European nations, especially France.4 Such a view, however, is countered by the presentation of a vision of how the home functions as a mechanism for social control, constituting a discrete social unit that can be isolated and, if necessary, sacrificed to a greater social good if a substantial risk to the nation’s security is apparent (as in the case of plague).5 In narrative terms, a strong emphasis is given to the discussion of shutting up houses. It is introduced via an extended discussion of the legislation that enabled the practice,6 and officials whose roles are defined by the legislation become key actors in the dramatization of the issue’s function in the wider text. Most importantly, the practice is used to assail the liberties inherent in the notion of the private sphere, showing how those new officials – ‘Examiners’, ‘Searchers’, ‘Watchmen’, ‘Keepers’, and ‘Buriers’ (p. 53) – serve as functionaries of a disciplinary state authority that is intent upon surveillance and incarceration, tracing and controlling the influence of plague and its carriers even to the final interment of its deceased victims. Their power to shut up houses turns homes into

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potential prisons and residents into ‘Inmates’ (p. 57) who may be subjected to a variety of surveillance measures – constant attention from Watchers and enforced visitations by Searchers and Examiners – and, similarly, subjected to vaguely defined punitive measures ‘at the Direction of the Aldermen’ (p. 57) in cases of transgression. All of those terms coalesce within the narrative to present a home space that has been co-opted as a tool for public control, a function that is in direct tension with the more benign ideal of the home as a point of refuge from encroaching public authority. A result, as John Bender has observed, is that ‘sites of imprisonment’, in the form of individual homes, are ‘diffused into every street’, making the nation itself serve as an exemplar of tyrannical authority.7 As the narrator directly relates, under such conditions the nation becomes a prison-state, where there are ‘just so many Prisons in the Town as [. . .] Houses shut up [. . . though] the People shut up or imprison’d so, were guilty of no Crime’ (p. 64). Despite some moments where the narrator takes pains to register the beneficial aims that underpin the practice, the narrative’s overall position on the shutting up of houses remains in accord with the earliest negative assessments: ‘the most grievous Story [that] must be told’ (p. 52) about the period covered. Later, he reports that the practice was ‘the only subject of Discontent among the People at that time’, counteracting other positive outcomes of the plague’s effects such as the diminution of sectarian differences.8 In emphasizing the negative and divisive effects of the practice, the narrative draws attention to the fragility of any security afforded to the private liberties of home life unless supported by a similar systemic guarantee at a public level. It is no surprise, then, that the novel also explores how homes are composed and how they function when considered in light of a networked view of society. The Journal presents a vision of a nation that is under threat of disintegration, and although the ostensible enemy is plague, the tensions that the disease exploits are weaknesses distributed throughout Britain’s body politic, fracturing the bedrock of civic life via the strains placed on fundamental social units such as the family and the parish, with the effects extending all the way up the political chain to the Restoration court of Charles II.9 To establish its systemic vision, the narrative of the plague’s entry into the nation is represented in terms of a staged invasion, where first an individual, then one house, and then a neighbourhood, a parish, a town, a city and, finally, the nation fall prey to the disease sequentially.10 At the centre of that network lies the connection between the individual and the home, linking organism and identity to the social networks that comprise the body-politic of the nation.11 The idea

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of home in the system so described is crucial to developing our understanding of the complex and fraught vision of nationhood that is advanced in the text. Most centrally, homes become key sites for the transmission of plague because they are inalienably connected to the broader network, functioning as small political units within the national body rather than as discrete isolable private spaces. Homes, after all, are frequently shown to depend upon connections to the outside world, and, as the narrative reports, are made vulnerable because of those connections: Infection generally came into the Houses of the Citizens, by Means of their Servants, who, they were obliged to send up and down the Streets [. . .] for Food, or Physick, to Bake-houses, Brew-houses, Shops & c. and who going necessarily thro’ the Streets into Shops, Markets, and the like, it was impossible, but they should [. . .] meet with distempered people, who conveyed the fatal Breath into them, and they brought it Home to the Families to which they belonged. (pp. 73–4)

As might be expected, the family is the minimal operative social unit connected to the home space; but, unlike more modern conceptions, where belonging is denoted by ties of kinship and affinity, Defoe’s text reflects a prevailing view of the time in presenting an expansive family that incorporates all household members, including those who are connected by economic ties (here, the servants). That more expansive view of the household denotes a more expansive vision of the home, where separation between public and private spheres of life is indistinct. In the instance quoted above, the narrator relates how the home is connected to centres of trade (bake-houses, brew-houses, shops, and markets), but in other places it is connected to public institutions linked to health, governance, and religion.12 In all such circumstances, the home performs dual functions, both private and public, though the parameters of those categories are unstable and expand or contract as the influence of plague escalates. The narrative gives clear indications that homes that are so construed cannot be disconnected from the network, and therefore also cannot be secured. Even those houses that are shut up according to the legislation are permeable – H.F. speaks of many escapes made from under the noses of watchmen (for instance, on pages 62–3) – and likewise, the ideal of home as a secular retreat is undermined. Hence, although the narrative toys with the idea of the home as a sanctuary it is insufficient for that role. Even those who retreat to the river are not ‘entirely safe from the Infection’ (p. 108) and the narrator’s frequent excursions out from his

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house, despite all the apparent evidence to support a contrary retreat, speaks to a lack of faith in the security of the home. As permeable as the prison-houses that allow families to escape while under round-the-clock surveillance from the official Watchers, homes are constructed as disturbing social institutions that might as easily entrap or destroy an individual or family as save it.13 Much as it depicts the structures of political and social life, the narrative, too, has structures that reinforce the unstable kind of home that Defoe renders in his text. The novel comprises a series of interwoven journeys observed by the narrator, anchored to and overlapping upon the space of his home, which is figured so as to appear connected to the heart of Britain’s great metropolis, lying upon a ‘great street [. . .] known to be one of the broadest Streets of London’ (100). Radiating a series of journeys out from that centre, the narrative’s structure is analogous to the concentric journeys traced in the various sections of The Tour, perhaps suggesting itself as a blueprint for Defoe’s later grand foray into mounting a description of the British nation. The journeys in the Journal are manifold, and undertaken by diverse characters or entities. The plague itself progresses through the city’s parishes as mapped by developments in the published Bills of Mortality, and H.F.’s brother’s family (and many like them) flee from their city residences to other homes until the threat has passed (a trajectory followed by members of the Restoration Court), while the three men of Stepney (and, eventually, their large retinue) foray into the countryside and villages that encircle the metropolitan centre. Such groups represent a cross-section of the British community, and thus, figuratively, the narrative sets the nation itself in a state of agitated motion. As a model for narrative, such journeys set up expectations of a process of exile and return wherein narrative resolution involves a recuperative homecoming. Each journey is, indeed, rounded by a homecoming of sorts, as both the narrative and its protagonists return to London as those individuals and groups displaced by plague resume the lives they abandoned with its onset. However, although such returns do enable a form of narrative resolution (in that the dissipation of plague supplies necessary closure for the narrator’s plague journal), in the context of the novel’s treatment of a discourse of nationhood, the representation elicits a set of responses that are indicative of Defoe’s engagement with, and distancing from, other earlier literary models for dealing with national crisis. The discourse of return that is employed by Defoe works to rewrite strategies that had prevailed when representing earlier political events (especially in relation to both the Stuart Restoration and the Glorious

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Revolution).14 In Defoe’s text, instead of providing a mechanism for illustrating a narrative of national rescue, recuperation, or redemption, the post-plague homecomings see the reinstatement of a divided, sectarian state that apparently had been restored to a condition approaching unity under the social order in the nation defined by plague. Passages in the narrative tell us that, with the onset of plague, ‘the Church of England was restor’d’, and the various factions that had torn it apart so violently in earlier times ‘reconcil’d’ (p. 44); and that the plague ‘took away all Manner of Prejudice at, or Scruple about the Person [. . .] found in the Pulpit’ (p. 156). However, the narrative goes on to report that, ‘after the Sickness was over, that Spirit of Charity abated, and every Church being supplied again with their own Ministers [. . .] Things return’d to their old Channel again’ (p. 44), a process that is indicative of a wider pattern of national disintegration. At the narrative’s end H.F. returns again to that theme, concluding with a lament over ‘the Unthankfulness and Return of all manner of Wickedness among us’ (p. 211). Ironically, homecoming supplies the impetus for national disunity and division, breaking asunder a unifying tendency that had characterized British life in the time of plague. At the same textual moment, Defoe exploits a biblical paradigm – the Exodus – introducing a crucial discourse for exploring myths of exile and homecoming in a nationalist context. For, despite the fact that biblical allusions and images are a regular feature of the narrative (as is common within all of Defoe’s texts), and that exile and return is a prominent theme, it is only at this point that the novel exploits an association between H.F.’s Londoners and the nation of Israel, explaining that for the Generality of the People it might too justly be said of them, as was said of the Children of Israel, after their being delivered from the Host of Pharaoh, when they passed the Red-Sea, and look’d back, and saw the Egyptians overwhelmed in the Water, viz. That they sang his Praise, but they soon forgot his Works. (p. 210)

Here, H.F.’s Londoners – emblematic of the nation more broadly via their position at the centre of the narrative’s geospatial network – are cast in the role of God’s Chosen in search of the Promised Land. Significantly, although presented as part of the narrative resolution, the analogy that is deployed eschews any suggestion that the nation’s delivery from plague represents a resolution of the quest for the national homeland. The redemption narrative depicted in the Journal delivers the people of Britain to a point still near the beginning of the quest for Israel, choosing a moment when the Israelites are characterized as ungrateful and

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misguidedly satisfied to be cast adrift in the wilderness. By way of that analogy, the London presented at the conclusion of Defoe’s text is not a model of a realized national home or Promised Land and cannot function as such; instead, it stands as a wilderness or, at best, as a false home that acts as a snare that might arrest the nation from pursuing its quest to a more satisfactory end. As with its representation of the dual function of the home as site of sanctuary and prison, the text depicts homeland in idealized terms as the proper resolution of Providential plans for mankind (who strives to achieve the promised land), and in real terms as a trap that potentially distracts from that ultimate goal through a tendency to affiliate with imperfect and ill-functioning homes that permeate the secular political world that determines ideas of nationhood. Defoe’s decision to employ an analogy that refuses an easy association between the British homeland and the Promised Land of biblical myth is significant as it provides a mechanism for considering how the presentation of home conveyed in the Journal fits with broader patterns of representation that appear across his oeuvre and engages with the practices of other writers. His exploitation of the analogy to indicate a failure of the national ‘home’ positions his texts in relation to the period’s hotly contested debates about nationhood, where the conflation of Britain and Israel was a prevalent feature of both mainstream and oppositional discourses. On the side of mainstream commentary, as Linda Colley has noted, the practice of substituting Britain for Israel was so widely accepted that Isaac Watts’s popular translations of the Psalms could make the change without attracting any noteworthy derogatory comment.15 In a different way, ostracized or displaced Dissenters could utilize the mythic structure of Exodus in describing or envisioning their search for a new ‘promised’ homeland in the New World.16 Defoe’s positioning in relation to this debate reveals a broad-ranging strategy that is sustained across most of his major works. As noted earlier, Defoe’s identification with the Dissenting community forms an important base for understanding the presentation of both homes and homelands in his texts, informing a position of scepticism towards the idea that the material world could supply a model for the Promised homeland of biblical myth.17 Connected to the congregation of the Presbyterian preacher Samuel Annesley until his death in 1696, Defoe’s development as a writer took place within a tradition that insisted upon the inescapable wickedness of the material world. Insofar as it served a purpose, a world so constituted provided a locale for subjecting Christian aspirants to a trial by ordeal, and as the site for their pursuit of a quest for spiritual

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redemption. Construed in that way, all facets of the world that connect pilgrims to secular concerns become obstacles or snares that distract them from their true calling.18 Iconic for that tradition, Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1676) sets out a blueprint for understanding the worldview that permeates Defoe’s texts, and for the position of homes (and homelands) within them. Bunyan’s narrative commences with Christian’s decision to abandon his native home (signifying both family and nation) in the pursuit of a truer home in the Celestial City,19 and the disquieting nature of homes in the material world is a recurrent theme treated in several sections of the narrative. Quizzed by Prudence about his native country, Christian notes only his shame at the carnal pleasures that his countrymen took in earthly delights; and he responds to Charity’s enquiries about his wife and family by focusing upon their function as temptations that might serve to connect him to an earthly home that would ultimately serve to thwart his pilgrimage (pp. 41–3). Looking more broadly, in Vanity Fair, the trappings of a variety of potential homes: ‘houses, lands, trades, [. . .] countries, kingdoms, [. . .] wives, husbands, children, masters, servants’ are all among the merchandise sold to ensnare travellers in the mire of material pleasure (p. 70). In each of those instances, and throughout the text, home is positioned as an obstacle to a fulfilled spiritual journey. Defoe’s presentation of home in A Journal of the Plague Year follows a similar path to The Pilgrim’s Progress. Moreover, Bunyan’s example makes sense of the differences between the treatment of homes in Defoe’s texts and the mainstream models from either the Dissenting or High Church traditions that set out to debate the proper identification of the Promised Land in secular terms. For, despite his general tendency to deploy biblical discourse in his texts, Defoe avoids appropriating either model in his writings. The motif is significantly absent from the essays that he wrote in support of the Act of Union in 1706–7, a forum where such a frame might well have been expected given the tenor of other writings on the subject.20 Further, on the few occasions where it is used in his novels, as in the section from the Journal that is quoted above, the trope is treated in a sceptical light, serving to point out the limited extent to which the analogy between Britain and Israel can be sustained. The attitudes about homes and homelands that are revealed in the Journal can be traced among many of Defoe’s now-iconic texts. Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Roxana, for instance, each give accounts of their early lives that serve to demonstrate the failure of the home to supply social stability, and each of their narratives relays experiences of the

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traumatic effects of its continuing failure. For Moll in particular, homes are hostile environments, whether the reader chooses to focus upon her nativity to Newgate – a home-space that literalizes the prison motif explored in the Journal – or any of the number of surrogate homes that emerge both at ‘home’ in Britain or abroad in the New World colonies.21 For the purposes of this discussion, however, it is Robinson Crusoe who furnishes the most useful example for exploring the means by which Defoe utilizes the kind of troubled home spaces that are prevalent in H.F.’s narrative to construct a similarly disturbed vision of Britain’s nascent empire. The first Crusoe narrative – The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe – depicts a set of potential homes that fail to resolve the protagonist’s quest for homeland. In conveying that vision, Defoe employs a now-familiar set of representative processes, offering a schematic presentation of the position of home(s) within wider networks of power and setting the idea of home at the centre of the several narrative journeys depicted (though here, the scope of the depiction expands to cover Britain’s Imperial ambitions). Whether we focus upon the metaphoric functions of the various sites of domesticity that Crusoe inhabits throughout the novel or upon the manner in which different locales fail to fulfil the protagonist’s quest for homecoming, we can observe, again, the complex and ambiguous function of the idea of home in the narrative of Crusoe’s experiences. Crusoe’s homes fulfil similar representative functions to the homes that would later appear in the Journal. Despite all of the advantages of his native home, set out in his father’s discussions of the advantages of the ‘middle life’ (p. 58), Crusoe’s sole preoccupation in the narrative’s early section is escape.22 In this way, the home is figured both as a site that offers security in an otherwise uncertain world and, simultaneously, as a prison or trap that must be avoided if he is to follow the path ordained for him by Providence. Fuelled by his prodigal nature,23 Crusoe’s desire to escape becomes a dominative motive for action, and persists in his responses to all other potential homes that emerge as the narrative progresses. Crusoe abandons his second home in Brazil, tempted to return to his adventures because of the resemblance of the situation to that of his father’s house in England (pp. 82–3), and once he is wrecked on the Island he spends twenty-eight years making a home (or set of homes) that he incessantly plots to abandon, which, indeed, he does upon the first opportunity.24 The drive to escape is not attributable solely to the idea that the homes he occupies can be literally seen as prisons; it is only when enslaved by the

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‘Turkish Rover of Sallee’ (pp. 69–72) or when trapped on the Island that he is truly prevented from acting with freedom.25 Rather, all homes are presented as directly antagonistic to Crusoe’s ‘wand’ring inclination’ and in all cases act symbolically to incarcerate even when they offer sanctuary or security. The presentation of various kinds of home spaces during the time Crusoe spends upon the Island epitomizes the representational practices of the broader text. The Island itself is cast as a ‘Prison [. . .] in the worst Sense in the World’ (p. 128), a function not mitigated by the relative comfort of the life it affords him or by its apparent role in narratives involving both his physical and spiritual salvation. On a smaller scale, the habitations that Crusoe creates upon the Island also serve the dual purposes of points of refuge and potential prisons. The collapse of the cave encompassed by Crusoe’s original home on the Island causes him to reflect distinctly upon the prospect that his home could become his grave (p. 112), upsetting its ability to offer him his desired sense of security from the Island’s real and fantastical dangers. Later, following the earthquake and subsequent flood (pp. 116–7), he plans to build another residence because of his fear of being ‘bury’d alive’ (p. 118). Subsequently, in contemplating a move to his proposed ‘Country House’, he instigates further considerations of kinds of imprisonment to which he is subjected. He considers that to move away from the coast would signal an acceptance of his permanent incarceration on the Island, drawing upon a discourse of servitude in articulating his position: ‘to enclose my self among the Hills and Woods, in the Center of the Island, was to anticipate my Bondage’ (p. 132). In a more subtle way, too, he signals his confinement within a British imperialist paradigm, developing the trope established via his establishment of the ‘Country House’ in the instance referred to above into a fullblown fantasy in which he becomes ‘Lord of the whole Mannor, or if I pleas’d [. . .] King, or Emperor’ (p. 152). Via such terminology, the home spaces developed on the Island become linked to the British social order and its hierarchies are imposed upon the apparently blank canvas of the Island he is bringing under his dominion.26 In the final stages of the Island section of the narrative, Crusoe’s home is turned quite literally to a prison, as it is used to incarcerate the defeated mutineers from the ship that rescues Crusoe, and the trope of the Island as prison is reprised as they are left there as punishment for their crimes. Although they are characterized as homes, each of these sites of habitation are problematic and fail to live up to an ideal locale offering security and comfort from the tribulations of the world.

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As with the physical homes Crusoe inhabits, so Defoe questions the idea that earthly nations can fulfil the function of an idealized vision of the home promised by Providential decree. As we have seen already, the Island itself cannot function as the Promised Land and, for much of the narrative, that role appears to be reserved for the England that might welcome him upon his eventual rescue. However, when Crusoe does finally return to England those expectations fail. The narrative thwarts the return to the father evoked by Crusoe’s alignment with the Prodigal Son narrative when he learns of his father’s death (p. 264),27 and any suggestions of resolving his quest for home at the level of narrative are similarly undercut when he again leaves, even though he again finds himself cast in a comfortable position in the enviable middle condition. Before the narrative concludes we find Crusoe hunting bears and wolves as part of an extended journey in southern Europe (pp. 274–82), and he finishes the volume by offering a foreshadowing account of the additional wanderings that would shape the second volume of the Crusoe saga, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, following the failure of yet another home following the death of his wife and the successful speculation in his nephew’s maritime career (pp. 283–4). In all permutations, the homes offered within the narrative fail to counteract his ‘wandering inclination’ and the narrative remains unresolved by any of the homes that the novel proffers. Strengthening the association further is the familiar motif from Exodus that appeared in the Journal, this time serving to undermine suggestions that the material world might supply an apt model for an earthly paradise, especially disavowing the potential for the resolution via a space within the New Worlds of the Americas. The Exodus paradigm appears on three occasions in the novel, in each case serving a similar function. On the first two occasions, Defoe refers to a single line from Psalm 78, which records God’s ‘spread[ing] a Table in the Wilderness’ (pp. 127, 152) for the Israelites, to create an analogy for appreciating God’s role in delivering him to the Island following the wreck of his ship and for anticipating his possible delivery from the Island. In both cases the Island is clearly cast as wilderness, and cannot be mistaken for an idealized final destination that realizes the quest for the Promised Land. On the third occasion the narrative deploys a direct reference to Exodus 16.3 set in the context of Crusoe’s conversation with the Spaniard who has been rescued from the natives’ cannibalistic rites. There, Crusoe discusses the need to increase the production of corn if they are to rescue the Spaniard’s countrymen from their incarceration on the Brazilian mainland, remarking that ‘the Children of Israel, though they rejoyc’d at first for their being deliver’d

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out of Egypt, yet rebell’d even against God himself that deliver’d them, when they came to want Bread in the Wilderness’ (p. 239). In this passage, the Egypt from which the Spaniards are to be delivered is not Europe or England as it might be in other texts dealing with flight from Old Europe’s or England’s tyranny, and the Island itself is not the Promised Land, but is resolutely wilderness, despite Crusoe’s extensive years of occupation, cultivation, and domestication. In this figure, as elsewhere in Defoe’s texts, no earthly nations are proffered as supplying a site for a divinely ordained national home and, although the ideal of home remains an appealing prospect, it cannot be resolved within the domain of human systems of organization. Each of the homes presented across Defoe’s texts serve to authenticate a particular vision of the material world that is antagonistic to the utility of home as a mechanism for providing an apt object for individual or national desires. Even at their best, homes are of dubious value, offering a sham of security or comfort that is merely an illusion of the material world. Viewed as such, the most apt approach to home can be traced in the vision of Crusoe at the time of his epiphany, when he views the ‘World’ itself ‘as a Thing remote, which I had nothing to do with, no Expectation from, and indeed no Desires about: In a Word, I had nothing indeed to do with it, nor was ever like to have; so I thought it look’d as we may perhaps look upon it hereafter, viz. as a Place I had liv’d in, but was come out of it’ (p. 152). At their worst, however, homes serve far more sinister functions. As secure spaces, they can be co-opted by tyrannical authority to deprive individuals of their natural liberties. As sites that promote a sense of belonging and comfort within a materialist world, they can be seen to distract individuals from a more virtuous pursuit of a spiritual home in the company of God. Whether represented as a site of domestic retreat or as a metaphor for drawing together an idealized vision of nationhood, the alluring idea of home is presented as unstable and unable to bear the weight of the pragmatic realities of Defoe’s represented world.

Notes I would like to extend my sincere thanks to colleagues in the Dept. of English at Macquarie University, especially to Prof. A.D. Cousins for his insightful advice and encouragement on draft versions of this chapter and, similarly, to Dr Lee O’Brien for keeping me on track with her careful reading and penetrating queries. 1. Betty A. Schellenberg, ‘Imagining the Nation in Defoe’s A Tour Thro’ The Whole Island of Great Britain’, ELH 62 (1995), 297.

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2. The most influential account remains Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 3. An extended discussion of links between political discourse about liberty and early eighteenth-century aesthetics appears in Michael Meehan, Liberty and Poetics in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1986). 4. Such interests were common to Defoe’s earlier political writings. He had treated the subject variously in his Review and in pamphlets written that dealt with potential threats from France and from the exiled Stuart Court, each of which were figured as icons of tyrannical rule. Defoe’s pamphlet ‘The Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of England, Examined and Asserted’ (1702) addresses William III’s restoration of England’s ‘full Liberty of Original Right’ (p. 101) against the examples of ‘all the Oppressions and Tyranny of Arbitrary Rulers’, such as the French king. Later in the same pamphlet, an address to the combined houses of parliament asserts a wish for ‘One Party [. . . that] would adhere to Unbyas’d Justice, and pursue the Honour and Interest of the Protestant Religion, and the English Liberty’ (pp. 104–5), offering clear links between notions of unity, Protestantism, and Liberty that contribute to a sense of the national character. Quotations are from D.W. Hayton (ed.), The Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe: Vol. 4. The Union with Scotland (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000). 5. As the narrator puts it, ‘it was a publick Good that justified the private Mischief’ (p. 60). Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. John Mullin (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009). All subsequent references to the text (hereafter, the Journal) are from this text and appear parenthetically. 6. The relevant legislation is the ‘Act for the Charitable Relief and Ordering of Persons Infected with the Plague’, 1 Jac. I, c. 31. 7. John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 73. 8. As is discussed, for instance, in H.F.’s ruminations about the plague’s ability to bring about a temporary resolution sectarian strife (p. 44). 9. The novel toys with the idea that either the plague’s coming is linked to the Restoration or that its potency is exacerbated because of the ‘Conflux of the People, to a youthful and gay Court’ (p. 38). 10. An instance of such a networked vision of the plague’s onset appears on pages 25–6. I have elsewhere argued a case for Defoe’s depiction of the nation’s systemic networks of power in his account of the plague. See Geoffrey Payne, ‘Distemper, Scourge, Invader: Discourse and Plague in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year’, English Studies, 95.6 (2014), 620–36. 11. For discussions of the systematic nature of the worldview described in the Journal, see Maximillian Novak, ‘Defoe and the Disordered City’, PMLA 92.2 (1977), 241–52, or Cynthia Wall, ‘Novel Streets: The Rebuilding of London and Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year’, Studies in the Novel 30.2 (1998), 168–77. 12. Throughout the narrative H.F. dwells on the many connections he has to the city, sometimes taking him even ‘to the other End of Town, even when the

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14.

15. 16.

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18.

19.

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sickness was there’ (p. 37). He reports that the plague ‘brought [people] to crowd into the Churches’ (p. 156) and details his own official role of Examiner (pp. 144–52), which required him to break his own isolation. To such factors is added H.F.’s own very human curiosity: ‘tho’ I confin’d my Family, I could not prevail upon my unsatisfy’d curiosity to stay within entirely myself; and tho’ I generally came frighted and terrified Home, yet I cou’d not restrain’ (p. 85). Hence, H.F.’s claim: ‘many People perish’d in those miserable Confinements, which ‘tis reasonable to believe, would not have been distemper’d if they had had Liberty’ (p. 60). See the discussion by Abigail Williams in her chapter for this volume: ‘“Home to our People”: Nation and Kingship in Late Seventeenth-Century Political Verse’. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). For a discussion of earlier models of this phenomenon, see the chapter by A.D. Cousins in this volume, which discusses Marvell’s deployment of the motif in ‘Bermudas’. The seminal account of Defoe’s connection to the Dissenting tradition is given in J. Paul Hunter’s The Reluctant Pilgrim (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966). More recent criticism dealing with Defoe’s connections to the traditions of dissent include Jason H. Pearl, ‘Desert Islands and Urban Solitudes in the Crusoe Trilogy’, Studies in the Novel 44.2 (2012), 125–43, and Maxmillian Novak, ‘“The Sum of Humane Misery”: Defoe’s Ambiguity toward Exile’ SEL 50.3 (2010), 601–23. For a discussion of the nature of the material world in the Dissenting tradition, see Leopold Damrosch Jr., God’s Plots and Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 187–212. There Damrosch also discusses Defoe’s note of his view of the connection between his own work and Bunyan’s, as will be discussed below. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Cynthia Wall, Norton Critical Edition (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009), pp. 11–5. Subsequent references are from this edition and appear parenthetically. For a discussion of Defoe’s participation in the literary debate about Englishness that surrounded the controversy of having a non-native English monarch in the person of William III, see Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a New Whig Literary Culture, 1681–1714 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 131–4. Defoe’s essays and poems composed in support of the Union have been collected in Hayton (ed.), Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe. A particular concern for Moll is the way home affords a space for the promotion of a variety of criminal behaviours, whether via the incestuous seduction from her adoptive brother, or either of the incestuous marriage

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22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

geoffrey payne contracts she enters into, or via the protection afforded by her landlady that aids and abets her felonious career in London’s underworld. Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), ed. W.R. Owens (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), p. 58. All quotations are from this edition and appear parenthetically. The narrative exploits Crusoe’s self-identification as the Prodigal Son (p. 61), who in Christ’s parable exhibits his ingratitude by abrogating his familial duties, and abandoning his father’s house for a life of debauchery and profligacy. Paula R. Backscheider’s account of ‘Defoe’s Prodigal Sons’ makes a comprehensive survey of Defoe’s uses of the Prodigal Son motif in his texts (both fictional and non-fictional). She does not, however, afford an explanation for the apparent paradigmatic ‘failure’ that I detail in the discussion below. Paula R. Backscheider, ‘Defoe’s Prodigal Sons’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 15 (1982), 3–18. The Prodigal Son parable is recounted in Luke 15: 11–32. An engaging discussion of Crusoe as ‘homo domesticus’ appears in Pat Rogers, ‘Crusoe’s Home’, Essays in Criticism 24 (1974), 375–90. It is worthwhile noting that Crusoe’s life as slave in the home of his Moorish master is not very dissimilar than the life he might have expected back home in England: looking after the master’s ‘little garden’ and doing ‘the common Drudgery of Slaves about his House’ (p. 70). The institution of the ‘Country House’ serves as an icon of a broader engagement that has been widely discussed in critical discourse on Robinson Crusoe, significantly in Manuel Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship, and Robinson Crusoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) ch. 5 and in Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary, ch. 3. See note 23, above.

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chapter 9

Pope’s homes: London, Windsor Forest, and Twickenham Pat Rogers

At first glance, it looks absurd to talk about Alexander Pope in relation to exile. He never left England, and indeed passed his entire life as a resident of the Home Counties (this includes his infancy and later brief spells in central London). Although he greatly enjoyed his ‘rambles’ to country houses and scenic locations, when he often adopted the role of consultant on landscape gardening, his itineraries were circumscribed even by the standards of the age. He never got much further afield from his base than Bristol, the Isle of Wight or the northern Cotswolds – a rather sheltered and privileged segment of the British landmass, then as now. His patrons like the Earl of Burlington went on the Grand Tour; his colleagues in the Scriblerus Club spent a fair amount of time outside England, and of course the most famous among them, Jonathan Swift, would crisscross the Irish Sea many times from his remote fastness in Dublin. Allies such as Bishop Atterbury and Lord Bolingbroke would be legally banished or proscribed while resident at the court of the Jacobite ‘king over the water’. His Catholic friends routinely sent their children to be educated at Douai in Flanders, if boys, or convents elsewhere in France, if girls. For most of his boyhood and adolescence Pope enjoyed a tranquil upbringing within a stable community, as the only child of elderly parents, with an apparently secure domicile in Windsor Forest – even though that was not his native heath. His career prospered, and thanks to the success of his translations of Homer he built up a tidy nest egg, easily outdoing the modest fortune that his businessman father had bequeathed. By the time he published a collected edition of his works in 1717, he was recognized as standing at the very head of his profession. Soon afterwards, barely into his thirties, he managed to acquire a long lease on a villa in Twickenham – at this date no more than a Thames-side village with fairly easy access to the capital by land or water, but far from an exotic locale. 127

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How can we begin to think of this as a rootless existence, when we recall the disrupted lives of true exiles and émigrés? The twentieth century sent a batch of composers, artists, and writers whirling across continents, from Moscow to Los Angeles, from Dublin to Trieste, from Madrid to Paris, from Berlin to Tel Aviv, from Sydney to London, from Vienna to practically every known spot on earth. By contrast Pope only knew of the wider world vicariously, first from his reading and second from the accounts of his friends. Most obviously, he engaged in a highly wrought, if sometimes affected, correspondence with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu when she went on her prolonged visit to Constantinople in 1716–18. Nor does Pope’s poetry often deal with global themes. There is one striking exception, Windsor-Forest (1713), written to celebrate the new world order set out by the Treaty of Utrecht, and looking to a future dispensation when international contacts will grow more cooperative and ‘Slav’ry be no more’ (408). For the rest, his poems appear inward-looking. For all his training in humanist lore and his cosmopolitan reading in the classics and modern European literature, they seem to focus on explicitly domestic issues. This is in the sense both of internal politics – the fate of his Tory friends Oxford and Bolingbroke, or the opposition to Walpole – and of localized concerns: ‘To Hounslow-heath I point, and Bansted-down, / Thence comes your mutton, and these chicks my own’ (The Second Satire of the Second Book of Horace Paraphrased, 143–4).1 All this would suggest a life of comfortable self-possession and security – but that is far from the truth. It does not take much exploration of Pope’s poems and letters to see that he had been deeply traumatized by circumstances – personal, medical, religious, political, financial – that left him desperate to plant roots in a landscape beset by alienation and rejection. The reason that he came to fetishize Twickenham as a place of safety was that, at some profound level, he felt homeless. To understand this, we need to look at what happened to him inside and outside the villa he so carefully erected to ward off the demons that haunted his imagination.

London: initiation and exclusion The prevailing view on Pope, classically stated by Maynard Mack, has been that his home at Twickenham served as a haven.2 From here he could cultivate the values of ‘retirement’, otherwise threatened by the pressure of political and literary squabbles, mainly prompted by the hegemony of Robert Walpole. Here I shall argue that Pope’s life at

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Twickenham embodied a half-resolved contradiction between Pope’s forest childhood and his engagement in the world of London, bearing in mind the fact that he had extensive connections with the commercial, financial, and municipal world of the City. The discussion will straddle some familiar poles, such as court/country, active/contemplative, public/ private, idyll/satire, and so on. Pope did not seriously challenge current ideas of nationhood, other than by positioning his work in a much broader European context than was attempted by the great majority of writers as a result of his deep involvement in classical, French, and Italian literature. It was partly because he was a Londoner that his poetry developed as it did. The time and place of his birth, in the heart of the City in 1688, hold some significance. His father had an import/export business in the linen trade, with an office and a home in Plough Court at the east end of Lombard Street, close to the site of key financial commercial institutions. Already the Guildhall, the General Post Office, East India House, and the Royal Exchange stood in the district, to be joined within a few years by the Bank of England, Lloyd’s insurance, and coffee-houses where the brokers of Exchange Alley could meet and sell shares. A few years later the Merchant Taylors’ company hall would let out a room for the fledgling South Sea Company. In his classic account of the financial revolution which transformed the nation’s economic structure, P.G.M. Dickson supplied terminal dates of 1688 to 1756: from the year of Pope’s birth to a point little more than a decade after his death. In the first place he called home, then, Alexander would have been surrounded by impressive commercial palaces set up by the great trading companies that spread their tentacles around every known corner of the world. Into his last years he still had occasion to visit the City on business, and as he passed some of these major landmarks his mind must have been drawn back to these scenes of childhood. Not two hundred yards from the Popes’ residence, in St Swithin’s Lane, Sir Gilbert Heathcote set up a vast network of diverse concerns which brought him wealth, a knighthood, positions as Lord Mayor and MP for the City, and a key role in the new Bank of England. Pope allotted him space in several works, and his presence lurks behind the Dunciad. When the poem describes the installation of a new Lord Mayor, a note reminds us that ‘The Procession of a Lord Mayor is made partly by land, and partly by water’ (1: 83). Pope certainly recalled the time when Sir Gilbert had to scale back the event in 1710. This episode reveals the close attention that the poet always gave to the municipal affairs of the City,

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whether political, ceremonial, or merely social – more than once he refers to occasions of civic junketing, when ‘May’rs and Shrieves all hush’d and satiate lay, / Yet eat in dreams the custard of the day’ (Dunciad 1:89–90). He had close friends in high places within the square mile, including Slingsby Bethel, a merchant in the African trade who acted as his investment advisor. Bethel would end up as an alderman and Lord Mayor. In assessing the politics of Pope’s later poetry we must sometimes shift our gaze from national events to the dramas played out within the realm of city government. Such matters were in a way hometown gossip for the boy from Plough Court. Yet Alexander Pope senior took early retirement from business in the year that his son was born. This probably had something to do with the fact that he was a Catholic convert. Though he had enjoyed success as a dealer in Flemish lace, he could never have aspired to the influence wielded by the great captains of finance. The Corporation Act of 1661 laid down that no person could be legally elected to any public office, unless he had within the previous twelve months received the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper according to the rites of the Church of England, something most Catholics could not conscientiously perform. The year 1688 saw the arrival not only of a son to the Popes, but also of William III along with the expulsion of James II. The new king was proclaimed in February 1689 outside the Royal Exchange – an easy stroll for the retired merchant to join the crowd, if he had wished. Immediately Whiggery and protestant fervour were on the march. Within twelve months the government had brought in the so-called Ten Mile Act, which among other penal restrictions laid down that any reputed papist who declined to take the oaths would be adjudged ‘a Popish Recusant Convict’ and forbidden to live within a distance of ten miles of the City. In 1692 Mr Pope moved his family to Hammersmith, a symbolic rather than literal adherence to the law, since it was only about half the prescribed mileage. Almost certainly he chose this location because of a strong tradition of Catholic education and activity in the village. No child, even as young as Alexander, would have been totally oblivious to a pattern of harassment that his family and co-religionists endured. The fearsome Pope-burnings that went on a decade earlier had now ceased, but one legacy of Titus Oates’s demented campaigns remained. This was the Monument, augmented in 1681 by a tendentious inscription blaming the Great Fire on a ‘Popish frenzy’ not yet extinguished. The column, on a site just 150 yards south of the family residence, loomed over the poet’s infancy, and never left his awareness: forty years on, he would write in his Epistle

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to Bathurst: ‘Where London’s column, pointing at the skies / Like a tall bully, lifts he head and lyes’ (339–40). Add to this the crude pageantry of Lord Mayor’s shows, with their carnivalesque depiction of fiendish monsters representing the Pope and the Antichrist. The gorgons and dragons who stalk the Dunciad may well have had their origin in this familiar pageantry of prejudice. Who can wonder that Mr Pope wished to remove his family from this atmosphere, hardly the ideal place to bring up a child? Or that the poet kept a close recollection of people and places with a link to his first home? The most urgent reminders came at the time of the South Sea Bubble in 1720. After making a timely withdrawal of stock just before the crash, Pope reinvested and lost some of the money he had inherited from his father or earned by his writings. But Pope already had a complex relationship with the South Sea scheme. The company had been founded by his friend Robert Harley, just about the time that the Tory prime minister began to socialize with the Scriblerus Club. In time the venture had been taken over by Hanoverians and Whigs. Pope’s most considered verdict on the Bubble, and his judgment on the entire morality of the financial world, were reserved for the Epistle to Bathurst (1733). A major section is devoted to the principal architect of the scheme, Sir John Blunt, while Heathcote makes another brief appearance. The culminating episode tells the story of a fictional City grandee, named Sir Balaam, whose career resembles that of Sir George Caswall, a banker, stockbroker, and disgraced MP. Caswall originally ran his business in Lombard Street, opposite the entry to Exchange Alley, while Blunt operated from Birchin Lane – both locations lay just yards from Plough Court. In fact, the headquarters of the Sword Blade Company, the banking arm of the South Sea enterprise in which the two men were partners, overlooked the churchyard of St Edmund King and Martyr, a tiny parish where the Popes lived. When the poet looked back to the Bubble, he can only have connected the frenzy and its perpetrators with the place of his birth and the site of his own father’s working life. If he later felt bitterness about the City’s oligarchs, that need not surprise us. London constituted the locus of British capitalism, which was the main subject of his poem. It had marginalized his father, on account of his religion, and it had tempted the poet himself to gamble almost as rashly as the get-rich-quick merchants described in the Epistle. And yet though he had been ejected from the municipality together with his family, he could not wholly lay its ghost to rest. It was, as we say, the haunt of his earliest years.

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Windsor Forest: idyll and expulsion In later years Pope would sometimes look back to his childhood in Windsor Forest as an idyllic period. But it came about by accident. His parents were driven to move out of London after the Revolution because of the Ten Mile Act, as well as the impact of double taxation. As mentioned, they settled first in Hammersmith, then a small riverside settlement barely five miles from central London. Then in 1700 the Popes became residents of the obscure Berkshire village of Binfield, close to modern Bracknell, although it required a legal fiction for them to take possession of a house through its purchase by a Protestant relative of Mrs Pope. We might suppose that it was a good thing for the poet to escape from urban squalor, with his creativity fuelled by a tranquil upbringing amid the delights of this sylvan refuge. But the young Pope must have felt in his inner self a strong contrary influence – a sense that he was being shifted gradually further and further from the centre of things – a consciousness of exclusion and exile. Pope’s later drive for success may be seen as an attempt to recapture an inheritance denied him. It must have taken time for the boy to immerse himself in the strange surroundings. Luckily the parents seem to have made a good adjustment to their new life in Berkshire. Although Pope’s father had spent his life in the City as a member of the commercial class, he evidently gained rapid acceptance among the Catholic gentry of the home counties. We might also suspect that the boy Alexander, talented but physically handicapped, proved an object of sympathetic interest. The Popes would have immediately come to the notice of the squire John Dancastle, together with his younger brother Thomas, who lived at the manor with a resident priest. Pope maintained close relations with them for as long as they lived, and stayed at the house in 1717 after he had been uprooted with his parents in the previous year to move to Chiswick. This friendship set off a chain reaction. In the seventeenth century a Dancastle had married into the Englefields, one of the most ancient Catholic families in Berkshire. Their seat lay at Whiteknights, just outside Reading, once sequestrated ‘for popish recusancy’ following the Civil War. Young Pope made regular visits to the estate, staying there for example in 1711 and 1713. The patriarch was Anthony Englefield, one of a group of elders to whom the teenager looked for advice. One of Anthony’s daughters married a local man named Lister Blount, and she became the mother of the sisters Martha and Teresa, who were to play a large part in Pope’s later life. Among Englefield’s other relatives was a country gentleman from Sussex, John Caryll, whom Alexander likely met at Whiteknights.

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We should not underestimate the importance of these connections for Alexander as he grew up. Martha Blount became his most loyal and lasting among all his women friends, while her godfather John Caryll played a vital support role to Pope until his death in 1736. Such alliances became particularly crucial when the network of Catholics came under such severe pressure at the time of the rising. One thing that rooted the boy in his new environment was quite simply the presence of a body of his co-religionists, mostly based in the Thames Valley. They even helped to provide a plot-line for his triumphant arrival at the pinnacle of literary success with The Rape of the Lock (1712; 1714). The heroine Belinda is based on a girl from a long-established family in Oxfordshire, the Fermors, and in the year that the revised poem appeared she married a member of a recusant family from another part of Berkshire. The villain of this piece, ‘th’ Adventrous Baron’, is modelled on a ward of John Caryll. All this suggests that the sense of home for Pope in this period would be indissolubly linked to an awareness of his situation as the son of a man ‘exiled’ by his faith from his base in the city. The fresh location gave Alexander junior a kind of protection and privacy, along with the comforting proximity of other Catholics. But as events would prove, this sanctuary could be invaded by forces from the outside world. We find the most direct impress of the physical milieu in which Pope was raised if we look at the Pastorals (1709) and Windsor-Forest (1713). Both works were conceived and largely written at Binfield, although by the time that the latter poem came out the young man had established his own links in London society. He had started to get to know writers, including the group who formed the Scriblerus club – Jonathan Swift, John Arbuthnot, John Gay, and Thomas Parnell, who remained close allies afterwards. In addition he encountered politicians at the heart of the Tory government from 1710 to 1714, including its leaders Robert Harley and Henry St John, soon to undergo metamorphosis into the Earl of Oxford and Viscount Bolingbroke, as well as Lord Lansdowne, poet and dedicatee of Windsor-Forest. For a time he maintained good relations with Whig authors such as Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, then at the peak of their fame, which allowed him entrée to the influential Spectator circle and brought him greater literary opportunities. Leading figures in the publishing trade, notably Jacob Tonson and Bernard Lintott, offered him commissions. As an amateur painter, too, he made the acquaintance of artists like Godfrey Kneller, Charles Jervas, and Jonathan Richardson senior. But even before that he had acquired a team of elderly supporters including the dramatist William Wycherley, the politician Lord Halifax, and a grandee

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with links to the literary scene of Dryden, the Duke of Buckingham. Soon afterwards he would meet Lord Bathurst, who despite his family background in City trade came to represent ‘country’ values (inflected at first by Jacobite sympathies that were later renounced), and whose estate in Gloucestershire would eventually operate almost as a second home for the poet. All these men were Protestants, a sign of his increasing immersion within the cosmopolitan world centred on London and Westminster. Clearly Pope was no recluse, sitting out in a backwater far from the bustling activity of the capital. Yet his experience as a bookish and sickly boy in the forest beyond question left an indelible mark. His chief mentor back in Binfield was the former diplomat and government minister Sir William Trumbull, who had made a self-conscious retreat to the glades of Windsor in emulation of Cincinnatus on his farm. Windsor-Forest contains an oblique tribute to Trumbull; ‘Happy the Man who this bright Court approves, / His Sov’reign favours, and his Country loves; / Happy next him who to these Shades retires. . .’ (235–7). The locale of the poem drifts down the Thames, like the timber of the forest, to the metropolis and then at the end to a wider global setting as it looks forward to the peaceful and beneficent spread of trade inaugurated by the (then hopeful) South Sea Company. But the pastoral dream remains strong, even as its idyllic quality comes under threat. For Pope, the ‘Peace and Plenty’ of a Stuart reign is underwritten by a respect for nature, a feeling for the traditional patterns of social living, and a contempt for purely commercial values. This preference is expressed here in a scarcely disguised attack on William III as a sort of eco-destroyer, offering by implication a proleptic warning against the dangers of undue City influence – something that might arise when the Hanoverian monarch, waiting in the wings, should take over the throne. For Pope then, one of the connotations of home was now the stability attached to a way of life based on solid moral principles as against the pursuit of wealth. Everything changed with the arrival of George I in 1714 and the Jacobite rising twelve months later. Despite the success of his Homer translation, which made him quite rich, the next two years were little short of calamitous for Pope, who saw change and decay everywhere he looked. The leaders of the outgoing ministry were impeached by their Whig successors: Bolingbroke fled the country to join the Pretender, but Oxford found himself in the Tower on a charge of high treason. He was joined by friends and associates such as Lord Strafford, Lansdowne, and Sir William Wyndham, while other allies including Matthew Prior endured long spells

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of captivity. Then, with the embarrassingly rapid failure of the rising, a host of individuals from the poet’s extended circle met fates that were as bad or worse. Even Dr Arbuthnot, a man highly placed in the medical and scientific establishment, became a suspect person because of the activities of his brother in France. The most prominent Jacobite martyr after his execution on Tower Hill was the Earl of Derwentwater, a close relative by marriage of Martha Blount, and an intimate of Lady Swinburne, Martha’s aunt – whose two brothers-in-law were captured with the Earl and condemned to death. Members of John Caryll’s family were also implicated. Pope may not have felt much sympathy for the rebellion, but he saw the pain of personal acquaintances as the entire recusant community underwent stigma for its alleged support of a hostile foreign power. In retribution for the failed assault on Britain, the government introduced a fresh batch of penal laws against the Catholic community. Their goal was punishment and humiliation, and further isolation for the papists. By this means the Whigs hoped to expose their opponents to a charge of disloyalty in failing to stand out strongly enough against the rebellion, even though most Tories had supported the government or at most had taken a neutral stance. Two new measures hit the Popes especially hard. A commission had been appointed to enquire into the property of traitors and Popish recusants, and estates held for ‘superstitious’ uses. The more damaging act called on all papists who had refused to take oaths of obedience or to abjure the Roman Catholic mass to register their estates. If they did not do so, two-thirds of their estates would be forfeited to the king and the remaining one third to anyone who informed on them. As a result the poet’s family risked expulsion, ruin, and possible fines. (The taxes were further stepped up in 1718.) Not for the first time, the law had forced the Popes to move on like the sorriest vagabonds. Thus public issues had come to affect Alexander’s private life and his literary vocation in painful ways. Uprooted from his childhood home, he did not compose much poetry in the next few years, aside from the Iliad, and his new vein would yield not pastoral but satire. Meanwhile the family settled in Chiswick just outside London. There Pope’s father died in 1717, and the son had to clear up his estate. The poet quite openly described his departure from the scenes of his childhood as a loss of Eden: ‘Binfield is no more’, he told Parnell in 1716, ‘and the Muse is driven, from those Forests of which she sung, the Day may shortly come, when your Friend. . . may look back with regret, on the Paradise he has lost, and have only the consolation of poor Adam, “The world lies all before him, where to chuse / His place of rest, and Providence

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his Guide”.’3 Then, a few days later he wrote to Caryll, ‘I write this from Windsor Forest, of which I am come to take my last look and leave of (sic). We her bid our papist-neighbours adieu, much as those who go to be hanged do their fellow-prisoners, who are condemned to follow ’em a few weeks after . . . I parted from honest Mr Dancastle with tenderness; and from old Sir William Trumbull as from a venerable prophet, foretelling with lifted hands the miseries to come upon posterity, which he was just going to be removed from.’ The only option remaining was to lie low and do good by stealth: ‘Methinks, in our present condition, the most heroic thing we are left capable of doing, is to endeavour to lighten each other’s load, and (oppressed as we are) to succour such as are yet more oppressed.’4 Pope was almost literally homeless, as the move to Chiswick could only be a temporary stop in a convenient pied à terre. Along with the surroundings of his youth, he had been deprived of much of the nexus that provided the support system for his early writing. If he was to get back to his vocation, he needed a place where he and his widowed mother could find a measure of peace and seclusion, unchallenged by the current urban paranoia (which mounted again as the Bubble year of 1720 approached). Yet he also needed access to the facilities which only the capital could give. That is where Twickenham came in.

Twickenham: locale and identity When Pope took up residence in Twickenham in 1718, it was no more than a village, with a population we can estimate at around 1,500. We should certainly not think of it as a suburb, peopled by commuters who flitted up and down the road to London – any more than Jane Austen’s Highbury in Emma was any sort of a proto-suburb, as has been suggested. In fact, Pope commonly made the journey by river, which must have taken at least two hours each way. He used his own boat, although there was water carriage to Sudbury and places adjacent three times per week in summer. Much of the traffic on the Thames consisted of commercial barges towed by horses. Pope’s house stood on the river side of the road to Hampton Court in Cross Deep, an outlying hamlet of the village. On the other side of the road lay his garden – hence the need for a subterranean passage to reach it. The highway was busy enough for a turnpike to be established twenty years after Pope’s death, with Horace Walpole as one of the trustees.5 Pope remodelled the property under the direction of James Gibbs, a Catholic and Jacobite with close associations to the Harley family. Gibbs

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would lose his shirt in the South Sea imbroglio, and must have been glad of continued employment, though he had other work locally at Orleans House and Whitton Park. The house was on quite a diminutive scale, standing on just five acres and consisting of just three bays. Apart from a few outbuildings including cottages and a boathouse that Pope rented a short distance upstream, this was all he had to worry about. After the main construction had been performed, he devoted his energies to adding small ornamental features such as a portico and a second-floor balcony. Nothing particularly unusual was evident in the architecture, either external or internal, but the house did contain a large selection of portraits. These included pictures of the Duchess of Buckingham (natural daughter of James II, thus half-sister of the Pretender, and widow of Pope’s patron); Wycherley; Lord Peterborough, soldier and adventurer; Bolingbroke; small images of the Scriblerian club members; Lady Mary; the poet Matthew Prior; the actor Thomas Betterton; Lord Oxford, and many more. In ‘the best room fronting ye Thames’ were found ‘Mrs Blounts Pictture in a gold frame’, with ‘Lord Bathurst ditto’. The library boasted marble busts of Homer, Isaac Newton, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden. Such a list gives a reliable clue to Pope’s elective affinities, though it may look strange that he did not dispose of Lady Mary after their well-publicized quarrel.6 In some ways more central to his ideas of domesticity were the famous grotto planted in a basement on the river side, and the garden, which he decorated with a number of features. The most significant was an obelisk erected in memory of his mother, following her death in 1733. This carried a short Latin inscription testifying to the love she felt for her son and (stated less directly) the love he felt in turn for her. It was placed on a small mound at the far end of the garden: Horace Walpole wrote of ‘the solemnity of the termination at the cypresses that lead up to his mother’s tomb’.7 It was a gesture of filial affection of course, but one subsumed in a larger tribal loyalty, embracing a piety that incorporated family, friends and sympathetic individuals from the past and present. The garden also contained groves, quincunxes, a vineyard, a kitchen garden, an orangery, a shell temple – and a bowling green. It all added up to a set of emblematic scenes, designed to provoke visual curiosity, but also to inspire reflection on literary, philosophic, historical, and political themes. The villa at Twickenham served as an index of the owner’s taste, and a repository of lessons on how to live. The choice of this setting had not been made on a purely random basis. For generations the locality had acquired a reputation as the home of the

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muses, boasting the names of poets such as Lucy, Countess of Bedford; Sir John Suckling; and Thomas Traherne. The picturesque stretch of the Thames had attracted numerous landscape artists, and Pope’s house served as the subject of many views taken from the other side of the river. However the most evocative dates from 1808, when J.M.W. Turner, who lived at several addresses in the locality, painted the house ‘during its dilapidation’ after a new owner pulled down the villa, stripped the grotto, and laid waste to the garden. Among artists who had homes in the vicinity were Kneller, Thomas Hudson, and Samuel Scott. To the casual visitor another feature of the Twickenham skyline would have made itself more readily apparent. A number of impressive mansions stretched along the river within a mile of the villa. They included Orleans House, with its showplace garden; Radnor House; and at the far end of the village Marble Hill, erected for Henrietta Howard, maîtresse en titre of George II. This last went up shortly after Pope’s arrival and involved many of his friends: he also had a hand in planning the garden. Other prominent peoples who lived in the vicinity were Lady Mary, resident at Savile House for a crucial period after her return from Constantinople, and the Earl of Strafford, a Tory politician who had served in the Harley administration. It was not until two years after Pope died that Horace Walpole moved into Strawberry Hill, just a short walk along Cross Deep to the south. But other notabilities known to Pope possessed homes strung around the district, including Lord Islay at Whitton – his brother the Duke of Argyll had a home across the river at Sudbrook, designed by Gibbs after he had completed the renovations at the villa. Plainly, Pope’s house and garden represented a miniature version of the great country houses that Pope knew so well. This has a joking aspect, like the mocking belittlement of epic properties in The Rape of the Lock. Nevertheless, on its small scale the villa did stand for some of the virtues which the poet identified with the estates that he visited on his rambles, especially those like Bathurst’s Cirencester, Cobham’s Stowe, Digby’s Sherborne, Burlington’s Chiswick, and Peterborough’s Bevis Mount, where he had some input into the layout of the garden. It is a mistake, however, to think that these places embodied ‘retirement’ in any simple sense. Certainly they could offer rest and refreshment at times to the families of peers active in the politics and society of the city. Yet they equally served as nerve-centres to preserve the local interest on which political and social power rested. After Pope moved to Twickenham, he kept up contact with these estates, and indeed he augmented their number. In part this was to further his own career. It also had the effect of

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maintaining the grand fiction of ‘patriot’ independence, which involved a way of asserting not just separation from London values, but also a form of rivalry. Pope signalled his opposition to the government of Walpole by helping to create the great estates, and on a lesser level by constructing a simulacrum of the large landed properties on his own tiny plot. It makes for architecture as identity politics. He held Twickenham on a lease, and at one stage rejected an opportunity to buy it outright. This was for prudential rather than political reasons. Still, there remained a kind of temporary feel to some of his observations about the place. Perhaps this came about because of his pervasive awareness that all human contrivances, including the most enviable things we can own, have their date. As he expressed it in one of his most eloquent passages: The Laws of God, as well as of the Land, Abhor, a Perpetuity should stand: Estates have wings, and hang in Fortune’s power, Loose on the point of ev’ry wav’ring Hour; Ready, by force, or of your own accord, By sale, at least by death, to change their Lord. Man? and for ever? Wretch! what wouldst thou have? Heir urges Heir, like Wave impelling Wave. All vast Possessions (just the same the case Whether you call them Villa, Park, or Chase), Alas, my bathurst! what will they avail? Join Cotswold Hills to Saperton’s fair Dale; Let rising Granaries and Temples here, There mingled Farms and Pyramids, appear; Link Towns to Towns with Avenues of Oak, Enclose whole Downs in Walls, ’tis all a joke! Inexorable Death shall level all, And Trees, and Stones, and Farms, and Farmer fall.

Slyly, Pope aligns his own humble ‘Villa’ with the lordly possessions and grandiose plans of his friend Bathurst. It did not do to hope for too much permanence. In the end, Twickenham could not altogether stem a restlessness in Pope that came from deep existential clashes in his psychic economy. There he harboured conflicting urges towards withdrawal and engagement, privacy and publicity. He wanted to have his own place, and yet he could not afford to cut himself from a wider world which gave him the material for his poetry. At the start of the Epistle to Arbuthnot (1735) he comically invokes a host of intruders:

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pat rogers What Walls can guard me, or what Shades can hide? They pierce my Thickets, thro’ my Grot they glide, By land, by water, they renew the charge; They stop the Chariot, and they board the Barge. No place is sacred, not the Church is free; Ev’n Sunday shines no Sabbath-day to me: Then from the Mint walks forth the Man of Ryme, Happy! to catch me, just at Dinner-time.8

Twickenham was indeed a refuge, but it was also a workplace, where Pope composed most of the abrasive commentary on the life of the times that is found in The Dunciad, the Moral Epistles, and the Imitations of Horace. His domestic life was limited initially by the need to care for his mother and always by his own invalid condition; he dined out more than he entertained. What he created was less than a home as most of us understand it, than a sort of bachelor pad within a private museum. It served its purpose, but could not erase the lasting imprint on his mind of the cruel power structures that circled his birthplace, and it could never completely salve the wounds inflicted by the owner’s expulsion from the forest.

Notes 1. Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace, ed. John Butt, The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, 11 vols. (London: Methuen, 1961), vol. 4, p. 67. 2. See Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope 1731–1743 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), esp. ch. 1–3 (pp. 3–114). 3. C. J. Rawson, ‘Some Unpublished Letters of Pope and Gay’, Review of English Studies 10 (1959), 377. 4. George Sherburn (ed.), The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), vol. 1, pp. 336–7. 5. There is a large literature on the history of Twickenham. The most apposite for present purposes are works by Anthony Beckles Willson, especially Mr Pope & Others at Cross Deep, Twickenham in the 18th Century (Twickenham: priv. pr., 1996). See also his pamphlet Alexander Pope’s Grotto (Twickenham Museum, 1998); and Morris R. Brownell, Alexander Pope’s Villa (London: Greater London Council, 1980). 6. Mack, Garden and City, pp. 244–58, reprints the inventory made of the contents of the house after Pope’s death. 7. Cited in ibid., p. 26. 8. Imitations of Horace, pp. 96–7.

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chapter 10

Samuel Johnson and London Evan Gottlieb

‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.’ These famous words of Samuel Johnson first appeared in James Boswell’s biography of his friend and mentor – but in this instance they are borrowed from Apex Hotels’ website, which goes on to reassure potential customers that ‘London has something for everybody, making it perfect for sightseeing.’1 Promotional banality aside, the inclusion of Johnson’s iconic quip in any number of contemporary travel and tourism websites for London confirms that Johnson’s close relationship with the UK’s capital city remains as well known today as it was during his own lifetime and after. Yet for all their seeming indelibility, the links between Johnson and London were neither inevitable nor unalloyed; instead, they were forged over a career of near-constant literary productivity, and their multi-faceted nature reflects Johnson’s passion for the city he lived in for nearly five decades. This chapter tracks the chronological development of Johnson’s attitudes towards London on three interrelated levels: as his personal home; as eighteenth-century Britain’s literary as well as political centre; and as an emergent example of what the sociologist Saskia Sassen calls a ‘global city’. Johnson was born in 1709 in the small village of Lichfield, Staffordshire, about 125 miles from London. After a difficult childhood spent mostly in the countryside (Johnson was able to attend Oxford for less than a year before running out of money), and following a failed attempt to run his own school, he left for London’s vastly expanded opportunities on 2 March 1737. His only travelling companion was one of his pupils, David Garrick, a charismatic young man who would become the most celebrated stage actor of the mid eighteenth century. At the time, of course, neither Johnson nor Garrick could foresee their future successes, and their initial months in the metropolis were notably penurious. By October, however, Johnson had been joined in London by his wife, Elizabeth Porter, and had managed to find regular employment as a hack 141

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writer for Edward Cave’s popular Gentleman’s Magazine. But the initial challenges of city life, many of which are still the subject of popular accounts – sleeping at acquaintances’ homes until one can afford a place of one’s own, seeking employment as a relative unknown, trying to ‘break into’ the urban scene – were understandably formative for a still-young man who had grown up living above a quiet provincial bookstore. London was anything but quiet. The Great Fire of 1666 had destroyed much of the city’s old medieval core, which in turn had stood on the site of a Roman encampment; the new buildings erected subsequently were made of more durable materials but retained the original city’s essential character as ‘a tangled warren of alleys and courtyards, bisected by a few great thoroughfares’ and anchored by St. Paul’s Cathedral in the middle and the Tower of London to the east.2 By the early 1700s, ‘the City’ had begun to be joined to Westminster, seat of the British government, by a region known as ‘the Town’ that spread out to the west. With its wide boulevards and central squares, the Town proved congenial for hosting not only the legal profession’s Temple Bar but also London’s revitalized theatre scene, in which latter milieu Garrick would thrive. As for Johnson, the impression the rejuvenated city evidently made on him is demonstrated by the fact that his first major poem took the British capital for both its title and subject.3 His decision to model London (1738) on the classical author Juvenal’s third Satire made personal as well as professional sense: it allowed the then-unknown author to put his grammar-school learning to good use at the same time as establishing his literary bona fides. Johnson not only specifies in its subtitle the poem’s status as an ‘imitation’ – a legitimate genre in the eighteenth century, without today’s pejorative connotations4 – but also uses an epigraph taken directly from the Roman author: ‘For who can be so tolerant of the unjust city, so iron-willed as to contain himself?’ (my translation). In their original context, these lines clearly refer to the poet’s undisguised disgust at Rome’s perceived monstrousness. Situated at the head of Johnson’s poem, however, they become more ambiguous, as London’s vibrant excessiveness – at least compared to the provincial world that encompassed Johnson’s previous experiences – threatens the poet’s self-control on multiple levels. Like Juvenal’s original, London begins with a lamentation for the departure from the city of the speaker’s friend, here named ‘Thales’. Certainly, life in the metropolis is beset with dangers, as the poem quickly and wittily lays out in snappish heroic couplets: Here malice, rapine, accident, conspire, And now a rabble rages, now a fire;

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Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay, And here the fell attorney prowls for prey; Here falling houses thunder on your head, And here a female atheist talks you dead.5

Natural dangers are both compounded and exaggerated by the unnatural conditions of urban life: crowding and anonymity create threats of mobs (‘a rabble’) and thieves (‘relentless ruffians’), and high-density living conditions worsen the threat of architectural collapse (‘falling houses’). Perhaps most unnatural of all is the ‘female atheist’, whose godless discourse is hyperbolically represented as yet another mortal threat. (Johnson, not unknown for his occasional misogyny despite several close female friendships, is recorded by Boswell as remarking that ‘a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprized to find it done at all’.6) This early litany of urban dangers is followed by many more complaints, most of them delivered by ‘Indignant Thales’ (34) as he prepares to leave London for rural Wales. Yet a good number of the descriptions of city life that follow seem, perhaps despite themselves, to complicate the apparently rhetorical question asked by the speaker in the poem’s second stanza: ‘For who would leave, unbribed, Hibernia’s land, / Or change the rocks of Scotland for the Strand?’ (9–10). Thales may now scorn the ‘palaces’, ‘manors’, and ‘licensed stage[s]’ of the metropolis (57, 59), but the many enticements of London life are presented in all their seductive glory even as they are systematically dismissed as demoralizing and dangerous to both personal and national health. Thales is at his most vehement denouncing the capital’s supposed degradation on the world stage: London! the needy villain’s general home, The common shore of Paris and of Rome, With eager thirst, by folly or by fate, Sucks in the dregs of each corrupted state. Forgive my transports on a theme like this, I cannot bear a French metropolis.

(93–8)

The intention here, with the help of a little xenophobia and a lot of antiGallic sentiment, is to emphasize London’s impurity. The overall effect, however, is to confirm that Britain’s capital can now properly be compared to Rome and Paris, respectively the seat of the Roman Empire and the de facto Western cultural capital of the seventeenth century. Johnson’s comparison intuits what contemporary historians confirm: driven by labour-saving improvements to agricultural practices in the

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countryside, the promise of higher wages, and the very lures that Johnson’s poem relentlessly catalogues, throughout the mid eighteenth century London experienced significant demographic growth, from approximately 630, 000 in 1715 to around 740, 000 by 1760.7 According to Roy Porter, by the middle of the eighteenth century, about ten percent of England’s population lived in the metropolis, making England (if not Britain) the most urban of all European nations.8 Little wonder, then, that even after many more lines excoriating the city for its crime, corruption, and luxury, Thales’ warnings appear to go unheeded; as the older man embarks alone in the final stanza, he can only predict that his younger friend (the poem’s original but now longsilent speaker) will eventually choose to join him in exile from London, when ‘youth, and health, and fortune [are] spent’ (256–7). Johnson published London anonymously, and although his authorship was eventually revealed he never rated it among his best works.9 Tellingly, he would rarely leave London again. (Several decades later, Boswell would remark at length on the difficulty of getting his friend out of the city to embark on what would become their famous tour of Scotland.) Instead, his relationship with what Porter calls the ‘wonder city’ of the eighteenth century only grew closer and deeper.10 In retrospect this development can look inevitable, but it likely did not feel that way to Johnson as he painstakingly built his authorial curriculum vitae in a city not lacking for literary hopefuls. The amount and variety of hackwork that Johnson took on over the next decade are impressive, including biographical accounts, reviews, translations, introductions, and occasional essays on a multitude of subjects. The most significant, the ‘Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage’ (1744), recounts the misfortunes of one of Johnson’s earliest urban friends, who had died the previous year. His account of this charismatic poet borrows liberally from an even more quickly published account, but is unmistakably infused with Johnson’s personal recollections of, and even identification with, the older man. In this context, it seems significant that Johnson makes the crux of Savage’s late, crisis-ridden life his voluntary exile from London for Swansea and Bristol. (Savage is thus often thought to be the model for Thales, discussed above.) At every turn thereafter, his desire to return to the city is represented in almost pitifully passionate terms, and Savage’s inability to do so adds insult to his many injuries. As Johnson explains at one point near the ‘Account’s’ end, ‘In this distress [Savage] received a remittance of five pounds from London, with which he provided himself a decent coat, and determined to go to London, but unhappily spent his money at a favourite tavern. Thus was he again

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confined to Bristol. . . .’11 In Johnson’s telling, Savage’s distance from London is both symptom and symbol of his tragic, ultimately fatal marginalization. In some respects, the increasingly intimate relationship between Johnson and his city of choice was neither surprising nor unique. As John Brewer notes, mid eighteenth century London’s dominance compared to the rest of the country was so great, demographically as well as culturally, that ‘One in ten English people lived there; one in six Britons spent part of their working life in the metropolis.’12 With its theatres, pleasure gardens, markets, churches, exchanges, and of course the busy River Thames running through it, no other city in Britain came close to matching London in scope or dynamism as well as sheer size. Johnson’s long run of periodical writings, beginning with The Rambler in 1750, is unified by repeated references to his city of choice. Given that Johnson’s main goals in these texts are to keep readers abreast of the latest cultural trends and to inculcate the Christian-Stoic principles he held dear, this makes good sense. More surprising, perhaps, is Johnson’s habit of highlighting London’s centrality to modern Britain by repeatedly contrasting its richness and variety to the relative impoverishment (culturally if not always monetarily) of rural life. Even when Johnson satirizes Londoners’ inflated self-importance, he cannot help but pay tribute to the city’s outsized influence. The narrator of Rambler no. 61, for example, is a countryhouse dweller who finds nothing more annoying than Londoners’ superior airs: For, without considering the insuperable disadvantages of my condition, and the unavoidable ignorance which absence [from London] must produce, they often treat me with the utmost superciliousness of contempt. . .. They seem to attribute to the superiority of their intellects what they owe only to the accident of their condition, and think themselves indisputably entitled to airs of insolence and authority, when they find another ignorant of facts, which, because they echoed in the streets of London, they suppose equally publick in all other places, and known where they could neither be seen, related, nor conjectured.13

Yet even this disaffected character must admit that Londoners’ pretensions to superior worldliness are entirely supported by the country folk themselves: To this haughtiness they are indeed too much encouraged by the respect which they receive amongst us, for no other reason than that they come from London. For no sooner is the arrival of one of these disseminators of knowledge known in the country, than we crowd about him from every quarter, and by innumerable inquiries flatter him into an opinion of his own importance. He sees himself

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surrounded by multitudes, who propose their doubts and refer their controversies to him, as to a being descended from some nobler region, and he grows on a sudden oraculous and infallible, solves all difficulties, and sets all objections at defiance. (pp. 388–9)

Like a latter-day messiah – Johnson’s language here echoes the description of Christ about to give the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew14 – the Londoner’s authority to render judgment on matters both great and small is recognized and appealed to by all the countryfolk. The only thing worse than being in London, it seems, is not being in London. Beyond its repeated presence in his mid-career periodical writings, the importance of London to Johnson’s mature sense of identity – both as an Englishman and as an increasingly influential figure in Britain’s thriving literary marketplace – is borne out in many other places in his varied oeuvre. Trading on his growing reputation as a man of letters, in 1746 Johnson agreed to produce a new dictionary, one that would, in his words, ‘preserve the purity, and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom’.15 The subsequent toils of Johnson and his amanuenses are well known, thanks in no small part to Johnson’s own Preface to the dictionary in which he excoriates his one-time patron, Lord Chesterfield, for abandoning him well before the eight-year project reached its conclusion. Less remarked upon is the regularity with which London shows up in the Dictionary’s pages. During the years of labour that went into its making, Johnson lived mostly at no. 17 Gough Square, in what is still the financial centre of greater London. Accordingly, the city’s institutions and even its bureaucratic positions permeate his definitions.16 Readers learn not only of ‘Grub Street’ (‘The name of a street in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called grub-street’) and ‘Bedlam’ (‘corrupted from Bethlehem, the name of a religious house in London, converted afterwards into a hospital for the mad’), but also of a series of municipal stations and identities peculiar to the city, including ‘aleconner’ (a city inspector whose job was to make sure all pubs used the same measure for serving liquor), ‘liveryman’ (a member of a free company in London), and ‘searcher’ (the equivalent of today’s medical examiner). Johnson occasionally even indicates when a word in general usage has a specific meaning for Londoners: ‘town’, for example, usually means ‘Any walled collection of houses’, but with regard to Britain’s capital indicates ‘The court end of London’. Despite Rambler no. 61’s impatience with those who believe Londoners are better informed than other Britons, Johnson’s Dictionary

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seems designed to bring the latter’s knowledge and language usage into line with the former’s. As mentioned above, Johnson composed his Dictionary – which cemented his reputation as the greatest English-speaking man of letters of the eighteenth century – while living at Gough Square, just north of Fleet Street. Although it is now known as ‘Dr. Johnson’s house’, in fact this was merely one of eighteen residences where Johnson lived over the course of his career in the capital.17 When a young, ambitious Scotsman named James Boswell first visited Johnson at home, the older man was by then living in more upscale environs, on Inner Temple Lane in the heart of London’s traditional legal district. In fact, they had already met once before, in the back parlour of a bookseller’s shop in Covent Garden. Famously, at this first meeting on 16 May 1763, Johnson immediately began to rib Boswell about his Scottish origins: the latter records that when he introduced himself by saying that ‘I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it’, Johnson responded ‘That, Sir, I find, is what a great deal of your countrymen cannot help.’18 Not born a Londoner himself, Johnson nevertheless seems to have felt particularly aggrieved by the high numbers of Scots who moved to the metropolis during the mid eighteenth century; a few months later, he would quip that ‘the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England’ (p. 302). (Johnson himself clearly preferred taverns and coffee houses to prospects and highways; he chose the centrally located Turk’s Head tavern in what is now the Soho neighbourhood, for example, as the site of the literary dinner club he and the artist Joshua Reynolds started in 1764.) Beyond recording Johnson’s many sallies against the Scots – a series of jokes and put-downs that Boswell seems to have taken a masochistic pleasure in recording – the Life of Johnson contains a number of valuable observations on the nature of the attraction London so clearly held for its subject. Conversing on the subject in the autumn of 1769, Boswell records Johnson asserting that ‘The happiness of London is not to be conceived but by those who have been in it. I will venture to say, there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we sit now, than in all the rest of the kingdom’ (pp. 405–6). When Boswell points out that London has become very spread out – in other words, that it suffers from the equivalent of today’s urban sprawl – Johnson agrees but adds that ‘the largeness of it . . . is the cause of all the other advantages’ (p. 406). This sentiment is repeated some years later but with an important additional observation; when Boswell notes that, until their trip to Scotland (which I discuss in more detail below), Johnson had never left England, the older

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man replies that ‘by seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can shew’.19 Even allowing for some exaggeration, it seems clear that what Johnson is noting – London’s expansiveness, heterogeneity, and both literal and metaphorical richness – is an urban phenomenon that has become even more marked in contemporary life. In this sense, what he appreciates about London may be comprehended by the contemporary sociologist Saskia Sassen’s term ‘global city’. Sassen argues that although today we experience globalization – especially the near-instantaneous movement of capital and information around the planet – as utterly deterritorialized, the infrastructure of global phenomena is in fact still highly concentrated in select urban centres: The master images in the currently dominant account about economic globalization emphasize hypermobility, global communications, the neutralization of place and distance. . .. But the capabilities for global operation, coordination and control contained in the new information technologies and in the power of transnational corporations need to be produced. . .. many of the resources necessary for global economic activities are not hypermobile and are, indeed, deeply embedded in place, notably places such as global cities and export processing zones.20

Certainly, all of the global processes delineated above were not present in Johnson’s London; moreover, the mid eighteenth century’s world economic system was nowhere near as fully integrated as is today’s.21 Yet it was clearly on its way, and as London evolved towards its nineteenth-century position of pre-eminent global importance, it makes sense that Johnson would find in it all of the cosmopolitanism he apparently needed, literally without having to leave home. Despite his complaints about the increased presence of foreigners within greater London, Johnson clearly benefitted from and even enjoyed what Sassen identifies as the process whereby ‘through immigration a proliferation of originally highly localized cultures now have become presences in many large cities, cities whose elites think of themselves as cosmopolitan, that is transcending any locality’.22 Johnson did not need to venture out of London to see the world; the world – its cultures, its goods, its knowledges – increasingly came to London. Nevertheless, Boswell did eventually coax Johnson to leave his city for a tour of Scotland in the fall of 1773. Johnson was now fifty-three years old: an older man, especially by eighteenth-century standards. His willingness to undertake the trip with his younger friend was somewhat remarkable, not only because of his well-documented aversion to most things Scottish, but also because of the attendant health risks. Both men kept records of their trip, each with an eventual eye to publication, and the difference

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between their choices of titles is telling: whereas Boswell’s bears the rather quotidian heading, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, Johnson’s title – A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland –conveys a clear sense of setting off on an adventure to places unknown. Whereas Boswell’s text is organized temporally, moreover, Johnson’s place-based framework indexes his awareness of the sheer distance he would be putting between himself and his beloved city for the first time in decades.23 Nevertheless, London once again figures largely in both men’s accounts. Critical opinion is divided on the extent to which Johnson’s Journey is unfairly biased against Scotland, versus the extent to which it is genuinely committed to exploring the north to the best of Johnson’s abilities; either way, London figures frequently as a virtual measuring stick against which Johnson assesses all things Scottish.24 In his very first entry, about exploring a small island in the Firth of Forth near Edinburgh, Johnson marvels that it is still uninhabited, since ‘if it had been placed at the same distance from London, with the same facility of approach’, it would have been ‘cultivated and adorned’ with ‘expensive industry’ long ago.25 By contrast, he has little to say about the highly developed city of Edinburgh itself; although he claims it is ‘too well known to admit description’ (p. 3), Johnson seems reluctant to recognize the virtues of Scotland’s most sophisticated metropolitan centre, sometimes referred to in the later eighteenth century as ‘the Athens of the North’. (Boswell, it should be noted, devotes many pages to his and Johnson’s experiences in Edinburgh.) Instead, Johnson later describes in some detail several of Scotland’s smaller cities – cities that clearly cannot compete with London. These include St. Andrews, where Johnson seems to relish describing its post-Scottish Reformation dilapidation, and Aberdeen, where Johnson notes that the new town is built ‘almost wholly with the granite used in the new pavement of the streets of London’ (p. 13). Again, depending on one’s perspective, this can sound like a compliment – Johnson goes on to note that the mineral is ‘beautiful and must be very lasting’ – or an insult, since it implies that what is good enough for building with in a Scottish city is only fit to be walked on in London. (Such an unflattering comparison, it must be admitted, would chime with Johnson’s famously satirical definition of ‘oats’ in his Dictionary as ‘a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people’.) References to London grow scarcer but do not disappear altogether even once Johnson and Boswell leave Scotland’s Lowlands and east coast to head first into the Highlands and then across to the Hebridean islands. West of Aberdeen, in the town of Elgin, Johnson observes that ‘in the chief

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street. . . the houses jut over the lowest story, like the old buildings of timber in London, but with greater prominence’ (p. 21). Again, the comparison here cuts both ways: Johnson finds an unexpected architectural connection between the southern capital and this tiny northern outpost, but since such buildings were precisely what made the Great Fire of 1666 so deadly, their continued presence in Elgin seems like further evidence of Scotland’s relative backwardness. This kind of allochronic discourse – with which, as Johannes Fabian has shown, anthropologists have traditionally positioned themselves in more contemporary temporal spheres than those of their subjects26 – governs many of Johnson’s invocations of London as the standard of modern, civilized life. On other occasions, however, there is a more complicated tension in the Journey: between Johnson’s frequent condemnations of the Scottish highlanders’ and islanders’ backwardness and stubbornness, and his admiration for their perceived virtues of simplicity and hardiness. This ambivalence – which extends from Johnson’s attitude towards his subjects to his position on more basic questions of perception and observation27 – is on clear display when he and Boswell arrive at the celebrated Isle of Coll, one of the most isolated of the Inner Hebrides. In the middle of a relatively thorough inventory of the island’s topographical and sociological elements, Johnson remarks on the significance of its lone general store: A shop in the Islands, as in other places of little frequentation, is a repository of every thing requisite for common use. Mr. Boswell’s journal was filled, and he bought some paper at Col [sic]. To a man that ranges the streets of London, where he is tempted to contrive wants for the pleasure of supplying them, a shop affords no image worthy of attention; but in an Island, it turns the balance of existence between good and evil. (p. 118)

Here, late in the Journey, Johnson’s invocation of his beloved capital city carries a negative undertone for the first time. In London, Johnson recognizes, one becomes so accustomed to commercial plenty that it is not only taken for granted, but carries the risk of moral corruption (‘tempted to contrive wants for the pleasure of supplying them’); once at a distance from London’s overabundance, one’s appreciation for even a single retail shop – as well as the islanders’ ‘dexterity to supply some of their necessities’, as Johnson puts it in a subsequent paragraph – is healthfully refreshed.28 Of course, no amount of recognition of Scotland’s virtues dimmed Johnson’s enthusiasm for returning to London, that ‘great theater of life and animation’, as Boswell puts it near the end of his Journal (p. 431). In a similar manner, when (a little more than a decade later) Johnson knew he

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was unlikely to survive a final illness, he returned from the countryside where he had gone ‘to try what help the country can give me’,29 to the city with which he so closely identified. In Boswell’s words: such was [Johnson’s] love of London, so high a relish had he of its magnificent extent and variety of intellectual entertainment, that he languished when absent from it. . .. These feelings, joined, probably to some flattering hopes of aid from the eminent physicians and surgeons in London, who kindly and generously attended him without accepting of fees, made him resolve to return to the capital.30

As Boswell’s account underscores, there is triumph even in Johnson’s decline: he is now fully embraced by the very city he had worked so hard for so long to make his own. London’s best doctors were unable to help him, however; Johnson died on 13 December 1784, and was buried a week later with great ceremony at Westminster Abbey, alongside numerous other figures of national importance. If it is true, as many critics have claimed, that Johnson’s posthumous reputation was burnished at least as much by Boswell’s masterful biography as by his own writings, then it is equally true that, had Johnson not made his way to London as a young man, he would never have had the opportunities to become the charismatic man of letters whose wit and wisdom Boswell subsequently enshrined. From his early days as an unknown rural schoolteacher, Johnson became the central literary figure of one of the most important cities on the planet. Today’s London, with its skyscrapers, sprawl, and international real estate market, is one of Sassen’s ‘global cities’ in ways that Johnson could not have anticipated and probably would have disliked, could he have foreseen them. Yet as long as at least some of its theatres, bookstores, pubs, and coffee houses remain on its busy streets, Johnson’s presence in London will linger: a testament to the city that both fed his imagination and shaped his worldview.

Notes 1. ‘London City Guide’, Apex Hotels, accessed 19 March 2014, www.apexhot els.co.uk/en/community/city-guides/london-city-guide/. 2. Cynthia Wall, ‘London’, in Jack Lynch (ed.), Samuel Johnson in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 244. 3. For a more thorough analysis focusing on London’s post-Fire rebuilding and its influence on Johnson, see Nicholas Hudson, ‘Samuel Johnson, Urban Culture, and the Geography of Postfire London’, SEL 42.3 (Summer 2002), 572–600.

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4. See, for example, Robert Mack, The Genius of Parody: Imitation and Originality in Seventeenth– and Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 5. Samuel Johnson, ‘London’, in Donald Greene (ed.), The Major Works (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 2, lines 13–8. Subsequent quotations will appear parenthetically by line number. 6. Quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. R.W. Chapman, intro. Pat Rogers (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 327. 7. ‘A Population History of London: The Demography of Urban Growth’, The Proceedings of the Old Bailey: London’s Central Criminal Court, 1674–1913, accessed, 1 April 2014, www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Population-history-of -london.jsp. 8. Roy Porter, London: A Social History (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 131. 9. See Walter Jackson Bate, The Achievement of Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 18. 10. Porter, London: A Social History, p. 131. 11. Samuel Johnson, An Account of the Life of Mr Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers, in Greene (ed.), Major Works, p. 155. 12. John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1997), p. 28. 13. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler 61, 16 October 1750, in The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (London: Rivington, 1823), vol. 2, pp. 397–93, at p. 388. Accessed via Google Books, 22 April 2014. Further citations to this and other volumes in this edition will appear parenthetically by page number. 14. ‘And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him: And he opened his mouth, and taught them’ (Matthew 5:1–2). 15. Samuel Johnson, ‘The Plan of an English Dictionary (1747)’, ed. Jack Lynch, accessed 3 June 2014, andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/plan.html. 16. All definitions from Johnson’s Dictionary are taken from the following edition: Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd edn (Dublin: W.G. Jones, 1767). Accessed via Google Books, 29 September 2014. 17. See Christopher Hibbert, Ben Weinreb, John Keay, and Julia Keay, The London Encyclopaedia, 3rd edn (London: Macmillan, 2011), pp. 434–44. No. 17 Gough Street is now a museum dedicated to Johnson; see www.drjohnsons house.org. 18. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R.W. Chapman, intro. Pat Rogers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 277. 19. James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, in Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 151–447, at p. 365.

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20. Saskia Sassen, ‘The Global City: Strategic Site/ New Frontier’, accessed 30 June 2014, www.india-seminar.com/2001/503/503%20saskia%20sassen.htm. 21. For a useful primer on the concept of world systems by its chief practitioner, see Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). World-systems analysis is related to but not identical with globalization studies; for a discussion of their differences, see the introductory chapter of Evan Gottlieb, Romantic Globalism: British Literature and Modern World Order, 1750–1830 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014). 22. Sassen, ‘The Global City’. 23. For a fuller comparison of Johnson’s and Boswell’s accounts of their Scottish travels, see, for example, Evan Gottlieb, Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), ch. 3. 24. For the former view, see, for example, Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 67–97; and Richard Nash, Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), pp. 139–55. For the latter view, see, for example, Gottlieb, Feeling British, ch. 3; and Ruth Mack, ‘The Limits of the Senses in Johnson’s Scotland’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 54.2 (2013), 279–94. 25. Samuel Johnson, Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, in Johnson and Boswell, Journey to the Western Islands, ed. Chapman, pp. 1–149, at p. 4. 26. See, for example, Johannes Fabian, ‘Of dogs dead, birds alive, and time to tell a story’, in Fabian, Time and the Work of Anthropology: Critical Essays, 1971– 1981 (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 225–44. 27. See, for example, Mack, ‘The Limits of the Senses’; Ian Duncan, ‘The Pathos of Abstraction: Adam Smith, Ossian, and Samuel Johnson’, in Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (eds.), Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 38–56. 28. This theme of Johnson’s Journey bears marked similarities to the lessons learned via travel around Britain by the Bramble family in Tobias Smollett’s 1771 epistolary novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. 29. Boswell, Life of Johnson, p. 1337. 30. Ibid., p. 1358; cf. Wall, ‘London’, p. 249.

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chapter 11

Contesting ‘home’ in eighteenth-century women’s verse Catherine Ingrassia

‘Home’ for women of the long eighteenth century in Britain presented fundamental contradictions. Certainly, securing an ‘establishment’ and having a domestic space to control and shape remained a dominant female ambition within the cultural construction of gender, and a home potentially brought security, comfort, and a specific, if limited, sphere of influence. In Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Lucas speaks for many women when she explains her decision to marry Mr. Collins with the simple statement, ‘I ask only a comfortable home.’1 Good housekeeping, in turn, was thought to display feminine virtue and modesty, the containment and appropriate funnelling of female energies.2 The household itself served as what Amanda Vickery describes as ‘a microcosm of the state, revealing the hierarchical ordering of society in miniature’.3 Yet that home, as a physical space, also represented tremendous domestic labour and responsibility while remaining a form of property most women did not (and legally could not) own. Indeed women often lived with the risk of displacement because of widowhood, financial reversal, loss of pension, or any other life upheaval that tipped an often delicate balance. While home retained an avowedly domestic (and domesticating) focus, conceptually and materially it was also deeply imbricated in the global. National fast days demanded personal privation in recognition of international conflicts, the relinquishing of sugar at the tea table demonstrated dedication to the abolitionist movement, or, more intimately, the absence of a husband, son, or brother because of military deployment or death in service marked the nation’s involvement in foreign conflicts. Thus ‘home’ emerges as a deeply contested site, fraught with ‘conceptual inconsistency’4: a space of labour and rest, comfort and loss; a site of control yet potential dispossession; a location for private desires, thoughts, and actions that simultaneously invites scrutiny and constructs public identity; a place of the local and the global, the foreign as read through the domestic. 154

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Female poets of the long eighteenth century capture this complicated conception of home. Certainly some female poets conformed to the simpler ideal of hearth and home; Elizabeth Hamilton (1756?–1816) celebrates ‘my ain fire-side, my ain fire-side, / Oh, cheering’s the blink o’ my ain fire-side!’ in her ballad of the same name.5 Other eighteenth-century women’s verse, however, confronts more complex situations as it reflects upon women’s own domestic space and service within it, their attitudes towards the country they call home, and the inextricable connections between the two. Mary Barber (1685–1755), for example, juxtaposes poetic descriptions of her home with sustained meditations on displacement and homelessness. Her poems detail the situation of veterans’ widows unable to secure their pension, the plight of the Barbary captives, and the dangers for women who have had reversals of fortune. Similarly, poets such as Frances Seymour, the Countess of Hertford (1699–1754), Mary Collier (1688?– 1762), Anna Seward (1747–1809), and Joanna Baillie (1762–1851), represent home as a space of domesticity, warmth, and comfort, and, simultaneously, a site of loss, absence, or memory. Their poems depict scenes as various as the wife of a prisoner of war imagining her absent husband’s presence or the homeless veteran hoping only for a night’s respite from the cold. Such verse by Barber and her contemporaries offers a distinctly different, much more complicated portrait of home than is sometimes attributed to female poets, often using images of domesticity and knowledge from the private sphere to subversively critique governmental actions and national policies. This essay explores the contradictions within female poets’ representations of home and their focus on the immediately domestic (space, politics, responsibilities), the persistently global (conflicts, national identities, war), and the points of contact between the two.

***

Mary Barber, an Irish female poet married to a woollen-draper ‘declind [sic] in the world’6 with whom she had four surviving children, lived primarily in Dublin, cultivated her poetic abilities, and developed a relationship with Jonathan Swift and the literary circle with which he surrounded himself. Part of his so-called ‘female triumfeminate’7 and known as the ‘Citizen Housewife Poet’, Barber benefited from relationships with contemporaries like Constantia Grierson (1704/5–32), whose poems she included in her own volume, and Swift, who was instrumental in helping Barber raise sufficient subscriptions to publish her 1734 volume of poetry. Swift described Barber to Pope as ‘our chief Poetess, and upon the whole hath no ill Genius’8 and, out of friendship to Swift, a

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very ill Pope wrote that he would provide ‘Whatever Service of I can render, her by speaking well &c. . .. Whatever Friends I can get to Subscribe to her.’9 Poet Mary Jones (1707–78) praised Barber’s poetry because she eschewed the romantic topics of her female contemporaries: ‘I don’t remember to have met with. . . a word of that passion which has made so many female poets; I mean love.’10 Mary Chandler (1687–1745) described her verse as ‘Fill’d with Compassion for the poor distress’d’.11 George Colman and Bonnell Thornton’s anthology Poems by Eminent Ladies (1755), the first significant collection of British female poets, notes that Barber wrote ‘by motives very different from any of those, which have induced others to attempt poetry’, for this ‘ingenious Authoress’ wrote ‘chiefly to form the mind of her children’.12 Modern scholars similarly tend to characterize Barber as a poet presenting ‘“ordinary” domestic life both in Ireland and in England’.13 Indeed, critics aesthetically privilege that aspect of her verse. A.C. Elias asserts that her best poems are those ‘illustrating her children’s states of mind’,14 and Adam Budd suggests that her ‘career as a supplicating petitioner may have suppressed a more credible literary voice’.15 Such statements both implicitly devalue the range of her poetry and ignore how deeply the political is embedded within the domestic. Barber’s poems capture the categorical instability and inherent contradictions of home during the long eighteenth century. Yet, from the beginning of her 1734 collection Poems on Several Occasions, Barber rhetorically obscures the more political focus of her writing. Her paratextual materials strategically claim her poetic ambitions emerge only from maternal devotion. ‘[S]ensible that a Woman steps out of her Province whenever she presumes to write for the Press’,16 Barber insists her ‘Aim’ is ‘chiefly to form the Minds of my Children’. Because ‘nothing can be of more Use to a Society than the taking early Care to form the Mind of Youth, I publish some of the Verses written by me with that View, when my Son was a Schoolboy’ (xxv). As she writes in the poem ‘A True Tale’ (pp. 7–12), ‘A Mother. . . vast Pleasure finds / In modeling her children’s Minds’ (1–2). A previous version of that poem published separately as A Tale Being an Addition to Mr. Gay’s Fables (1728) draws an even more explicit domestic image positioning Barber as a happy Mother ‘beside the fire’ reading Gay’s Fables to her children who ‘Transported hung around her Chair’.17 That focused motivation is, in Barber’s words, ‘the best Apology a Woman could make for writing at all’ (xxv–xxvi). However, that perspective is complicated by her admission that ‘the Distresses’ and potential homelessness of ‘an Officer’s Widow’ ‘set me upon drawing a Petition in Verse’

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(xviii). Her poetry is directed on the ‘domestic’ broadly conceived: the domestic space of her home and the domestic concerns of a nation. Within the domestic space of her own home, Barber poetically records the professional and moral improvement of her sons. Often ventriloquizing their voices or writing what she terms ‘Verses between a Mother and her Son’ (xxv), her poems envisage the challenges they face when they leave home and venture into public, masculine spaces such as school. Satiric, at times sentimental, always vital in their voice, these poems capture the affectionate dynamic between a mother and her sons. Yet even those poems with ostensibly a purely domestic focus allude to the political. For example, ‘Written for my Son to his Master on the Anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne’ (p. 96) celebrates William of Orange’s great victory over James II marking Protestant dominance in Ireland and Scotland. While her poem playfully asks ‘why should Scholars. . . Be Pris’ners on this glorious Day’ (5–6), it also uses politically charged language that underscores the importance of ‘Liberty’ to the British conception of national identity. ‘Written for my Son, and Spoken by Him at First putting on Breeches’ (pp. 13–6) laments that little boys are ‘plagued’ by breeches. By blaming ‘Tyrant Custom’ to which ‘we must yield’ (2), Barber alludes to an entire cultural system in which the same ‘custom’ that demands breeches for little boys also requires women to be submissive, dutiful, and domestic. The ‘Tyranny’ (4) she laments in ‘Written for my Son. . . upon his Master’s first bring in a Rod’ (pp. 36–7), while ostensibly describing the relationship between master and schoolboy, resonates with other unequal power relationships (all containing the potential for tyranny) within Britain: husband and wife, landlord and labourer, king and subject. Barber also writes with an awareness of the degree to which her poetic pursuits, her status as a ‘verse-writing wife’ potentially distract from her domestic responsibilities (p. 59). ‘The Conclusion of a Letter to the Rev. Mr. C—’ (pp. 58–62) ventriloquizes ‘Rev Mr. C—’, who pities Barber’s husband. In presenting the domestic chores Barber leaves undone, the reverend lists the duties he would expect from a wife that accord with the dominant cultural expectations for household management: If ever I marry, I’ll chuse me a spouse, That shall serve and obey, as she’s bound by her vows; That shall, when I’m dressing, attend like a valet; Then go to the kitchen, and study my palate. She has wisdom enough, that keeps out of the dirt, And can make a good pudding, and cut out a shirt.

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A woman ‘Reading the Poets’ (11) should have a new home, ‘a dark Room, and Straw Bed’ (12), a reference to Bedlam. Elizabeth Thomas (1675–1731) also depicts the tension between household duties and poetic inclinations. She laments that as ‘domestick Tools’ women ‘in their House a full Employment find, / And little Time command to cultivate the Mind.’18 Beyond the space of her own house, ‘home’ for Barber is also Dublin, a city with unpleasant physical realities she details in poems to female friends in the country whose homes represent an idealized space of clean air, privacy, and peace. In ‘Written from Dublin, to a Lady in the Country’ (pp. 99–102), Barber describes passing through ‘crouded Scenes I hate’ (10) that contrast with the ‘Your Versailles’ (19) in which she imagines her friend resides, a rural location of calm, solitude, and ‘retirement’ (8). ‘A Wretch, in smoaky Dublin pent, / Who rarely sees the Firmament’ (1–2), Barber expresses a persistent desire to leave ‘[t]he smoaky Town’19 to which economic circumstances relegate her. As she states in ‘To a Lady, who Invited the Author into the Country’ (pp. 132–5), ‘citizens must stay at home’ (8). While the recipient of the poetic letter surveys ‘lovely Landscapes’ and enjoys ‘various blooming sweets’ (31, 33), Barber, ‘sick of Smells, and dirty Streets’ (34), is ‘Stifled with Smoke, and stunn’d with Noise’ (31, 34–6). Only ‘pow’rful Fancy’ enables her to enjoy ‘Sylvan Scenes’ (39–40). Ideally she seeks a pastoral location of ‘flow’ry Fields’ (47) and ‘blissful Solitude’ (49). There, ‘eating Care should ne’er intrude’ and she can be visited by the ‘Muse’. ‘By a Person of Quality’ (p. 230) explicitly represents retirement and removal from the city as her ideal: Remote from Strife, from urban Throngs, and Noise, Here dwells my Soul amidst domestic Joys: No rattling Coaches serious Thoughts annoy; Or busy prating Fools my Peace destroy: Wrapt up in all the Sweets of rural East, .... The Mind, in peaceful Solitude, has Room To range in Thought, and ramble far from home.

(1–8)

‘Domestic joys’ exist ‘far from home’ with its attendant noise, responsibilities, and distractions. Only in the ‘sacred Silence’ can she ‘truly live’ (10). The landscapes and bucolic pleasures Barber imagines echo Frances Seymour’s description of her own country home and its diversions in To the Countess of Pomfret: Life at Richkings (1740).20 In a previous poem inscribed to Seymour,21 Barber praises the ‘lovely Hertford’ because she

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‘her Hours employs, / To form her Mind for never-fading Joys’ (23–4) in contrast to the ‘heedless Fair, who pass the live-long Day, / In dress and Scandal, Gallantry and Play’ (1–2). Yet in her own poem, Seymour satirizes herself and ‘the pursuits our time employs’.22 Richkings does not provide literary inspiration; rather it is a place of boredom and idleness. In the letter preceding the poem, Seymour laments that ‘when. . . in the country’, she is ‘compelled to furnish materials’ for her letters purely ‘out of my own stock’.23 Seymour questions ‘what can (that’s new) remain for me to say’ (3) without detailing the agricultural work and dire situation of the labouring poor surrounded by ‘scenes of ruin’ (14). After a brief description of ‘prospects sad as these’ (19), she describes ‘in a gayer style. . . what we accept as joys’ (21–2). Her rarified space offers boundless time free of domestic responsibilities: ‘We sometimes ride, and sometimes walk; / We play at chess, or laugh, or talk’ (24–5). Her ‘labour’ is purely symbolic: ‘make a cheese; / Or see my various poultry fed, / And treat my swans with scraps of bread’ (40–3). Her table knows only abundance: ‘Eggs, cream, fresh butter, or calves’-feet; / And cooling fruits, or sav’ry greens, – / ’Sparagus, peas, or kidney beans’ (54–6). While Seymour introduces the economic disparity that accurately captures rural life (‘th’ ungrateful soil’, ‘thirsty flocks expire upon the ground’) the very first line of the poem lists the architectural elements of the estate – ‘the groves, the portico, and lawn’ (1) – constructing verbally the boundaries that physically mark ownership and control. ‘Destin’d to a low Estate’24 (31), Barber identifies her financial situation as the primary reason for her inability to leave Dublin, but her health also limited her travel and, in the process, reconfigured her relationship with her own home. ‘Tyrant Gout’ plagued Barber causing ‘feeble joynts’, ‘freezing limbs’, and a ‘pulse. . . irregular and low’.25 She also experienced continued dental pain. As Barber notes in ‘The Prodigy’ (pp. 22–7), ‘’Tis well I can write, for I scarcely can speak, / I’m so plagued with my Teeth, which eternally ake’ (11–2). ‘Written for my son, to some of the Fellows of the College’ (p. 54) ventriloquizes her son who celebrates the ‘Toothdrawer’ and the relief he brings Barber and the entire household. Because ‘the Tongue cannot rest, when the Teeth are in Pain’ (8), everyone in Barber’s home suffers when she is in physical distress: ‘My Mamma had the Tooth-ach, and I felt the Smart—’(3). Regardless of their actions, children and servants ‘were sure of a Scolding’ (6). In ‘To Mrs. S—. Written in my Sickness’ (p. 131) Barber describes lying on her ‘sickly Couch’ (3) in a ‘desolated Place’ (2). Barber’s pain not only colours the mood of the house, it also confines her to that domestic space.

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Just as physical pain transforms the home, so too does emotional pain as Barber details in ‘The Widow Gordon’s Petition’ (pp. 2–5), which assumes the first-person perspective of the veteran’s widow and depicts the ruptured domestic space, rendered unnatural by the government’s failure to provide the pension owed. Children who ought to give a mother’s ‘Soul Delight’ are made ‘irksome to [her] Sight’ (7, 8); she is transformed into ‘a wretched Mother’ (9). Without friends or spouse, her home becomes a ‘lonely Mansion’ (17) for ‘All fly th’ Infection of the Widow’s Tears’ (18); her table is bare and she ‘hears the Want she never can relieve’ (10), her children’s ‘piercing Cries for Bread!’ (6). Unlike those women ‘who at Ease recline’ (25), the Widow Gordon ‘start[s] at each imaginary Sound, / And Horrors have encompass’d [her] around’ (23–4). Debtors’ prison remains a spectre throughout the poem, the ‘dismal Jail’ (22) that may emerge as her alternative home. The other possibilities the poem presents are ‘the Grave’ or ‘Destruction’ beyond what she currently experiences – actual homelessness. ‘On Seeing an Officer’s Widow Distracted’ (pp. 233–5) similarly records the consequences of the ‘thankless State’s’ failure to provide pensions owed. Unrecognizable to her children, completely undomesticated – indeed ‘wild as Winds’ – the Officer’s Widow ‘Rove[s] thro’ the Streets. . . / With tatter’d Garments, and dishevell’d Hair’ (11–3). Homeless and ‘by cruel Treatment tir’d’, she sleeps, ‘A Stone thy Pillow, the cold Earth thy Bed’ (16, 18). The poem concludes with a vision of soldiers, ‘Britain’s Martial Sons’ (20), hesitating on the battlefield, haunted by the image of their children hungry and their wives ‘into Prisons thrown; / and unreliev’d in Iron Bondage groan’ (25–6). Then, soldiers may ‘Feel the Heart fail’ (22). The domestic health of the home and its inhabitants lies at the heart of national health and military success. Homelessness was a persistent problem in the eighteenth century and the idealized vision of home must always be read against that social landscape. Joanna Baillie illustrates the plight of homeless veterans in her poem A Winter Day (1790). Describing her composition of the poem, Baillie writes of her awareness of the disparity between her own comfort and the misfortune of others: ‘One dark morning of a dull winter day standing on the hearth in Windmill Street and looking at the mean dirty houses on the opposite side of the street, the contrast of my situation from the winter scenes of my own country come powerfully to my mind. . . and with little further deliberation I forthwith set myself to write the “Winter day” in blank verse.’26 The poem begins with a description of the modest home of the ‘lab’ring hind’ who sleeps ‘on his bed of straw, / Beneath his homemade coverings, coarse, but warm, / Lock’d in the kindly arms of her who

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spun them’ (8–10). His wife, once awake, ‘knows not where to turn, / Her morning work comes now so thick upon her’ (51–2). The ‘warm and cheerful house’ (64) stands in stark contrast to the bitter winter day outside. After myriad daily activities, the husband, the children, and villagers ‘scatter to their homes’ (176) as ‘night comes on a pace’ (180). Home as a physical space, however modest, remains the goal ‘whether man or beast’: ‘all move alike / Towards their several homes; and happy they / Who have a house to screen them from the cold!’ (182–4). The homeless veteran, hoping only ‘to relieve / A poor old soldier’s wants’ (205–6), seeks shelter in the farmer’s home and enjoys the hospitality albeit humble. Playing with the young sons, he thinks simultaneously of his own sons, soldiers ‘who now lie distant from their native land / In honourable, but untimely graves’ (219–20). They too are, in a sense, homeless – denied a home by their early death, buried in a foreign land. The veteran shares his ‘tales of war and blood’ (270) by the hearth he temporarily enjoys. His words briefly make him the centre of the family’s focus: They gaze upon him, And almost weep to see the man so poor, So bent and feeble, helpless and forlorn, That oft’ has stood undaunted in the battle Whilst thund’ring cannons shook the quaking earth, And showering bullets hiss’d around his head.

(270–5)

The details of the battlefield resonate within this domestic space introducing the national conflict, making it an evening tale. Yet the image is selfcontained. Although the family ‘gazes’ upon the veteran and ‘almost weeps’, after his narrative they return to their own domestic routine: ‘with little care they pass away the night’ (276). The man who has fought for home and nation will face an uncertain future in the morning, a moment the poem withholds. Instead, the text ends with the labourer’s expression of renewed gratitude prompted by his knowledge of the veteran’s situation. He concludes the day ‘thankful for the roof that covers him’ (295). In many ways, Baillie’s poem offers an idealized vision of bourgeois domesticity that reinforces existing hierarchies, the kind of idealization we see in Hamilton’s ‘My Ain Fireside’. Yet, Baillie also focuses on the inequity confronted by the veteran and places it squarely within that domestic space – a man loyal to God, home, and king, who receives no compensation, no reciprocity, no comfort from the nation that ruptured his family and rendered him homeless. Like Barber’s Widow Gordon, the veteran’s homelessness is not an individual problem but a national one that

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casts fundamental doubt on the relationship between a soldier and his homeland. Barber explores similar tensions between presence and dispossession, domestic stability and foreign displacement, home and not home, in her poem ‘On Seeing the Captives, lately redeem’d from Barbary by his Majesty’ (pp. 271–4). In this poem, home is contested for the freed captives, the British citizen, and even Barber herself. Between 1660 and the 1730s, thousands of Britons were taken captive and enslaved by Barbary Corsairs. Calculating the precise number of captives over time was difficult (although some estimates range as high as 20,000 captives over the intervening period), and the number of captives redeemed by the British government likely represents ‘only a portion of the total number of English captives held’.27 The Barbary Captives were typically sailors, perhaps originally pressed into service, or other disenfranchised members of British society. As such, they ‘embodied in a particularly dramatic form the vulnerability of the laboring poor in general’, suggests Linda Colley.28 Such vulnerability might have been more keenly felt by Barber due to Corsair raids on the Irish coastline. Barber’s poem reflects on the experience of 11 November 1734, when 131 Barbary captives redeemed by King George I were returned to England and presented to the King. The Daily Journal describes how ‘the Captives’ were brought ‘in their Slavish Habits to St. James’s, to return his Majesty Thanks for delivering them’.29 As the brief newspaper account reveals, they were not, of course, admitted into the palace; rather ‘His Majesty view’d them from the Palace Windows’, and ordered ‘100 guineas to be distributed among them’ – a sum that amounts to less than one pound per man. Sir Charles Wager (1666–1743),30 philanthropist and businessman, then provided dinner for the men at ‘The King’s Head Tavern in Fenchurch Street’. Barber praises Wager for his efforts ‘to feed the Hungry. . . And make the Heart, born down by Care, rejoice’ (30–1). From the beginning of the poem Barber describes the men as ‘freed Captives’ (3), an oxymoron that illuminates the complicated position of the redeemed men. As the ‘freed Captives’ return home and ‘hail their native Shore’ to ‘tread the Land of LIBERTY once more’ (4–5), they bless their ‘Deliv’rer’, the King whose ‘compassion’ makes ‘the Joys of Liberty more felt’ (40, 42). The observers of this scene take ‘Joy in their Joy’, a kind of reciprocal, mutually reinforcing pleasure. The captives are freed from ‘SLAVERY’, ‘No more in Iron Bonds the Wretched groan’ (9); they have returned home. Their liberation surpasses everything: ‘can Empire boast a Bliss, / Amidst its radiant Pomp, that equals this?’ (11–2). Although, when

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captive, they evinced British vulnerability, returned to British soil they are the domestic manifestation of imperial power. Those welcoming the returning captives – ‘a Husband, Brother, Kinsman, Friend’ (20) – ‘now in Peace shall die’ while blessing heaven and ‘the Hand, that has unbound thy Chains’ (25–6). Within this poem of apparent exultation, however, lies the contested status of these ‘freed Captives’. Although liberated from enslavement, the Barbary captives return to England only to be enslaved by their own country, prisoners to poverty, hunger, and homelessness: ‘The bitter Cup of Slavery is past; / But pining Penury approaches fast’ (36–7). As Colley notes, ‘for a labouring man. . . release from captivity abroad did not necessarily result in a warm sense of liberty recovered and resumed at home’.31 ‘The Joy of Liberty’ is fraught, for Barber makes it clear how compromised the term ‘liberty’ is at this point. The ambiguity of the final lines of the poem underscores the freed captives’ liminal status. The poet urges ‘Albion. . . To break the Bonds, and set the Pris’ners free’ (42–3). The line might urge the redemption of additional captives; however the poem as a whole suggests that true freedom comes not by being ransomed from slavery but, ultimately, from an improvement in the quality of the life to which the captive returns.32 Servitude and imprisonment within the confines of the British nation – and within one’s ‘home’ – also resonate in Mary Collier’s The Woman’s Labour (1739).33 If, as Colley suggests, ‘the culture of captivity served to interweave the foreign and the domestic’,34 Collier potently represents what a ‘culture of captivity’ looks like for the labouring poor. From the opening lines of her poem, Collier explicitly likens her domestic labours – whether in her own home or in service of someone else’s – to slavery. She is someone ‘who ever was, and’s still a Slave’ (6). She makes specific reference to those enslaved by the ‘Turks’, a term which would allude to those holding Barbary captives: ‘For none but Turks, that ever I could find, / Have Mutes to serve them, or did e’er deny / Their Slaves, at Work to chat it merrily’ (p. 8). At the beginning of the poem as Collier lies on her bed, ‘Eas’d from the tiresome Labours of the Day’, she muses on how ‘Time and Custom by degrees destroy’d / That happy State’ women ‘at first enjoy’d’ when men had the primary responsibility for ‘Toil’ (p. 6). Now, however, not only do women like Collier work in the fields during the day, their labours extend into their own home. When Ev’ning dos approach, we homeward hie, And our domestic Toils Incessant ply:

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catherine ingrassia Against your coming Home prepare to get Our Work all done, our House in order set.

(p. 9)

Women leaving the field ‘must make haste, for when we Home are come, / Alas! we find our Work but just begun; /. . . / We all Things for your coming Home prepare’ (p. 10, emphasis added). Responsible for everything within the house, labouring women, in Collier’s representation, are denied any comforts that home might offer. Additionally, as Collier details, her labour extends not just from the fields to her own home but, on those days she goes ‘Charing’ (p. 12), to labour performed in other women’s homes as well. While ‘When Ev’ning’s come’ men ‘Homeward take [their] Way’, (their work determined by the amount of daylight available), women’s work continues: ‘till our Work is done, are forc’d to stay; / And after all our Toil and Labour past, / Six-pence or Eight-pence pays us off at last’ (p. 15). Home and the vision of the hearth remain a desirable but elusive object. Collier, like other labouring women, contributes more to enhancing the homes of others than cultivating her own domestic space, a place from which she remains essentially displaced and estranged. A similar displacement informs Anna Seward’s ‘Elegy Written as from a French Lady, Whose Husband Had been Three Years Prisoner of War at Litchfield’ (1810), a poem that presents home as a place of absence, loss, and memory rendered unrecognizable without her husband. Assuming the perspective of a French woman, the poem presents a detailed description of a home that tallies the domestic and emotional costs of the ‘unransom’d bondage’ of a soldier. ‘Why are bonds for him who knows not crime?’ asks the wife, recognizing that her husband, like a Barbary captive, is imprisoned due to ill-luck, not guilt (12, 44).35 The poem conveys the wife’s emotional distress, ‘the slow-consuming fire / My peace that scorches, and that wastes my youth’ (23–4). The poem’s focus centres on the detailed description of home, ‘the lonely bowers’ (83). Although, as Claudia Kairoff notes, the wife ‘maintains her home as if her husband had never left’, the physical absence marked within the domestic space persists36: ‘All things around me seem to expect him here; / My Husband’s favourite robe enfolds me still; / Here have I rang’d the books he lov’d,—and there / Placed the selected chair he us’d to fill’ (57–60). The space awaits his return, the chair ‘Again to be resum’d. . .’ if ‘Fate /. . . would given him back to love and me; / Then should I see him there reclin’d sedate’ (61–3). Home exists only as an imagined future and ‘sweet remembrances. . . /. . . of the Past’ (37–8). In its current iteration, however, home only reminds her of ‘this killing absence’ (73) and the lack it represents. The wife cannot,

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does not recognize her own home. It reinforces how deeply the domestic, the personal, and the private are intertwined with the national.

*** The cognitive dissonance Seward depicts echoes the verse of female poets at the end of the century who no longer understand the direction of Britain’s actions globally or domestically. The betrayal of British ideals with seemingly endless war, the repression of civil liberties, and what some perceived as the moral erosion of the country rendered Britain unrecognizable and made home appear, for some, foreign. In ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’, Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743–1825) laments that ‘my Country, name beloved, revered’ may soon be ‘only known / By the gray ruin and the mouldering stone; /. . . Time may tear the garland from her brow’.37 Jane Cave Winscom (1744/5–1813) cannot comprehend the death of ‘many innocent People’ when the militia ‘were ordered to fire on the Populace’ on the Bristol Bridge, which she details in ‘Thoughts Occasioned by the Proceedings on Bristol Bridge’.38 In ‘The Widow’s Home’, Mary Robinson (1756–1800) describes the life of ‘the Soldier’s Widow’ who will never enjoy ‘peace domestic’,39 a term describing her mind, her country, and, of course, her own home. These poems, like Barber’s, fundamentally question the relationship between home and nation. Barber captures the abiding tensions in ‘Verses said to be written by Mrs. Mary Barber to a Friend Desiring an Account of her Health in Verse’, a poem published in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1737. Initially the poem appears to be about her illness and its profound effect on her sense of self, now static, and place, now confined: ‘On my wearied couch I pass the day, / While ebbing life wears heavily away. /. . . yet here I lie.’40 The poem concludes, however, with a potent image of the culture of captivity present in many poems about home: So wretched captives, long in prison bound, Where iron bands at once confine and wound, Resolve, when free to tread the verdant plain, And joyous breathe the fragrant air again: With this gay vision chase the hours away, And gild the horrors of their gloomy day. But find, alas! when time unbinds their chains, The fatal weakness which they cause remains.

(21–8)

Her confinement within the home is perpetual – ‘no more the hopes of liberty delight’ (19) – yet it is unwanted and, ultimately, unavoidable. While exacerbated by her illness, certainly, Barber’s image is not unique. For Barber and her female contemporaries, ‘home’ emerges as a potentially

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uneasy and discomforting concept. The social, physical, and psychological space in which women ostensibly had greatest purview emerges as one rife with the inconsistencies and contradictions that characterize British women’s situation in the long eighteenth century.

Notes 1. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 125. 2. As Naomi Tadmor details, ‘contemporary prototypes of the good housekeeper and virtuous wife’ informed thinking on domestic responsibilities and the appropriate role for women within the household. Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 196. 3. Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 7. 4. Ibid., 10. 5. Elizabeth Hamilton, ‘My Ain Fire-Side’, in Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine E. Ingrassia (eds.), British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century: An Anthology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), p. 70, lines 7–8. Throughout the long eighteenth century, in poetry, prose, and visual iconography, the hearth remained the symbolic centre of the home; examples of its uncritical deployment are numerous. 6. Jonathan Swift to Alexander Pope, 20 July 1731, in George Sherburn (ed.), The Correspondence of Alexander Pope Vol. III 1729–1735 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 208. 7. For a discussion of this group and the significance of that term, see Paula R. Backscheider, ‘Inverting the Image of Swift’s “Triumfeminate”’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 4.1 (2004), 37–71. 8. Sherburn (ed.), The Correspondence of Alexander Pope Vol. III, p. 87. 9. Ibid., p. 184. 10. George Colman and Bonnell Thornton (eds.), Poems from Eminent Ladies (London, 1755), p. 6. 11. Mary Chandler, The description of Bath. A poem. Humbly Inscribed To Her Royal Highness the Princess Amelia. By Mrs. Mary Chandler, 3rd edition (London 1736), p. 76. This quotation was drawn to my attention by a mention in Backscheider, ‘Inverting the Image’, note 24. 12. Colman and Thornton, Poems by Eminent Ladies, p. 1. 13. Bernard Tucker, ‘“Our Chief Poetess”: Mary Barber and Swift’s Circle Author(s)’, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 19.2 (1993), 31–44, at 32. 14. Laetitia Pilkington, Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), vol. 2, p. 674, note 283.12. 15. Adam Budd, ‘“Merit in Distress”: The Troubled Success of Mary Barber’, The Review of English Studies, 53.210 (2002), 204–27, at 221. Mary Barber has

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17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

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received limited critical attention, most frequently in reference to her connection with Swift. She is treated briefly by Margaret J.M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Paula R. Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); and Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Mary Barber, Poems on Several Occasions (London: Printed for C. Rivington, at the Bible and Crown in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1734), p. xvii. All subsequent references will be made to this edition unless otherwise noted. Page and line numbers will be included in the text. Mary Barber, A Tale being an Addition to Mr. Gay’s fables (Dublin, 1728), p. 4, Eighteen Century Collections Online. Elizabeth Thomas, ‘On Sir J— S— saying in a sarcastick Manner, My Books would make me Mad. An Ode’, in Backscheider and Ingrassia (eds.), British Women Poets, p. 848, lines 7, 22–3. ‘Written upon the Rocks at Tunbridge, on seeing the Names of several Persons written there’, Poems on Several Occasions, p. 147, line 2. Also known as Richings (and later renamed Percy Lodge), Richkings was the Duke and Duchess of Hertford’s estate in Buckinghamshire. ‘Occasion’d by reading the Memoirs of Anne of Austria, written by Madam de Motteville. Inscrib’d to the Right Honourable the Countess of Hertford’, Poems on Several Occasions, pp. 73–6. The poem and the accompanying letter originally appeared in Correspondence between Frances, Countess of Hartford (afterwards Duchess of Somerset,) and Henrietta Louisa, Countess of Pomfret, between Years 1738 and 1741, 3 vols. (London, 1805) 2:37–39. The poem was subsequently published with only the last stanza in Roger Lonsdale, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). The complete poem appears in Backscheider and Ingrassia (eds.), British Women Poets, pp. 45–7. Quotations are from that edition. Correspondence between Frances, 2.37. ‘Occasion’d by reading the Memoirs of Anne’, p. 75. Verses said to be written by Mrs Mary Barber. To a Friend Desiring an Account of her Health in Verse. Lond. May 20, 1735. The Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 7 (March 1737) p. 179, lines 7, 12–4. Judy Slagle, Joanna Baillie: A Literary Life (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), pp. 55–6. The edition of the poem quoted here is from Backscheider and Ingrassia (eds.), British Women Poets, pp. 53–61. Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (New York: Anchor Books, 2002). Ibid., p. 78. The Daily Journal, Tuesday, 12 November 1734 (London), Issue 4312.

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30. Wager was a prominent and financially successful naval officer serving as Admiral and ending his career as treasurer of the navy, which Daniel Baugh describes as ‘a handsome sinecure’. Daniel A. Baugh, ‘Wager, Sir Charles (1666–1743)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, Jan 2008), accessed 4 September 2014, www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.library.vcu.edu/view/article/28393. 31. Colley, Captives, p. 118. 32. Colley goes on to note that overseas captivity was for some ‘a potential gateway to opportunity and a fresh start for those who were disadvantaged in some way in their home society’. Ibid., p. 119. 33. Mary Collier, The Woman’s Labour: An Epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck; In answer to his Late Poem, called The Thresher’s Labour (London, 1739). 34. Colley, Captives, p. 78. 35. Anna Seward, ‘Elegy Written as from a French Lady, Whose Husband Had been Three Years Prisoner of War at Litchfield’, in Backscheider and Ingrassia (eds.), British Women Poets, pp. 455–57. All references are to this edition. During the Napoleonic Wars, thousands of captured French soldiers were held, without release, for the duration of the conflict. See Gavin Daly, ‘Napoleon’s Lost Legions: French Prisoners of War in Britain, 1803–1814’, History 89 (July 2004), 361–80. 36. Claudia Thomas Kairoff, Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), p. 111. Kairoff also discusses the degree to which Seward’s poem echoes sentiments found in her letters ‘denouncing the war’ during the same period (pp. 111–3). 37. Backscheider and Ingrassia (eds.), British Women Poets, pp. 495–507, lines 67, 123–5. 38. Ibid., pp. 489–93. For a discussion of Winscom’s poem, see Ingrassia, ‘“Calmly to heav’n submit your cause”: Jane Cave Winscom and the Bristol Bridge Riots of 1793’, Aphra Behn Online: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 1640–1830 1.1 (2011), scholarcommons.usf.edu/abo/vol1/iss1/. 39. Mary Robinson, ‘The Widow’s Home’, in Lyrical Tales (London, 1800), p. 50, line 85. 40. Verses said to be written by Mrs Mary Barber, p. 179, lines 5–6, 11.

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chapter 12

Home, homeland, and the Gothic David Punter

Nationalism – a sense of living, and lived, history – exists only insofar as it is defined by its other. Perhaps we can see this most obviously in the multitude of acts of othering which constitutes the history of place names, which are regularly conferred by the other. We might think of the process by which the area including the island of Manhattan found its name changed from ‘New Amsterdam’ to ‘New York’, the consequence of a transaction of what might be called ‘commercial colonialism’: a new imperial master required a new imperial name, reflective of the change of dominion. And these acts of naming and renaming, of ‘re-homing’, are all around and are complemented by similarly numerous attempts to rename in order to reverse namings which have come to be seen as overtly violent, as ‘de-homing’. The renaming of ‘German Southwest Africa’ as ‘Namibia’ or ‘The Gold Coast’ as ‘Ghana’, for instance: merely within Africa, this list too is long. There are a number of processes at work here in describing what might be meant by a ‘home’: colonial settlement; imperial domination; the need to impose order on what would otherwise be seen as chaos. I want to begin by moving through a number of literary examples of the connections between othering, nationalism, and the sense of a home, and then to move on specifically to the Gothic, because the Gothic, in its engagements with European national differentiations and its powerful, if sometimes displaced, accounts of national trauma, offers a particularly apt repertoire of images of the homeland of many kinds. If we were to doubt for a moment that this remains a relevant vocabulary for the expression of national identification in Britain, we would need only to look at the television news, and the continuing focus on the Palace of Westminster, that great neo-Gothic pile which still figures as the home of what is sometimes referred to as ‘the mother of Parliaments’. But I begin further back, in the 1650s, when Andrew Marvell wrote his poem ‘Bermudas’: 169

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david punter Where the remote Bermudas ride In th’ocean’s bosom unespied, From a small boat that rowed along, The listening winds received this song: ‘What should we do but sing His praise That led us through the wat’ry maze Unto an isle so long unknown, And yet far kinder than our own? ... He lands us on a grassy stage, Safe from the storms, and prelate’s rage. ... He hangs in shades the orange bright, Like golden lamps in a green night, And does in the pomegranates close Jewels more rich than Ormus shows; He makes the figs our mouths to meet, And throws the melons at our feet; But apples plants of such a price, No tree could ever bear them twice;’ ... Thus sang they in the English boat An holy and a cheerful note; And all the way, to guide their chime, With falling oars they kept the time.1

In ‘Bermudas’ Marvell presents a land of innocence; a country where nothing bad can ever happen, and man – specifically the English man – is free to enjoy the love and protection of God. This isle is ‘so long unknown’, we hear, although we might fairly ask, ‘unknown to whom’ – it would certainly have been known to the Caribs who lived there, but then as Derek Walcott so wonderfully laments across a whole series of poems, the Caribs have been long since exterminated; they have endured, or rather failed to endure, their own trauma.2 The ‘grassy stage’ is a resonant phrase, turning the island into a stage set, while the ‘prelate’s rage’ alludes to an escape from the whole traumatic legacy of European religious strife. All the fruits, the vast beneficence of nature is here, we note, free for the taking, in a specific ideological inversion of the profit-oriented mercantilism which in fact governed these early stages of empire – currency and trade as features of a benighted European past, to be superseded in this brave new world. We may now find this fantasy portrayal of island life supremely ironic, or at best naïve; the idea, for example in ‘proclaim the ambergris’, that we

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the colonizers are led to our treasure by divine will – we see here one of the origins of the still potent mythemes of Treasure Island, of Coral Island, of The Pirates of the Caribbean, so viciously exploded in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954). Trauma at home is replaced by a vision of peace abroad, and a well-deserved peace at that. The designs of God and the designs of England are in perfect harmony; and a notion of nationalism is founded on its other, the other reincorporated into what Benedict Anderson calls the ‘imagined community’ as part of a seamless whole.3 But of course such an illusory whole is never actually seamless, and we can learn much by turning to the savage disillusionment of Daniel Defoe in ‘The True-Born Englishman’ (1701), a poem written in response to pamphleteers such as Tutchin and Dennis, who participated in a xenophobically motivated debate over the fitness of a foreign king, William III, to rule in England. The verse reads: These are the Heroes who despise the Dutch, And rail at new-come Foreigners so much; Forgetting that themselves are all deriv’d From the most Scoundrel Race that ever liv’d, A horrid Crowd of Rambling Thieves and Drones, Who ransack’d Kingdoms, and dispeopled Towns: The Pict and Painted Britain, Treach’rous Scot, By Hunger, Theft, and Rapine, hither brought; Norwegian Pirates, Buccaneering Danes, Whose Red-hair’d Offspring ev’ry where remains. Who join’d with Norman-French compound the Breed From whence your True-Born Englishmen proceed.4

Whether or not Defoe’s scorn for nationalist myth is self-evident and represents a still further twist in the history of England, not as an invading but as an invaded nation, the main thrust of his argument is obvious. The so-called English, those custodians of purported national and indeed ethnic purity, are in fact a mongrel bunch, the results of centuries and generations of invasion and interbreeding. There are very complicated matters at stake here, as there so often are, in the relationship between the ‘English’ and the ‘British’. Suffice to say that one of the ingredients in the stew of the English is the ‘Painted Britain’, which assumes that the British, whoever Defoe conceived them to have been, occupy a subservient historical and cultural space to the English – although all this is grist to his mill, designed to deflate a sense of ill-founded national pride. Nationalism proceeds through processes of inversion: mixed origins are replaced by national purity; offences against other peoples are replaced by

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location within a divine plan; a discontinuous, fragmented, traumatized past is replaced by a myth of historical continuity and greatness. And thus, naturally, to that eighteenth-century poetic icon, James Thomson’s ‘Rule, Britannia!’ (1740), and here I am moving to a different definition of ‘Britishness’: the elision between ‘English’ and ‘British’ is, as I have said, endlessly complex: When Britain first, at Heaven’s command, Arose from out the azure main, This was the charter of the land, And guardian angels sung this strain: ‘Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never will be slaves’. The nations, not so bless’d as thee, Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall; While thou shalt flourish great and free, The dread and envy of them all. . . .. Still more majestic shalt thou rise, More dreadful from each foreign stroke; As the loud blast that tears the skies Serves but to root thy native oak. . . ..5

This is an embarrassing poem, but then most efflorescences of nationalism, most celebrations of the homeland, are embarrassing. However, what we notice here first is the renewed alliance between Britain and heaven, the notion of the British as the chosen race. Much is made here of slavery, but again this is a classic example of a nationalist ideological inversion. Britain is not shown as a land which lives upon the basis of overseas slave labour; rather, slavery is seen as a threat to the British way of life, and also as the automatic fate of other European nations, less blessed with democracy, and thus always prone to fall under tyrannical domination. One of the issues here again, then, is of definition of the home in terms of the other, yet this relationship is put in curious ways: ‘the dread and envy of them all’. One could spell this out in rather pedantic fashion: the dread of those rulers who seek to hold back nations on the path to democracy, and the envy of those suffering people, denied freedom, who look upon Britain’s shores and gasp with amazement at its inhabitants’ democratic privileges. But this does not matter, for ‘each foreign stroke’, each assault on the British homeland

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from the foreigner outside, renders Britain’s fabled fortitude all the stronger. The ‘loud blast that tears the skies’ serves only to reinforce a sense of national determination and pride. Indeed one might go further and say that without such outrages the British sense of national destiny might be somewhat diminished. As for the native oak: well, Britain during this period was to suffer from a variety of terrors about the diminution of its oak stocks – not motivated by a romantic privileging of nature but because of the importance of oak to shipbuilding and thus naval prowess. After all, the oak is not really native to Britain. I mean that in two ways: first, varieties of oak are ‘native’ all over the place, from Mexico to China; but second, in a more longterm ecological sense, trees are not ‘native’ to anywhere. Tree populations come and go; they wear out and are, or are not, replaced; they are indifferent to the rise and ebb of empires and nations. I have arrived by a perhaps circuitous route at the heartland of the eighteenth century. And now we encounter another dissenting voice, that of William Blake. It needs to be said that he had eccentric ideas on the history of Britain, although they were ones not without wider currency among his contemporary antiquarians and seekers after biblical and nationalist truth, some truth to hold against the problem of birth trauma – how, where, and why was ‘Britain’ born? Gothic comes, as we shall see shortly, to attempt to provide an answer to that question. This is a brief passage from Jerusalem (1804–20), which in part reflects Blake’s belief – again not unique to him – in the British as the lost tribe of Israel: What do I see! The Briton, Saxon, Roman, Norman amalgamating In my Furnaces into One Nation, the English, & taking refuge In the Loins of Albion. The Canaanite united with the fugitive Hebrew, whom she divided into Twelve & sold into Egypt, Then scatter’d the Egyptian & Hebrew to the four Winds. This sinful Nation Created in our Furnaces & Looms is Albion.6

Blake appears to be saying that nation, nationalism, the sense of home, the fictions which lie behind Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’, are all the fruits of our imagination. We can construct myths, legends which appear to bind us back to our ancestors, but these are always more or less painful matters of ‘taking refuge’, of trying to find a safe space within which we can defend ourselves from change. Or they are means of trying to prevent ourselves from experiencing the full terror of trauma. I have not so far engaged in trying to present a full description, let alone definition, of trauma, but it is vital to any discussion

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of home or the homeland. The concept of trauma may, terribly, seem all too ‘familiar’, though in saying that I can sense Sigmund Freud coming over the horizon, and remarking that the ‘familiar’ is also always the ‘unfamiliar’; this, after all, is the essence of the uncanny.7 And so we are always also unfamiliar with trauma: we must be, we have to be, because trauma is that wound, that primal break, which will resist any fantasies of the whole, uninvaded body, the fully constituted, unassailable home. It is this that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are trying to get at when – with infinite difficulty, with a plethora of necessary evasions – they try to articulate the ‘body without organs’8; it is this too that Jacques Lacan finds when he searches for the break in the perfect image, for the always already contaminated body and psyche which finds itself, and simultaneously loses itself, in the mirror stage.9 Trauma and refuge: the haunting awareness of a break in history – indeed, many breaks in history – and of a radical homelessness which results in that other, perhaps even more haunting, awareness of the need to gather like people around a camp fire, afraid of the night, alone amid the threat of the wolves. What does Blake say? He says that the nation is sinful. So far so good, in a sense; here he is according with biblical notions. He says that this nation was ‘created’, and here we need to stop and pause for a moment; for he says that this nation was ‘created’ in ‘furnaces’ and ‘looms’. If we gloss Blake’s usage of these terms from his comparable usages elsewhere, we come upon what is surely the primary foundation of a homeland in the form of a nation state, that ideological construct so beloved of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Western Europe: namely the prolonged birth-pangs of a territorialization within which there are always the suppressed screams of the dispossessed – from Catalonia to Trieste, from Kaliningrad to the agonies of Poland, from the South Tyrol to Silesia, from Serbia to Bosnia. And, of course, in a more limited but resonant trajectory, from Palestine to Israel; and thus back, we may think, to the scattering of the Egyptian and the Hebrew. None of this is simple, and Blake places his own mark upon it; but neither is it recherché if we look at the evolution of the Gothic in the eighteenth century. And by Gothic I do not mean the Gothic novel, although I will come on to that; I mean the increasingly vast freight borne in Britain by a notion of the Gothic as an aesthetic, as a vernacular, thus as an essential – perhaps as the essential – element in nation-building and the establishment of a history of the homeland. Or perhaps as the essential element in building an imaginary alliance of nations: for what the Gothic signifies in the later eighteenth century is a strong set of definitions

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against the other. We can pin these down quite precisely. Gothic signifies northern Europe versus southern Europe. Gothic signifies Protestantism versus Roman Catholicism. Gothic signifies democracy versus tyranny. Gothic signifies an unruptured continuity with the past versus – what? Here is where matters become more complicated, because the Gothic inflection in northern European culture in these decades becomes inextricably linked with a set of questions about history: about who has command and control of history, about which ancestral pedigree (and it is no accident that ancestral pedigrees are the fundamental stuff of Gothic fiction) can counter the other; or outlast it; or, in the end, triumph over it, for the context of the Gothic, as we normally understand it, is within a series of triumphs and losses, a set of battles of various kinds, in which few hostages are taken. What is antiquity? What acts in the past justify, or fail to justify, the present? At any rate, Gothic is seen in the eighteenth century to have no uncontested origin; here is the uncanny, the paradox. While Gothic claims an ultimate originality, it betrays an awareness of its own febrile state – continually remade, reinvented. Even the hard-core antiquarians knew something of this, yet the links between Gothic, freedom, and democracy remain strong. Here is, to take one example among many, William Blackstone in his Commentaries (1765–69) describing the British constitution: an old Gothic castle, erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern inhabitant. The moated ramparts, the embattled towers and the trophied halls, are magnificent and venerable, but useless and therefore neglected. The inferior apartments, now accommodated to daily use, are cheerful and commodious, though their approaches may be winding and difficult.10

A kind of home, indeed, but under conditions of Gothic modernity, one might say: as Carol Margaret Davison adds in her own commentary on this passage, ‘the Teutonic people were frequently touted as the forefathers of Britons and portrayed as advocates of political liberty who stalwartly opposed tyranny and privilege until they fell under the yoke of priests and kings’.11 Tom Duggett, in his Gothic Romanticism: Architecture, Politics and Literary Form (2010), underlines some similar points; he quotes, for example, a 1739 journal article which alludes to the ‘old Gothick Constitution’: Methinks there was something respectable in those old hospitable Gothick halls, hung round with the Helmets, Breast-Plates, and Swords of our

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david punter Ancestors; I entered them with a Constitutional Sort of Reverence and look’d upon those arms with Gratitude, as the Terror of former Ministers and the Check of Kings. Nay, I even imagin’d that I here saw some of those good Swords that had procur’d the Confirmation of Magna Charta, and humbled Spencers and Gavestons. . .. Our old Gothick Constitution had a noble strength and Simplicity in it.12

These examples point towards a broadly encompassing national myth that incorporates the rough edges of British life, making use of the homely and the vernacular (for this was almost the moment at which the value of Shakespeare was being discovered) and valorising a certain untutored lack of deference. All these were implicit in the English constitution, although one might pause at this moment and wonder exactly what this word ‘constitution’ is doing at this point – is it referring to a legal entity or to a certain disposition, or predisposition? Perhaps, if we want to continue to suppose, nationalism is a set of clothes in which to dress the wounded nakedness of trauma. Hence, of course, the clothes themselves, the helmets, swords, and breastplates: all elements in the concealment of the vulnerable self, all participants in the battles which (or so the nation imagines) are necessary in order to keep it in being. And what Gothic is good at, so the legends have told for hundreds of years, is fighting; we know little of the Goths as tribes, but we are able to make them over into a generalized symbol of tribalism. And tribalism is another name for that invention of modernity, the nation state. The processes by which these national myths of the Gothic mutated into the specific literary form we know as the Gothic novel are complex, and have been traced by many critics13; I shall not attempt to do those processes justice here. But we may look at three examples, which I think address the problems of nationalism and trauma – the question of what we might call home, in the specific historical conjuncture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – in three different ways. The opening pages of Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1796) is indicative of the Gothic novel’s dealings with England’s other, the European world so long regarded as subjected to tyranny and, by all accounts, subjected to not a modification but an intensification of this tyranny by the events surrounding the French Revolution. The place is displaced, of course, as is conventional in Gothic: from France to Italy, the homeland of Catholic superstition; and there is temporal displacement too, for the novel opens in the year 1764, when ‘some English travellers. . . during one of their excursions in the environs of Naples, happened to stop before the portico of the Santa Maria del Pianto’. Within the church, they see a mysterious figure, and enquire of

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a friar who he is and what he is doing there. The following conversation ensues. The friar simply says, ‘He is an assassin’: ‘An assassin!’ exclaimed one of the Englishmen; ‘an assassin and at liberty?’ An Italian gentleman, who was of the party, smiled at the astonishment of his friend. ‘He has sought sanctuary here’, replied the friar; ‘within these walls he may not be hurt’. ‘Do your altars, then, protect the murderer?’ said the Englishman. ‘He could find shelter no where else’, answered the friar meekly. ‘This is astonishing!’ said the Englishman; ‘of what avail are your laws, if the most atrocious criminal may thus find shelter from them?’14

This may, indeed, be the crucial Gothic question: are there codes, superstitions, which may supersede and overcome the rule of law? The portrayal is of a polity which pays no allegiance to the regularity of control which characterizes the force of the Gothic constitution. In fact, one might say that one way of depicting the Gothic of the later 1790s is as a struggle between two descriptions or, perhaps better, appropriations of antiquity in the face of a perceived yet evaded challenge from modernity. The Gothic of northern Europe stands for organic growth, what Blake referred to when he called Gothic ‘Living Form’15; the terrors of southern Europe stem from a perversion of that organicism, a set of impositions of a false order which condemn the inhabitants of those countries to repression and tyranny. Yet both, at least, serve to deflect attention from the real threat. For it is arguable that the threat in classic Gothic fiction does not really arise from Catholicism and southern European feudalism, as we can see clearly in The Italian; for even the criminal monk Schedoni is treated with a certain respect and, indeed, a degree of psychological acumen. As an epigraph to Chapter X of Volume II, Radcliffe uses some lines from Milton: But their way Lies through the perplexed paths of this drear wood, The nodding horror of whose shady brows Threats the forlorn and wandering passenger.16

Although this epigraph has an apparently ready application to the plight of the heroine Ellena, in fact in the bulk of the chapter our readerly attention is focused on Schedoni, and it is unclear who exactly is ‘perplexed’ or frightened by whom or what. The attitude of the English towards the other is complex here: Schedoni is a bad man, of that there is no doubt, but he is also a man with interiority. The real enemy might be quite other, it might

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be the threat of the reduction of psychological riches to the pasteboard and flat lines readily ascribable to the radicals and supposed reductionists of the Revolution, the supposed abolition of home and all it stand for at the hands of those who claim to have no home, to owe allegiance to no nation. Thus, perhaps, one of the ideological roots of Radcliffe’s famed use of the ‘explained supernatural’ could be taken to show that the purported horrors of superstition are not so horrible after all, and that in the battle being fought across Europe it is possible to make common cause with other worshippers of antiquity, for they after all – and perhaps above all – at least have ‘homes’ to call their own. If we turn now to Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1794), we see the other side of the coin, and a view of southern Europe which positions England and the English as decisively superior to the benighted south. That England is to be portrayed as the natural ‘home’ of purity of motive, and genuineness of sanctity – however ironically we may think the great iconoclast Lewis eventually deals with these issues – is established in the very first paragraph: Scarcely had the abbey-bell tolled for five minutes, and already was the church of the Capuchins thronged with auditors. Do not encourage the idea, that the crowd was assembled either from motives of piety or thirst of information. But very few were influenced by those reasons; and in a city where superstition reigns with such despotic sway as in Madrid, to seek for true devotion would be a fruitless attempt.17

And so the catalogue of baseness continues, in a perfect avatar of Edward Said’s arguments about orientalism18: southern Europeans are lacking in piety; they have no interest in genuine knowledge; they are entirely under the sway of Papish superstition; they are liars and self-deceivers; they are consumed by fashion, which ill-conceals more blameworthy lusts; they are easy prey to rhetoric; they are idle and have no real purposes in life. It would be tedious to draw out the obvious implication that the English are none of these things, but are instead the embodiment of all the great home values of virtue and honesty. One seemingly logical response to the sway of despotism and religious domination would be to applaud those political events which, at least in one country, appeared to manage to sweep away these ancient structures of superstition; but this is not at all the drift of Lewis, or indeed of Gothic fiction in general. On the contrary, the argument is bent to quite another use, namely to persuade us that a nation which has fallen prey to these forces of evil is in fact prone to any excess; and thus an excess of reason is as

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blameworthy as an excess of superstition. Only within the capacious confines of an ancient, organic constitution can a kind of balance be really guaranteed as the progenitor of freedom, and a sense of homeland be guaranteed; and that constitution, as we have seen, was regarded as ‘Gothic’ to its core. I am assuming here that these Gothic fictions respond to the French Revolution. I am not seeking to prove it, for such things cannot be proved, but it would make no more sense to suppose that the Revolution was not within the penumbra of these books than it would to suppose that books within the Second World War were not concerned, at least in some sense, with that war. I can also make the ambiguous claim to have on my side the Marquis de Sade, he was in a position to know: to put it simply, violent, traumatic upheaval begets fictional violence. It also begets a repertoire of ideological attempts to paper over the cracks: the world and the prospect of an enduring home within it have been torn apart, but this must not be allowed or admitted, and therefore alternative versions of history must be drawn up, justifications must be provided. But this is, naturally, a task fraught with difficulty. It is fraught with difficulty in general; but it is also fraught with difficulty for Britain in particular during these turbulent years when a threat of imitative rebellion (discord on the home front) had to be countered with increasingly harsh laws which precisely served to limit freedom in the name of guaranteeing it. What is also interesting here, from a more psychological angle, is the question of birth trauma. It could be argued that the whole myth of the Gothic polity emerged in the first place as a massive unconscious attempt to set aside the whole issue: England, or Britain, was never ‘born’ (remember Defoe’s ‘true-born Englishman’), it arose, whatever it was – perhaps from the waves; perhaps it came into being ready-formed, a version of a myth of parthenogenesis, not so dissimilar in itself from the Ur-myth of Christianity to which it has so successfully assimilated its repertoire of national icons (despite continuing anxieties about the ethnicity of Saint George). But what if such a myth were reversed, and it were suggested that for this very reason the British had never had the chance to decide their destiny, had never been granted or taken the opportunity to take their future into their hands, as the French had? Then what had previously looked like courage in the face of an adverse world (this is the British myth – we win when the odds are against us) comes to look more like cowardice and evasion, a refusal to look fully at the facts of life. What might have looked like a revulsion towards the European other might look more like envy.

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Was the Gothic novel so popular because it encouraged anti-Catholic selfrighteousness, or perhaps, more simply, because people enjoyed reading about those other ‘freedoms’ – even if they included freedoms to murder, rape, and pillage – and might begin to suspect that they might enjoy actually practising those freedoms rather more than the ones they – apparently, but remember this is before the advent of any vestige of real democracy in England – enjoyed ‘at home’? No wonder Jane Austen and William Wordsworth were disgusted – they had different versions of the national myth to cling to, but recognized that, as part of the law of unintended consequences in the aftermath of the French Revolution, they were under threat. Certainly it appears possible that this is what, in coded form, C.R. Maturin, the third of the great original Gothic novelists, appears to be alluding in his brief Preface to that supremely violent, perhaps even psychopathic, book Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). He is defending himself against an accusation that he makes too much of ‘the persecutions of convents, and the terrors of the Inquisition’: I defended myself, by trying to point out to my friend, that I had made the misery of conventual life depend less on the startling adventures one meets with in romances, than on that irritating series of petty torments which constitutes the misery of life in general, and which, amid the tideless stagnation of monastic existence, solitude gives its inmates leisure to invent, and power combined with malignity, the full disposition to practise.19

Maturin continues, with a wonderful and surprisingly self-deprecating irony, to hope that ‘this defence will operate more on the conviction of the Reader, than it did on that of my friend’; but unfortunately, I am not sure that it does. For the descriptions in Melmoth of torture, pain, and endless suffering are, of necessity, memorable and vigorous; but so are the scenes of the purported horrors of conventional life. But when we think of Maturin’s actual life situation, as best we can discern it, it does indeed appear to have been precisely ‘an irritating series of petty torments’ – preaching to an almost non-existent Protestant congregation, isolated within predominantly Catholic communities, passed over for preferment, exiled from the metropolis, lost to all sense of home. All the excitement, all the vigour, seemed to be elsewhere; it was no fun being part of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy; you were constantly harassed and beleaguered, the apparent grandeur of your theology fell into stony ground; Melmoth is a terrible record of mutually echoed scorn. And so, another ideological reversal: the site of envy becomes the site of hate.

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Perhaps I should be clear about something at this point: I have used the word ‘ideology’ several times, and it is a much misunderstood word; or, to put it more clearly, it is a word which has been much misused and degraded – in my view, for politically deliberate reasons. When I use it, I mean it in the strict – and I believe correct – Marxist sense, namely, as a set of false explanations set up in order to conceal the true state of affairs in the name of a formation of economic and political domination. I think that is clear and precise. With Maturin, obviously, we are in the presence of a formation which is, to use another Marxist term now rarely used in its original meaning, over-determined. Crucially, it is over-determined by the whole Irish dimension to Maturin’s Gothic fiction; but much as I wish I did, I do not have space here to go into the complex dimensions of the Gothic offered by those ‘othered’ homelands of Ireland, Scotland, and indeed Wales, although I have tried to address these matters in various published essays.20 Instead I will conclude with a brief quotation from Freud’s The Future of an Illusion (1927): The narcissistic satisfaction provided by [a national culture] can be shared in not only by the favoured classes, which enjoy the benefits of the culture, but also by the suppressed ones, since the right to despise the people outside it compensates them for the wrongs they suffer within their own unit. No doubt one is a wretched plebeian, harassed by debts and military service; but, to make up for it, one is a Roman citizen.21

As (in my view) so frequently, Freud puts his finger on it, albeit in a multitude of ways. The connection with nationalism is all too obvious; but there are further implications for the notions of home and the homeland. If the development of the ‘homeland’ is based within trauma, then trauma is also that which is suppressed by narcissism: the fantasy of a whole, undivided culture arises in order to bury the otherwise haunting memory of division, fragmentation. Every nation is engaged in a struggle, sometimes violent, sometimes pacific, sometimes vestigial, but always present, to bury its own past. Of course, even to say this is to posit a fake longevity in terms of that recent construct, the nation state; but here I am using the term ‘nation’, I hope forgivably, as a shorthand for a plethora of formations which also includes tribal and local units, different versions of the home. Gothic arose as a fantasy construct which could be used to defend against specific perceived othernesses (although it might be that we could usefully replace the whole term ‘nation’ here with a different term, such as,

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for example ‘culture’) and, as I have tried to indicate throughout, simultaneously to construct those othernesses in order to permit the evolution of a set of defensive devices to protect the home (and, although I have had no space to mention this, we can find this same process going on in German and some Scandinavian national self-constructions as vibrantly as in the construction of the nationhood of Britain). I had not thought when I set out to write this paper that I would be claiming that every revolution around the world sets up inevitable resonances for the notions of home and the homeland; I had been expecting to draw upon and develop a very limited, and in any case well-accepted, set of arguments that the French Revolution, in large part because of the proximity and old enmities between England and France, exerted a specific set of effects on the understanding of the English nation. But now I am not sure. Perhaps every revolution, however far-flung, produces pressure on the stability of the body politic, just as every birth places in danger the power of the maternal body, the originary home – dare we mention here again, in the British context, the possibility of a threat to the ‘mother of parliaments’. And in any case, every revolution is now our own: we see it, we hear it, it is distributed through the increasingly instantaneous media every night. That threat, however, may come from within or from without; it may figure symbolically as a revolt of one’s own body, modelled on disease or illness, or it may arise in the form of the classic Freudian revolt of the ungrateful sons against the father whose time has come (in these myths, gender gets confused). But in whatever form it arises, it will surely have to do with the possibility of a secure home, and thus with the notion of nationalism as a cover story. Relevantly, psychoanalysis now speaks a story about psychosis which has become radically different from the story it offered some decades ago. The psychoses are now regarded not as effects in their own right but as defence systems, because what would threaten if those defence systems – those grotesque but functional processes of explanation – were to break down would be something far worse: it would be the complete disintegration of the self and its housing, its carapace, its home, as the memory of trauma seeped back in to destabilize the huge efforts of individual and cultural subjectivity to keep on going despite the continual menace to integrity. Hence the vast efforts which go into nationalism; and the even vaster efforts which we seem to put in to destroying that which is our own mirror image, our sembable, our frère: the other.

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Notes 1. Andrew Marvell, ‘Bermudas’, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al., 8th edn, 2 vols. (New York: Norton, 2006), vol. I, pp. 1698–9. 2. See Derek Walcott, ‘The Swamp’, in Collected Poems 1948–1984 (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), pp. 59–60. 3. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London: Verso, 2006). 4. Daniel Defoe, ‘The True-Born Englishman’, in Eighteenth-Century Poetry: an Anthology, ed. W.J. Turner (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), pp. 2–3. 5. James Thomson, ‘Rule, Britannia!’, in James Thomson, Poetical Works (Edinburgh, n.d.), p. 492. 6. William Blake, Jerusalem, in Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1967), p. 739. 7. See Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, eds. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–74), vol. VII, pp. 217–52. 8. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988). 9. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). 10. Carol Margaret Davison, Gothic Literature 1764–1824 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), p. 26, quoting William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Clark, NJ: The Lawbook Exchange, 2003), p. 267. 11. Davison, Gothic Literature, p. 26. 12. Tom Duggett, Gothic Romanticism: Architecture, Politics and Literary Form (London: Palgrave, 2010), p. 33. 13. See, e.g., Fiona Robertson, Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 14. Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, ed. Frederick Garber (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 1–2. 15. See Blake, ‘On Virgil’ (c. 1820), in ed. Keynes, Complete Writings, p. 778. 16. Radcliffe, The Italian, p. 241. 17. Matthew Lewis, The Monk, ed. Christopher MacLachlan (London: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 11 18. See Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). 19. C.R. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, ed. Douglas Grant (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 5. 20. See David Punter, e.g., ‘Scottish and Irish Gothic’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 105–23. 21. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, in Standard Edition, vol. XXI, p. 13

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part iii

Revolution in France, reaction in Britain

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chapter 13

Contesting the homeland: Burke and Wollstonecraft Daniel I. O’Neill

Introduction Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft are generally regarded as the leading figures in the emergence of modern conservatism and feminism, respectively. The context for the rise of these political ideologies was, in turn, Burke and Wollstonecraft’s clash over the meaning of the foundational event of late political modernity, the French Revolution. As part of this debate, both thinkers insisted that to understand events in France properly one had to simultaneously juxtapose them against an appropriate understanding of Britain’s political and theoretical significance. To achieve this, they each situated Britain within the broader discursive framework of their competing understandings of history as a civilizing process, and maintained that what Britain could be held to signify within such a framework was very different. In what follows I first sketch Burke and Wollstonecraft’s rival narratives of history. Following this, I turn to how each thinker drew on these narratives to paint very different pictures of the British homeland’s theoretical significance. By grappling simultaneously with Burke and Wollstonecraft’s duelling conceptions of the British homeland we can, I argue, comprehend more fully their competing interpretations of the French Revolution, and thus better understand the rise of conservatism and feminism. Edmund Burke believed that European civilization was built on two cornerstones – organized religion and the landed aristocracy – institutionalized in the church and the nobility.1 Together, these institutions served as the material embodiments of his aesthetic principles of the ‘sublime’ and the ‘beautiful’, rooted in fear and love, respectively. In making this claim, Burke synthesized his early philosophical and historical work with the historiographical narrative of the Scottish Enlightenment (which imagined progress from ‘savagery’, through ‘barbarism’, to ‘civilization’ across four stages of economic development) to articulate a unique understanding of the civilizing process. On Burke’s view, the nobility and the church jointly 187

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inculcated what he referred to as the requisite degree of ‘habitual social discipline’ necessary for ‘a people’ proper to emerge and be governed by a ‘natural aristocracy’, sitting atop an ordered hierarchy of social ranks in which the masses appropriately subordinated themselves to the wiser, wealthier, and more cultivated. For Burke, the nobility did this by helping the masses to love their superiors, while the church led them to fear their betters. Only where such a system flourished did Burke recognize ‘civilization’, as opposed to ‘savagery’, or ‘barbarism’. Given this understanding of history, for Burke the French Revolution represented the literal end of Western civilization. The revolutionaries systematically destroyed the church and the nobility, the two institutions he saw as chiefly responsible for driving the European civilizing process. Further, on Burke’s view the leaders of the French Revolution deliberately replaced these two pillars of civilization with mutually reinforcing egalitarian political institutions and social and cultural practices that encompassed both the public and private spheres, in an attempt to introduce an entirely new system of democratic manners precisely to accommodate and support their new scheme of democratic politics. Burke consequently cast the phenomenon of thoroughgoing democratization, which he saw at the heart of French Revolution, as synonymous with savagery itself. Conversely, Mary Wollstonecraft transformed Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy and historiography in an effort to defend the French Revolution as the first step towards thoroughgoing democracy and true civilization. To do so, Wollstonecraft engaged in a sustained critique of Scottish Enlightenment moral theory, particularly the central theoretical role the Scots had allocated to women in their effort to define and defend the emerging eighteenth-century ‘culture of sensibility’. In doing so, Wollstonecraft came to deny the Scots’ assumption about the ‘naturalness’ of the moral sentiments and the social manners derived from them. In particular, she rejected the historical role that the Scots saw women playing based on their putatively natural aptitude for ‘sensibility’. In her direct reply to Burke in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Wollstonecraft attempted to dismantle Burke’s moral theory, as well as the historical arguments he had used to justify it, which she recognized as relying heavily on a defence of the church and the nobility. To do so, she linked the Reflections to the moral theory of Burke’s earlier Philosophical Enquiry in the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757/1759), which she correctly understood as tightly linked to Scottish arguments defending the moral intuitionism of sympathy, ‘common sense’, and sensibility. Her critique of Burke’s Enquiry stressed instead the socially

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constructed nature of both morals and manners. Wollstonecraft thus rejected Burke’s conviction that social, political, sexual, and other inequalities were part of the natural order of things, and argued instead that all such hierarchies were artificial and had to be razed and reconstructed on the basis of democratic equality. Subsequently, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she focused her attention specifically on how the old European system of manners had affected women, and urged a democratic ‘revolution in female manners’. Far from arguing simply for an extension of standard liberal rights to women, Wollstonecraft ultimately demanded the thorough democratization of political, economic, social, and gender relations. This is an argument that she would stick by even in the wake of the Terror, as is evident from her Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe (1794). In that text, Wollstonecraft explained the Revolution’s violent turn as the predictable outcome of the extraordinary inequality that prevailed in France and throughout Europe, which she saw as fatal to the development of individual character and moral and civic virtue. For Wollstonecraft, therefore, the spread of democratic equality was synonymous with the advance of civilization, and the French Revolution remained the great harbinger of this transformation. Within this framework of Burke and Wollstonecraft’s deeply divergent conceptions of the French Revolution’s place within history understood as a civilizing process, we can also discern two radically different interpretations of the British homeland, interpretations which would prove vital to their attempts to grapple with what was happening in France. It is to these positions that I now turn.

Burke on Britain Burke, of course, was an Irishman who voluntarily transplanted himself to English soil and subsequently had a very long and highly successful career in the British (not the Irish) Parliament. Despite this fact, recent revisionist arguments have sought to somehow reconfigure Burke as some sort of crypto-Irish nationalist openly hostile to the British Empire.2 Yet Burke was nothing of the sort. Indeed, perhaps the most succinct encapsulation of Burke’s own understanding of the appropriate relationship between Britain (especially England) and Ireland comes from a letter he wrote late in life to John Keogh, the head of the Irish Catholic Committee, in 1796. When Keogh described Burke’s long battle to eliminate the Penal

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Laws against Catholics in Ireland as evidence of his being a ‘true Irishman’, Burke responded: You do me Justice in saying in your Letter of July, that I am a ‘true Irishman’. Considering as I do England as my Country, of long habit, of long obligation and of establishment, and that my primary duties are here. I cannot conceive how a Man can be a genuine Englishman without being at the same time a true Irishman, tho’ fortune should have made his birth on this side of the Water. I think the same Sentiments ought to be reciprocal on the part of Ireland, and if possible with much stronger reason. Ireland cannot be separated one moment from England without losing every source of her present prosperity, and even every hope of her future.3

For Burke, to be a true Irishman meant to be a true Englishman, and vice versa. These were certainly not the sentiments of Theobald Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen, the first true Irish nationalists. But Burke not only believed that the United Irishmen were completely wrong to blame England for Ireland’s woes, he detested their own self-proclaimed intellectual wellspring, who was none other than Burke’s own sworn enemy, Thomas Paine.4 Indeed, Burke believed that the British Empire had to be supported and preserved above all other considerations, for the good of both countries, but especially Ireland. He aimed to do this from a Parliamentary seat in England, the place he called ‘my Country’. But what made Britain in general and England in particular so worthy of allegiance, on Burke’s view? As set forth in the Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke insisted that British history comprised an ensemble of prescriptive institutions, laws, and manners (or modes of social interaction) that had been appropriately passed down through the generations as a kind of precious ancestral gift. Against Richard Price’s and other radicals’ claims about British history giving the people a right to elect kings, remove them from power for misconduct, and frame a government for themselves, Burke famously fulminated that British history established no such rights. Rather, he declared ‘that from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right, it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity’,5 one in which Price’s principles played no part. British history manifested ‘nature’, or ‘wisdom without reflection’, and its institutions were passed down like a genetic inheritance; it was a polity in ‘the image of a relation in blood’ overseen by Burke’s memorable ‘canonized forefathers’ of yesteryear (W&S, pp. 84–5). British history therefore expressed a kind of second nature that embodied the wisdom

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of the species; its institutions and manners functioned as a network of benign prejudices that helped guide Britain safely along the path of the present, illuminated by the lantern of the past (W&S, p. 138). On this score, Burke valorized England in particular because of its people’s steadfast adherence to prescription, prejudice, and the natural order of things. Because this was so, England, unlike France, proved capable of resisting the tidal pull of radical change. If the French looked rightly at their neighbour across the Channel, beyond Richard Price and the half dozen grasshoppers whom Burke declares were merely ‘the little shriveled, meager, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour’, they would see the ‘thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak’, silently chewing their cud, impassive and immovable from their inheritance. He tells his French correspondent Depont: Thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of our [that is to say, the English, not the Irish] national character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers. We have not (as I Conceive) lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century; nor as yet have we subtilized ourselves into savages. We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire, Helvetius has made no progress amongst us. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers. . .. In England we have not yet been completely emboweled of our natural entrails. (W&S, p. 137)

As J.G.A. Pocock showed long ago, a number of these well-known arguments link Burke to the English common-law tradition, especially as it was expressed in the writings of such seventeenth-century jurists as John Davies, Edward Coke, and Matthew Hale.6 However, subsequently – and I think accurately – Pocock has argued that there is in fact a much deeper argument at work in Burke’s Reflections than the simple appropriation of pre-existing arguments derived from the common law. Viewed from this angle, in his classic text Burke effectively ‘detached himself’ from the common-law mind because, on Pocock’s account, ‘if there is a nostalgia in Burke, it is for a medieval order in which popular manners were under clerical and chivalric direction’.7 The development in Pocock’s position provides the leaping-off point for my own interpretation of Burke’s thought. Indeed, the last sentence in the previous quotation from Burke marks the very great extent to which, for him, Britain was a polity expressive of the hierarchies supposedly inherent in all natural phenomena. Moreover, Burke believed that in Britain – again unlike in France with the coming of the Revolution – this rich tapestry of

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natural ranks was guaranteed by the twin pillars of the civilizing process, the church and the nobility. It is worth considering Burke’s arguments about the role played by both institutions in British history in some detail, both because they are crucial for understanding not only his views on the Revolution, but also Mary Wollstonecraft’s. Burke argued that in England, ‘We know, and what is better we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good and all comfort.’ Because this was so, Burke declared that there was no belief that ‘ninety-nine in an hundred of the people of England would not prefer to impiety’. Burke consequently devoted a great deal of time to a discussion of ‘our church establishment, which is the first of our prejudices’ (W&S, pp. 141–2), an institution he understood as vital for creating the necessary degree of ‘habitual social discipline’ required for a people to flourish. In the Reflections, Burke argues that an official church effectively ‘consecrated the commonwealth’, by making sure that the state was ‘infused’ with ‘such sublime principles’ as exert a ‘wholesome awe upon free citizens; because, in order to secure their freedom, they must enjoy some determinant portion of power’ (W&S, p. 143). Burke maintained that reverential awe towards political representatives was especially important in governments given to popular elections, since the share of political responsibility redounding to any single individual was limited in such systems. This meant that, ‘A Perfect democracy is therefore the most shameless thing in the world. As it is the most shameless, it is also the most fearless’ (W&S, p. 144). By learning to treat the state’s representatives as if they were sanctified by God, the ultimate in sublime patriarchal power and therefore the supremely fearsome being, the otherwise ‘swinish multitude’ could exhibit an appropriately tempered and chastened liberty, whereby they would willingly subordinate themselves to the natural aristocracy, and gingerly ‘approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude’ (W&S, pp. 130, 146). Only when the common people were purged through fear by the church could they treat the electoral process with the gravity it deserved, according to Burke: ‘When the people have emptied themselves of all the lust of selfish will, which without religion it is utterly impossible they ever should. . . in their nomination to office, they will not appoint to the exercise of authority, as to a pitiful job, but as to an holy function’ (W&S, p. 145). For these reasons, Burke tells Depont in the Reflections, ‘the majority of the people of England, far from thinking a religious, national establishment unlawful, hardly think it lawful to be without one. . .. Church and state are ideas inseparable in their minds’ (W&S, p. 149).

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Simultaneously, Burke argues, the established church in Britain played an important role in educating and training the members of that other great civilizing institution, the nobility. ‘Our [British] education is in a manner wholly in the hands of ecclesiastics, and in all stages from infancy to manhood.’ This was true even when the nobility went on their Grand Tour of the continent: ‘three-fourths of those who go abroad with our young nobility are ecclesiastics’, who accompany them as ‘friends and companions of a graver character’. In this way, Burke argues, ‘we conceive that we attach our gentlemen to the church; and we liberalize the church by an intercourse with the leading characters of the country’ (W&S, pp. 149–50). Conversely, Burke describes the French as under the sway of ‘a cabal, calling itself philosophic’ (W&S, p. 140), who were busy nationalizing the Catholic Church’s lands in order to back their new paper currency (the assignats), while effectively abolishing the monasteries with the passage of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. The French likewise obliterated the legal basis for the aristocracy by doing away with formal titles of nobility on the night of 4 August 1789, initiating a frontal assault on the French nobility. Of course, Burke’s most oft-quoted passages from the Reflections concern the nobility, especially the plight of Marie Antoinette. This episode was so crucial for Burke because he considered female aristocrats the sentient embodiments of his principle of beauty. As such, these chivalric icons made their country lovable by making it lovely, as he memorably quipped. Put differently, the beauty of the female portion of the aristocracy made them lovable to the lower orders, thus creating a bond of voluntary inequality and servitude by creating the affectionate portion of habitual social discipline that balanced the sublime principle of religion. Interestingly, however, there is no real discussion of England’s female aristocracy to be found in Burke’s work. Unlike his discussion of religion, he does not provide a counter-narrative juxtaposed against the treatment of Marie Antoinette at the revolutionaries’ hands, one that would valorize the fashion in which the English treat the functional equivalent of their Maries. Instead, in his writings on the French Revolution Burke’s discussion of the nobility focuses on men; particularly those who comprise the broader ‘natural aristocracy’ which he believed should appropriately govern any nation properly called ‘a people’. When the church the (sublime) and the female nobility (the beautiful) act in concert, these men could step forward and exert their rightful place as the political representatives governing

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society: ‘To enable men to act with the weight and character of a people’, Burke writes in An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, they must be in that state of habitual social discipline in which the wiser, the more expert, and the more opulent conduct, and by conducting enlighten and protect the weaker, the less knowing, and the less provided with the goods of fortune. When the multitude are not under this discipline, they can scarcely be said to be in civil society.

In fact, Burke declares, ‘when you separate the common sort of men from their proper chieftains, so as to form them into an adverse army—I no longer know that venerable object called the people in such a disbanded race of deserters and vagabonds’.8 On this score, Britain was the antipode to revolutionary France. Burke declared that, ‘the British House of Commons’ was in fact ‘filled with everything illustrious in rank, in descent, in hereditary and acquired opulence, in cultivated talents, in military, civil, naval, and politic distinction, that the country can afford’ (W&S, p. 95). In fact, Burke notes that while the House of Lords was ‘wholly composed of hereditary property and hereditary distinction’, it was also true that, ‘The House of Commons too, though not necessarily, yet in fact, is always so composed in the far greater part.’ This was because ‘the great masses’ of landed property and wealth ‘which excite envy and tempt rapacity, must be put out of the possibility of danger’ by giving their owners a degree of political power ‘out of all proportion, predominant in the representation’ of Parliament (W&S, p. 102). Only in this way, Burke insisted, could the great inequalities in landed property be protected from the predatory speculators in financial capital and the lower orders alike. In their endeavour to transform this state of affairs, Burke declares that the French levellers never managed to equalize human beings, but merely to ‘pervert the natural order of things’. They put petty clergy and petty lawyers into the National Assembly, and later enfranchised and empowered ‘artificers and clowns, and money-jobbers, usurers, and Jews’ (W&S, p. 100). Unlike Britain, in France the natural aristocracy was being further overrun by ‘shameless women of the lowest condition, by keepers of hotels, taverns, and brothels, by pert apprentices, by clerks, shop boys, hairdressers, fiddlers, and dancers on the stage’ (W&S, p. 297). The politicization of the first of these groups – the ‘shameless women’ – was particularly troubling to Burke, because such women threatened to make a ‘farce of deliberation’ and to transform the ‘sacred institute’ of a representative national body into a ‘profane burlesque’ and an ‘abominable perversion’

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(W&S, p. 119). On Burke’s view, France, unlike Britain, was thus a political world in which ‘the miserable sheep have broken the fold, and have got themselves loose, not from the restraint, but from the protection of all the principles of natural authority, and legitimate subordination’ (W&S, p. 300).

Wollstonecraft on Britain In A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Wollstonecraft defended the French Revolution, in part, by constructing a very different image of Britain to counter Burke’s own. In doing so, she challenged Burke’s theory of history as a civilizing process, as well as his defence of the church and the aristocracy as the institutions supposedly guaranteeing that process, all by reference to the specifically British examples Burke adduced. With respect to the first of these moves, Wollstonecraft turned to David Hume’s History of England to discuss ‘the infancy’ of British history, during the reigns of Edward III and Richard II in the fourteenth century. She describes this period as marked by the lawless power of ambitious kings in violent conflict with barbarous insurgents and equally corrupt Parliaments and clergy, while the poor were entirely at the mercy of the lords whose land they worked. Looking still further back in history, she asks Burke directly: ‘Are these the venerable pillars of our constitution? And is Magna Charta to rest for its chief support on a former grant, which reverts to another, till chaos become the base of the mighty structure—or we cannot tell what?’ Comparing the historical record of this period with the world Burke celebrated, Wollstonecraft asks him pointedly: ‘Where was the dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century?’ She finds it utterly lacking, declaring that ‘the boasted virtues of that century all bear the stamp of stupid pride and headstrong barbarism’.9 Wollstonecraft thus flatly rejects Burke’s attempt to linguistically transform the term ‘prejudice’ into a term of praise, and quips that the British ‘constitution, if such an heterogeneous mass deserve that name, was settled in the dark days of ignorance, when the minds of men were shackled by the grossest prejudice and most immoral superstition’ (VRM, p. 11). Turning specifically to Burke’s defence of the fusion of church and state via the ‘consecration’ the former provided for the behaviour of the latter, based on the principle of the sublime, Wollstonecraft was merciless. She begins by thoroughly reconfiguring Burke’s linkage of sublimity with power and terror, those features of God the Father that made him the supremely fearsome and thus supremely sublime male figure. She retorts:

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daniel i. o’neill I FEAR God. I bend with awful reverence when I enquire on what my fear is built.—I fear that sublime power, whose motive for creating me must have been wise and good; and I submit to the moral laws which my reason deduces from this view of my dependence on him.—It is not his power that I fear—it is not to an arbitrary will, but to unerring reason I submit. (VRM, p. 34)

In this way, Wollstonecraft rhetorically transfigures the source of the sublime from affect to reason, and from omnipotence to omniscience; thereby transforming the principle into an argument on behalf of critical rationality and individual self-respect. She tells Burke: ‘This fear of God makes me reverence myself. . .. I do not trouble myself, therefore, to enquire whether this is the fear the people of England feel:—and, if it be natural to include all the modifications you have annexed—it is not’ (VRM, p. 34). Having transformed Burke’s understanding of the deity, Wollstonecraft goes on to focus on the supposedly solemn act whereby the church ‘consecrated’ or made holy the state by bestowing divine blessings on its representatives, thus creating the necessary level of fear and awe in their electors. Here, she begins by arguing that the Anglican Church in eighteenth-century England was thoroughly corrupt, not least because of the sorts of individuals who were drawn to its offices. Playing on Burke the Irish outsider’s attempt to arrogate the title of Englishman to himself and to speak in that people’s name, Wollstonecraft scoffs: ‘I have not that respect for the whole body, which, you say, characterizes our nation. . .. It is a well-known fact, that when we, the people of England, have a son whom we scarcely know what to do with—we make a clergyman of him’ (VRM, p. 35). In fact, she argues, most of the English clergy simply undertook their profession for base materialistic reasons, ‘to entitle them to the emoluments accruing from it’ (VRM, p. 37). Because this was so, for Wollstonecraft the church was simply another deeply flawed human institution incapable of consecrating anything, and she excoriates Burke’s use of that term to describe the relationship between the established church and the state in eighteenth-century England: ‘This consecration for ever, a word, that from lips of flesh is big with a mighty nothing, has not purged the sacred temple from all the impurities of fraud, violence, injustice, and tyranny. Human passions still lurk in her sanctum sanctorum’ (VRM, pp. 35–6). Immediately following this, Wollstonecraft points to the passage in the Reflections (quoted above) in which Burke equates electing political representatives to performing a holy function. She finds this paragraph so ‘curious’ that she declares she is ‘tempted to transcribe it’, but instead

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puts the issue to Burke directly: ‘The only way in which the people interfere in government, religious or civil, is in electing representatives. And, Sir, let me ask you, with manly plainness—are these holy nominations? Where is the booth of religion?’ (VRM, p. 36). Certainly, she insisted, Burke’s invocation of the sacred could not have been meant as a description of the electoral process of late eighteenth-century Britain. Where, she demanded to know, amid the well-financed ‘drunken riot’ and buying of votes according to ‘sordid interest, or licentious thoughtlessness’ could be found the process Burke was attempting to sanctify? She denied that his description of elections in Britain was anything like an empirically accurate characterization of events on the ground. Wollstonecraft also took up at length Burke’s endeavour to defend the mutually reinforcing relationship between the church and the nobility with reference to the clergy’s control of the education of young noblemen. She tells Burke, ‘Far from agreeing with you, Sir, that these regulations render the clergy a more useful and respectable body, experience convinces me that the very contrary is the fact’ (VRM, p. 38). The clergy were obsequious to their noble charges, in fact not teaching but rather learning from them ‘servility to superiors, and tyranny to inferiors’. And, since ‘among unequals there can be no society’, she asks Burke, ‘is it not natural for them to become courtly parasites, and intriguing dependents on great patrons, or the treasury?’ (VRM, p. 39). Thus, when it came to Burke’s vaunted church establishment in Britain, Wollstonecraft argued that he had totally misread that institution’s role in the civilizing process, telling him: ‘you have affixed a meaning to laws that chance, or, to speak more philosophically, the interested views of men, settled, not dreaming of your ingenious elucidations’. For her, this went all the way back to the time before the Reformation in Britain, when rapacious priests sold indulgences to enrich themselves by holding out the promise of absolution, and it was a process that had continued throughout British history (VRM, pp. 39–40). Wollstonecraft also discusses at length Burke’s strident defence of Britain’s ‘natural aristocracy’, and what he saw as its rightful role as trustee of Britain’s national interest. Here, Wollstonecraft pairs Burke’s defence of the House of Commons with his criticisms of the National Assembly in order to challenge his view of both institutions. She argues that it was ‘necessary for the Assembly to have a higher model in view than the imagined virtues of their forefathers’ (VRM, p. 42). Commenting specifically on the composition of the lower house of Parliament, Wollstonecraft emphatically denies Burke’s description of it: ‘That the British House of

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Commons is filled with everything illustrious in rank, in descent, in hereditary, and acquired opulence, may be true,—that it contains everything respectable in talents, in military, civil, naval, and political distinction, is very problematical’ (VRM, p. 43). In fact, Wollstonecraft insists, Burke had effectively conflated a true natural aristocracy based on talent with a false one based on hereditary rank, blood, and wealth. On her view, that is, Burke was too wedded to an aristocracy of ascribed status, rather than a meritocracy. Playing on Burke’s description of the canonized forefathers of yesteryear with their coats of arms, portraits, inscribed monuments, and titles, Wollstonecraft asks him: ‘The liberty of the rich has its ensigns armorial to puff the individual out with insubstantial honors; but where are emblazoned the struggles of virtuous poverty?’ (VRM, p. 43). Challenging Burke at a still deeper level, Wollstonecraft even suggested that it was impossible for such wealthy men to become virtuous, because ‘everything valuable must be the fruit of laborious exertion, to attain knowledge and virtue’, whereas most in the House of Commons had never exerted themselves to earn their positions. But Burke seemed oblivious to this connection, and Wollstonecraft argued that he therefore mistakenly believed that somehow virtue and merit could be inherited, just the same as wealth and status: ‘But full blown talents may, according to your system, be hereditary, and as independent of ripening judgment, as the inbred feelings that, rising above reason, naturally guard Englishmen from error’ (VRM, pp. 43–4). In reality, Wollstonecraft argued, Burke’s venerable House of Commons was really filled with ‘the dead weight of benumbing opulence’ and ‘ignoble ambition’. Any true natural aristocracy required extraordinary merit which had to be an outward expression of innate ability, and could not be inherited like ascribed status, which was analogous to donning some outer material garment at one’s convenience in the absence of effort: ‘Talents, knowledge, and virtue, must be a part of the man, and cannot be put, as robes of state often are, on a servant or a block, to render a pageant more magnificent’ (VRM, p. 44). In this way, Wollstonecraft rejected Burke’s view of Britain’s natural aristocracy, just as she had lambasted his depictions of Britain’s church establishment and British history. A few years later, in her Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), Wollstonecraft revisits her earlier description of Britain contra Burke in the first Vindication. She does so against the backdrop of the Terror, and in the context of providing a comparative assessment of contemporary European societies along the

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spectrum of history as a civilizing process. Prior to the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft argued that, notwithstanding its many flaws, England nevertheless stood out as the European nation freest, in a relative sense, from tyranny. ‘With respect to the improvement of society, since the destruction of the Roman Empire, England seems to have led the way, rendering certain obstinate prejudices almost null, by a gradual change of opinion.’ Compared to their European kin, therefore, the English ‘were the only free people in existence’.10 And, like the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Wollstonecraft also saw the development of commercial society as playing an important role in the expansion of political liberty in Britain. But while Wollstonecraft regarded the British constitutional system as ‘ingenious in theory’, this very fact helped to explain its stagnation in the wake of intellectual progress, and the associated need for the deepening of democracy. Because the British believed that their system was ‘the most perfect the human mind was capable of conceiving’, they mistakenly concluded ‘that they actually possessed an extensive liberty, and the best of all possible governments’, instead of pressing on with further reforms that would ‘secure the[ir] real possession’. Wollstonecraft saw this as highly problematic, because in her view political liberty had no specific basis beyond Magna Charta, at least until the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.11 Furthermore, the Glorious Revolution itself produced just enough liberty that, unfortunately, ‘political questions were no longer discussed in England on a broad scale’, a fact that ‘stops the progress of civilization, and leads the people to imagine, that their ancestors have done everything possible to secure the happiness of society, and meliorate the condition of man, because they have done much’.12 This limited praise is the most Mary Wollstonecraft ever afforded Edmund Burke’s version of the British nation, a place she saw as very much in need of the kind of deepening of democracy that she believed the French Revolution was in the process of bringing, despite its violent turn.

Conclusion Recent scholarship has ably pointed to the ways in which Burke’s argument in the Reflections on the Revolution in France was predicated on a careful reconstruction of the meaning of the Glorious Revolution, in order to foreclose the opportunity of radical political change in England.13 The aim of this essay has been to add another layer to this argument about Burke and Britain, and also to bring Mary Wollstonecraft’s views on Britain into

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the conversation by juxtaposing them directly with Burke’s. Both of these thinkers used their ideas concerning Britain’s theoretical meaning as a yardstick for assessing the desirability of events in France. Burke’s view of Britain and its history was one that embraced it as a beneficent expression of natural hierarchies and incremental civilized progress under the tutelage of an established church and the ‘natural aristocracy’. For Wollstonecraft, conversely, Britain was at best a partial civilization, one whose guiding institutions – the established church and the aristocracy in Parliament – were socially constructed and historically corrupt from the start. As such, for Burke, Britain was the very embodiment of civilization itself, a precious historical achievement that had to be defended against the radical democratic and egalitarian threat posed by the French Revolution. For her part, Wollstonecraft viewed the French Revolution and what she saw as its promise of deep democratization as the great promise of the future, and eagerly anticipated the day when its egalitarian principles would spread across the English Channel and transform the British homeland.

Notes 1. What follows in this section draws on my argument in The BurkeWollstonecraft Debate: Savagery, Civilization, and Democracy (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2007). 2. On this score, see especially Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 3. Thomas W. Copeland (gen. ed.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958–78), vol. IX, p. 113. 4. See Jim Smyth, The Men of No Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998). 5. Paul Langford (gen. ed.), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 8 vols. to date (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981–), vol. VIII, p. 83; hereinafter cited parenthetically in the text as W&S. 6. See J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Burke and the Ancient Constitution: A Problem in the History of Ideas’, The Historical Journal 3.2 (1960), 125–43. 7. J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century. A Reissue with a Retrospect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 382. This assessment is taken from the ‘retrospect’ portion of Pocock’s text. 8. Isaac Kramnick (ed.), The Portable Edmund Burke (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), pp. 495–6.

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9. See Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 9–11; hereinafter cited parenthetically in the text as VRM. 10. See Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (eds.), The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 7 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1989), vol. 6, pp. 70, 113. 11. Ibid., pp. 113–4. 12. Ibid., p. 17. 13. See especially Ben J. Taylor, ‘Reflections on the Revolution in England: Edmund Burke’s Uses of 1688’, History of Political Thought, 35.1 (2014), 91–120.

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chapter 14

Homelands: Blake, Albion, and the French Revolution David Fallon

Introduction: receiving the divine vision ‘Jerusalem’, Blake’s lyric invocation of the nation, envisions the homeland as a complex relationship of time, space, and activity. The first stanzas evoke the legend of the infant Christ accompanying Joseph of Arimithea to England, poised against a sceptical, interrogative mood (‘And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon Englands mountains green: / And was the Holy Lamb of God, / On Englands pleasant pastures seen!’).1 Then, England was an ecology of ‘mountains green’ and ‘pleasant pastures’; at present it is marred by ‘clouded hills’ and ‘dark Satanic mills’. A universal divinity (‘the Countenance Divine’), figured as sunlight, is refracted through the national space of present England. The imperatives of the final stanzas (‘Bring me my Bow of burning gold’) issue in a prophetic promise to actively recreate a flourishing homeland in a utopian future, opening the bounded present to Eternity. The prophet’s active ‘Mental Fight’ aids the divine revelation, but the conclusion still mediates it through ‘Englands green & pleasant Land’. In the ambiguous feet, Blake collapses the historical distance between Jesus and the prophetic activity of both Milton and himself. Their prophetic work is a national modulation of the divine, facilitating its revelation to their countrymen. Blake’s balance of universal and national perspectives draws upon the Enlightenment discourse of national manners. All Religions are One (1788) distinguishes ‘the Poetic Genius’ as ‘the true Man’, modified by ‘the body or outward form of Man’: PRINCIPLE. 5. The Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nations different reception of the Poetic Genius which is every where call’d the Spirit of Prophecy. (1, E1)

The ‘Poetic Genius’ can only be discerned through specific national manifestations. In the illumination, the bard-like ‘Spirit of Prophecy’ is 202

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juxtaposed with a seated adult instructing children in a tent, suggesting the mediation of the Poetic Genius within a defined but temporary space. If the nation is an inescapable condition of experience, it is properly thought of as a finite medium through which the Divine Vision can be perceived and produced.

Nationalisms and reciprocity Many historians of nationalism trace its modern origins to the period of the French Revolution.2 As Bell notes, in this period ‘nationalism’ superseded older forms of ‘national sentiment’ with a directed political programme to construct the nation. The term itself was coined only in the late 1790s.3 A. D. Smith identifies the ‘time of the French and American Revolutions’ as the moment when in the West ‘the “nation-state” became the predominant, and soon almost the only legitimate form of political organisation, as well as the dominant vehicle of collective identity’.4 Grafting state institutions onto national identity was especially fostered in Britain and France by French revolutionary wars. As Charles Tilly argues, ‘War made the state, and the state made war.’5 Conceptualizing the nation as a homeland to be defended was central to this development: in 1797, Casanova observed that France had ‘become a worshipper of its patrie, without ever having known, before the Revolution, what a patrie was, or even the word itself’.6 The threat of French invasion, especially in 1798 and in 1803–05, galvanized Britons to imagine the homeland in defensive terms. Blake’s works respond to these developments, endorsing and challenging patriotic images of the nation in complex ways. Blake’s critics have often distinguished him from ‘official’ British nationalism during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. But Susan Matthews notes that his patriotism may not necessarily be benign: in Jerusalem, his ‘myth [. . .] continually moves out from nation to world in a process which disturbingly echoes not only the revolutionary universalism of the 1790s but also the language of empire’.7 For Julia M. Wright, ‘Blake indulges in imperial discourse and schema in order to fictively generate a New Jerusalem that assimilates, rather than, as in earlier Blake works, celebrates difference.’8 Paralleling Blake’s rhetoric and Evangelical missionaries of the 1820s, Steve Clark suggests that the critique of imperialism in Jerusalem is compromised by ‘an abrasive brand of Protestant nationalism formed in opposition to France and Catholicism projecting an imagined community of empire’.9 Troublingly, Blake is both proponent and critic of nationalism.

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Blake’s representations of homeland and nations engage with the Enlightenment discourse of manners, which enabled him to represent revolutionary Europe and reactionary England, especially the rise of the modern European nation-state. He struggles to wrestle liberatory potential from the emotive appeal of official, martial nationalist discourse. For example, in his Descriptive Catalogue (1809) he adapts Nelson’s famous signal at the Battle of Trafalgar, ‘England expects that every man should do his duty’ to elevate the ‘Arts’ to the prominence of ‘Arms’ and ‘the Senate’ (E549). Blake redirects nationalist solidarity away from war towards culture. His nostalgia for a symbolic pastoral homeland of Albion is distinctive for the ways in which he frames it as an affective centre of experience but also infuses it with openness and permeability to external national identities. Blake’s epic poems Vala; Or The Four Zoas (c.1796–1807), Milton (c.1804–11), and Jerusalem (c.1804–20) are fundamentally concerned with imagining the nation as homeland. From The Four Zoas, there is a new emphasis on the figure of Albion. Blake retitled the earlier draft of Vala to include ‘the Death and Judgement of Albion the Ancient Man’,10 foregrounding questions of national identity. These poems dramatize Albion’s arrested development; ‘Selfhood’ dominates his relation to other nations. Frequently, Albion sounds like a petulant, egocentric child. Turning from the Divine Vision at the outset of Jerusalem, Albion insists ‘My mountains are my own, and I will keep them to myself!’ (J4:29, E147). Albion’s rejection of a common humanity initiates the poem’s crisis. This relates to Blake’s familiar contrast between the imagination and reason. In Jerusalem, the ‘mechanical philosophy’, associated with Bacon, Newton, and Locke, as well as the Enlightenment scepticism and naturalism of Voltaire, Hume, and Rousseau, sicken Albion. His Spectre, like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Regained (1671), tempts Albion out of belief. ‘Like a hoar frost & a Mildew’ he rises over Albion and pronounces himself God, embodied in Enlightenment thinkers teaching ‘Humility’, ‘Doubt & Experiment’ (J54:15–18, E203). He asks: Where is that Friend of Sinners! that Rebel against my Laws! Who teaches Belief to the Nations, & an unknown Eternal Life Come hither into the Desart & turn these stones to bread. Vain foolish Man! wilt thou believe without Experiment? And build a World of Phantasy upon my Great Abyss! (J 54:19–23, E203–4)

The Spectre’s placeless ‘Desart’ contrasts with ‘the Nations’. The ‘Friend of Sinners’ unifies by teaching singular ‘belief’ to plural ‘Nations’,

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establishing common ground. Belief in ‘an unknown Eternal life’ requires imagination, which can actively ‘build’ a ‘World of Phantasy’ in contrast to the Spectre’s cold desert void. Blake’s notion of connective, universally human imagination enables a reciprocity and development into mature humanity. Blake identifies this process of individual psychology with that of nations. Albion’s development is arrested as he turns away from the reciprocal Divine Vision, towards the influence of his Spectre: The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man; & when separated From Imagination, and closing itself as in steel, in a Ratio Of the Things of Memory. It thence frames Laws & Moralities To destroy Imagination! the Divine Body, by Martyrdoms & Wars. (J 74:10–13, E229)

The ‘Reasoning Power’ blocks the imagination from identification beyond the self. Blake links the Spectre’s anti-imaginative impetus both to institutions (‘Laws’), persecutions, and nationalist war, opposed to the ‘Divine Body’ of humankind. Jerusalem, by contrast, maintains the Saviour’s connective ‘Fibres of love from man to man’ (J4:8, E146) via the affections and creative imagination. As Linda Colley notes, Blake’s identification in ‘Jerusalem’ between England and the chosen nation of Israel adopts imagery ‘at the centre of Protestant thought in Britain since the early seventeenth century’.11 Steve Clark and David Worrall imply that Blake’s Anglo-Hebraism fits broadly into this ‘national idea of a chosen people, predestined to triumph over a Catholic and tyrannical France’,12 but Blake both registers the analogy’s deep appeal while also criticizing exceptionalist nationalism. In the introduction to chapter two of Jerusalem, Jerusalem’s pillars originally stood in north London before the Fall, but Satan ‘witherd up sweet Zions Hill, / From every Nation of the Earth: / He witherd up Jerusalems Gates, / And in a dark Land gave her birth’ (J27:49–52, E 173). The poem challenges wartime Anglo-Hebraic exceptionalism: Is this thy soft Family-Love Thy cruel Patriarchal pride Planting thy Family alone Destroying all the World beside.

(J 27:77–80, E173)

In contrast, Blake envisages a more mobile and relational identification with Israel, open to all nations and produced through mutual recognition: In my Exchanges every Land Shall walk, & mine in every Land,

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(J 27:85–88, E174)

The repetitions reinforce mutuality. ‘[E]very Land’ mirrors home and foreign lands, while the possessive is both subject and object of the verb ‘walk’. The interconnection of ‘heart’ and ‘hand’ leads the reader to imagine a passionate form of international brotherhood.

France and England: nations and manners Blake was always aware that British national identity was forged antagonistically, especially during Britain and France’s wars.13 This is evident in Poetical Sketches (1783), in which a play fragment called ‘Edward the Third’ represents English nobles on the eve of the Battle of Crécy in 1346. As David Erdman argues, the play and the accompanying ‘War Song to Englishmen’, which appeals to ‘sons of Trojan Brutus, cloath’d in war’ whose voices roll ‘dark clouds o’er France, muffling the sun / In sickly darkness like a dim eclipse’ (E437), draw ironic parallels between past and present British aggression towards its neighbour.14 Blake envisaged the outbreak of the French Revolution as the people’s reclamation of their homeland, in terms similar to the nostalgic and renewable pastoral of ‘Jerusalem’. In The French Revolution (1791), Blake repeatedly collocates ‘Nation’ with the people’s representatives in the National Assembly, never with the king and nobles, and represents the French crisis of 1788–9 in ecological images. The king’s ‘scepter too heavy for mortal grasp’ will no longer ‘in cruelty bruise the mild flourishing mountains’ (4–5, E286). Seyes prophesizes that the oppressed people, whose ‘village and field is a waste’ (208, E295), will become free, and ‘the Priest in his thund’rous cloud’ (223) will escape superstition and clerics ‘May sing in the village, and shout in the harvest, and woo in pleasant gardens, / Their once savage loves’ (229–30, E296). The free nation temporally returns to a bright, pastoral homeland, in contrast to the ancien regime’s overshadowing darkness. Blake’s enthusiasm for a French conception of its own distinctive homeland suggests a reciprocal sense of relative national belongings. This is prominent in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c.1790–93). On Plate 3, the prophetic voice pronounces ‘Now is the dominion of Edom, & the return of Adam into Paradise; see Isaiah XXXIV & XXXV Chap:’ (3, E34). The compressed biblical references reinforce the imagery of The French Revolution. Esau was the ancestor of the Edomites, Edom being the

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nation south east of Israel. In Genesis (26:29–34) Jacob tricks the hungry Esau into exchanging his birthright for a lentil stew (traditionally ‘a mess of pottage’). Blake’s complex of allusions links the cheated man’s reclamation of the homeland with the reversal of the Fall and Isaiah’s apocalyptic vision, in which God’s vengeance and desolation of the earth is followed with a vision of how ‘the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose’. Blake is invested in the advent of the French Revolution as a type of a universal return of the dispossessed to the homeland. Blake’s annotations to Richard Watson’s An Apology for the Bible (1797) likewise sympathize with France: ‘To what does the Bishop attribute the English Crusade against France. is it not to State Religion. blush for shame’ (E613). Nevertheless, his sense of Christian duty is patriotic: ‘to him who sees this mortal pilgrimage in the light that I see it. Duty to [my] country is the first consideration & safety the last’ (E611). An annotation to Bacon’s Essays sharpens the contrast: ‘The Increase of a State as of a Man is from Internal Improvement or Intellectual Acquirement. Man is not Improved by the hurt of another States are not Improved at the Expense of Foreigners’ (E625). Blake’s epic poems elaborate an attempt to imagine a redirected, imaginative nationalism. At certain moments, Blake foregrounds his mythological characters’ most important associations. In Jerusalem, chapter three, Luvah is tortured in ‘A building of eternal death’ which is ‘Natural Religion’ and ‘its Altars Natural Morality’. Blake states: ‘Luvah is France: the Victim of the Spectres of Albion’ (J66:8–9, 15, E218). Blake’s epics encode a vision of the Anglo-French wars, repeatedly showing Luvah tortured by Albion’s agents. Luvah is also aggressor, an invasive threat in Night Three of The Four Zoas: ‘Luvah strove to gain dominion over the mighty Albion’ (FZ3:41.13, E328). Like Satan in the Book of Job, he leaves the ‘dark Body of Albion [. . .] Coverd with boils from head to foot. the terrible smitings of Luvah’ (FZ3:41.15–16). These broad identifications between Luvah and France may be reinforced by other associations, such as his compass point in the East, his description as a gallant ‘Prince of Love’, and his connection to looms, vineyards, and wine.15 This personification draws on long-standing English perceptions of the French, given additional impetus by Enlightenment accounts of national manners. Blake was aware of this discourse, quoting from Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (1756) in annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1798, E636). In ‘Of National Characters’ (1742), David Hume asserts that ‘each Nation has a peculiar Set of Manners’ and ‘some particular Qualities are more frequently to be met with among one People

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than among their Neighbours’.16 Frequent association of peoples into ‘one political Body’ leads them to ‘acquire a Resemblance in their Manners, and have a common or national Character, as well as a personal one, peculiar to each Individual’.17 Hume suggests ‘we have Reason to expect greater Wit and Gaiety in a Frenchman than in a Spaniard’.18 Blake seems to allude to this national character when at the outset of The French Revolution ‘the cloud and vision descends over chearful France’ (1, E286). David Simpson notes that English commentators viewed France as ‘the home of craven Catholics and bold atheists, subservient royalists and extreme anarchists, licentious libertines and cold calculators. The French were, in other words, felt to be prone to radical extremes’.19 Associated during the 1790s with philosophes and Jacobins, this volatility was contrasted by a supposedly natural British ‘revolt against theory’.20 The contrast prevails in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in which Burke bemoans the loss of traditional French chivalry in what he calls ‘a revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions’.21 Despite this, Revolutionary violence originates in pre-existent French character: France, when she let loose the reins of regal authority, doubled the licence, of a ferocious dissoluteness in manners, and of an indolent irreligion in opinions and practices; and has extended through all ranks of life, as if she were communicating some privilege, or laying open some secluded benefit, all the unhappy corruptions that usually were the disease of wealth and power.22

For Burke, the French combine extreme indolence and ferocity, and without firm control of these manners, violence is inevitable. Mary Wollstonecraft represented French manners pejoratively, albeit to liberal ends, in A Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794). The French people’s ‘sensations are ever lively and transitory; exhaled by every passing beam, and dissipated by the slightest storm’.23 Wollstonecraft argues that ‘the enthusiasm of the french [. . .] in general, hurries them from one extreme to another’.24 By 1789 ‘the french were in some respects the most unqualified of any people in Europe to undertake the important work in which they were embarked’.25 The Revolution’s impetuosity expressed corrupt national manners: ‘the character of the french, indeed, had been so depraved by the inveterate despotism of ages, that [. . .] the morals of the whole nation were destroyed by the manners formed by the government’. As a result, ‘when they changed their system, liberty, as it was called, was only the acme of tyranny’.26 Despite this, Wollstonecraft believed that the Revolution’s achievements would, in the long term,

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ameliorate French manners, an analysis echoed by later apologists for the revolution.27 This is a useful context for one of Luvah’s puzzling associations. At several points, he is closely associated with Jesus. In Night the Seventh of The Four Zoas, the warriors crucify Luvah: They sound the clarions strong they chain the howling captives they give the Oath of blood They cast the lots into the helmet, They vote the death of Luvah & they naild him to the tree They piercd him with a spear & laid him in a sepulchre. (FZ 7:92.11–14)

For Wilkie and Johnson, ‘the unfallen aspect of Luvah is almost wholly absorbed in the figure of Jesus’, while his ‘fallen aspect’ appears in the warlike and serpentine Orc.28 In this poem, Jesus (as the Divine Vision) takes on Luvah’s ‘robes of blood’ and the Eternal Man appears ‘as One Man infolded / In Luvah[s] robes of blood & bearing all his afflictions’ (FZ1:13.8–9, E308; see also FZ2:32.14 and 33:11–15, E321; FZ4:55.10–12, E337). In Jerusalem, Albion looks back to a time before war, when ‘England encompassd the Nations, / Mutual each within others bosom in Visions of Regeneration’: ‘The footsteps of the Lamb of God were there: but now no more / No more shall I behold him, he is closd in Luvahs Sepulcher’ (J24:44–45, 49–51, E170). The regions of Beulah chorus ‘As the Sons of Albion have done to Luvah: so they have in him / Done to the Divine Lord & Saviour, who suffers with those that suffer’ (J25: 6–7, E170). The close identification between Jesus’s crucifixion and burial and Luvah’s suffering under the Sons of Albion links France and the Divine Vision. A cancelled passage from Night the First of The Four Zoas may illuminate this link. Los tells his emanation Enitharmon how the Eternal Man refuses ‘to behold the Divine image which all behold / And live thereby’ (E825). Los urges that ‘we immortal in our own strength survive by stern debate / Till we have drawn the Lamb of God into a mortal form’ and tells Enitharmon that they ‘will so receive the Divine Image that amongst the Reprobate / He may be devoted to Destruction from his mothers womb’ (E825). The Divine Vision is to be incarnated in a limited medium and an antagonistic context. Blake stresses that Luvah’s robes of blood distort the Eternal man: ‘As the sun shines down on the misty earth Such was the Vision’ (FZ 1:13.10, E308). Contrariwise, in Milton, Satan’s ‘infernal scroll, / Of Moral laws and cruel punishments’ helps ‘pervert the Divine voice in its entrance to the earth / With thunder of war & trumpets sound, with armies of disease / Punishments & deaths musterd & number’d’ (M9:21–25, E103).

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Luvah, identified as both France and a garment for Jesus, suggests the French Revolution as a distorting medium for the Divine Vision, whose pure light is occluded by its opponents as well as refracted through the human limitations of the French. Blake seems to suggest that the Revolution has violently miscarried, partly through the unprepared tempers of the people who enacted it.29 Despite its corruption, the Revolution allowed a glimpse of a deeper utopian potential. Los’s prophetic capacity uniquely attunes him to the redemptive import of the Divine Vision clothed in Luvah’s robes. Addressing Enitharmon in Night the Seventh, he exhorts her to ‘look! behold! take comfort! / Turn inwardly thine Eyes & there behold the Lamb of God / Clothed in Luvahs robes of blood descending to redeem’ (FZ7:87.42–44, E369). In Blake’s hopeful prophetic vision, the failure of the French Revolution might yet be transformed by its contribution to a larger narrative of human redemption. If Blake’s epics play on stereotypes of French character, his depiction of Albion reciprocally draws on unfavourable caricatures of English manners. Blake appears familiar with Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in which Burke praised British manners in contrast to the restless speculation of French and English revolutionaries. Referring to England after the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, Burke asserts: I believe we are not materially changed since that period. Thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers. We have not (as I conceive) lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century; nor as yet have we subtilized ourselves into savages.30

French theory, over-refinement, and ferocity contrast with English solidity and common sense, curiously associated with the cold and damp climate. Continental stereotypes of the English during the long eighteenth century frequently linked the dismal weather with tendencies towards xenophobia, materialism, taciturnity, fretful gloom, and suicide.31 The English were believed to be particularly prone to ‘spleen’ and a melancholy which George Cheyne termed the ‘English malady’.32 Blake’s fallen Albion exhibits these English traits. Albion turns xenophobe, and rejects the mutuality of the nations in Jerusalem’s exchanges, leaving ‘the Body of Albion [. . .] closed apart from all Nations’ (J94.14, E254). Prior to Albion’s renovation, Blake imagines him iconically, in terms which tragically suggest Burkean English languour: Albion cold lays on his Rock: storms & snows beat round him. [. . .] The weeds of Death inwrap his hands & feet blown incessant

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And washd incessant by the for-ever restless sea-waves foaming abroad Upon the white Rock. England a Female Shadow as deadly damps Of the Mines of Cornwall & Derbyshire lays upon his bosom heavy Moved by the wind in volumes of thick cloud returning folding round (J 94: 1, 5–10, E254) His loins & bosom unremovable.

Storms, clouds, fog, and cold combine with pale cliffs to merge the island environment with the sick personified nation. Yet this is moments before the ‘Breath Divine’ (J94:18 and 95:2, E254) passes over Albion and initiates Albion’s awakening, the return of Jerusalem, and Albion’s dynamic regeneration. The storms may suggest upheaval, as his brooding winter contends with new life and an energetic revolution in manners.

National roots and wandering rootlessness In ‘Jerusalem’, Blake’s patriotism seems organically connected to England’s ‘green and pleasant land’. But the writer who wrote of ‘Natures cruel holiness’ (M36:25, E137) also questioned the rhetoric of a rooted connection to the nation. Martin Heidegger’s essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (1951) draws on this rhetoric. Heidegger represents a two-hundred year-old Black Forest peasant’s hut as a model of authentic, harmonious ‘dwelling’, organically absorbed into the environment. The house and peasant lifeworld exist in ‘simple oneness’ with the surroundings, exemplified by the co-presence of the childbed and the Totenbaum, the coffin perceived as a tree.33 All human life, from birth to death, takes place within one natural space. An idealized, authentic human existence is rooted in the homeland’s soil. The idealized peasant life in nature takes on a darker shade from Heidegger’s support for the National Socialist Party during the 1930s, particularly its ideology of ‘blood and soil’, which fetishized German ethnicity connected to territory, in contrast to rootless modern forms of being. Blake would seem to be straightforwardly opposed to such thinking. His texts and designs are pervaded by menacing roots. Plate 4 of Jerusalem uses the motif to distinguish freedom and slavery. A dark cloaked and seated figure (possibly Vala) extends her hands outwards. On her righthand side a praying man leans beyond reach, while a flying woman guides three youthful figures upwards and points to three stars and a crescent moon, labelled ‘Jesus Alone’ in Greek. The cloaked woman’s left hand grasps the head of a seated figure, whose left arm vegetates into a network of roots down the page’s right-hand side. The image contrasts the Natural Man’s rootedness to the freedom of the Spiritual Man, and has

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implications for nationalism. Albion (in the guise of Reuben) is sundered into tribes by the Daughters of Albion: They have divided Simeon he also rolld apart in blood Over the Nations till he took Root beneath the shining Looms Of Albions Daughters in Philistea by the side of Amalek. (J 74:44–46, E230)

Here, roots are associated with fallen nations as natural entities. Recurrent root imagery across Blake’s oeuvre figures institutional religion, exemplified by Urizen’s tree of Mystery in Night Seven of The Four Zoas. Urizen seeks to forestall Orc’s inevitable rebellion by cooling his flames: Age after Age till underneath his heel a deadly root Struck thro the rock the root of Mystery accursed shooting up Branches into the heaven of Los they pipe formd bending down Take root again whereever they touch again branching forth In intricate labyrinths oerspreading many a grizly deep. (FZ 7:78.4–8, E353)

This fixed foot under which roots shoot seems markedly different from the mobile, divine feet in ‘Jerusalem’. The rock is a standard symbol of the church (linked to St Peter’s Greek name, Petrus) and Blake associates the corruption of Christianity with institutionalization, leading to priestcraft and Mystery. Blake fuses this imagery with nationalism. Addressing his preface to chapter two of Jerusalem ‘To the Jews’, Blake asserts ‘Your Ancestors derived their origin from Abraham, Heber, Shem, and Noah, who were Druids: as the Druid Temples (which are the Patriarchal Pillars & Oak Groves) over the whole Earth witness to this day’ (J27, E171). Blake associates the oak with the druids’ temples and sacrifices of victims of their moral law and natural religion. In visionary converse, the restored Zoas cry: Where is the Covenant of Priam, the Moral Virtues of the Heathen Where is the Tree of Good & Evil that rooted beneath the cruel heel Of Albions Spectre the Patriarch Druid! where are all his Human Sacrifices For Sin in War & in the Druid Temples of the Accuser of Sin: beneath The Oak Groves of Albion that coverd the whole Earth beneath his Spectre. (J 98:46–50, E258)

While druidism is part of Blake’s visionary conception of human history, it has a specifically national character: ‘All things Begin & End in Albions Ancient Druid Rocky Shore’ (J27, E171). The oak had long been a national symbol of England, with royal associations, but its prevalence in the epics suggests Blake is responding to its ubiquity in conservative and loyalist

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propaganda, in which it represents England’s rooted traditions and constitution, exemplified in The Loyalists Alphabet (1803), where ‘O, Stands for Britains fam’d OAK’.34 If Blake distrusts organic rootedness, we might expect his embrace of mobile cosmopolitanism. However, a sense of homeland remains an important source of vitality. This is evident in his representation of the Polypus, the total form of Albion’s warlike Sons: And Hand & Hyle rooted into Jerusalem by a fibre Of strong revenge & Skofeld Vegetated by Reubens Gate In every Nation of the Earth till the Twelve Sons of Albion Enrooted into every Nation: a mighty Polypus growing From Albion over the whole Earth: such is my awful Vision. (J 15:1–5, E159)

The Polypus fascinated eighteenth-century scientists, combining plant and animal life and a tenacious ability to root and reproduce endlessly. For Blake, it encapsulates the formless vegetation of Natural Man, who enroots indiscriminately in all nations. While the Polypus may suggest an organic, unified structure, it is a chaotic compound of scepticism and living death, comprised of warring males: A Polypus of Roots of Reasoning Doubt Despair & Death. Going forth & returning from Albions Rocks to Canaan: Devouring Jerusalem from every Nation of the Earth. Envying stood the enormous Form at variance with Itself In all its Members: in eternal torment of love & jealousy. (J 69:3–7, E223)

Although the Polypus seems rooted in Albion’s rocks, the warriors’ focal point is actually Vala and her cognates: ‘I must rush again to War: for the Virgin has frownd & refusd’ (J68:63, E222). The self-divided members cohere around Vala, who is not national but, as I will suggest, institutional. Despite rooting into nations, the sons’ nomadic warrior existence is alienated from the positive emotional connection with a homeland Blake associates with Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, Blake distinguishes between society and institutional government, describing ‘the Polypus nam’d Albions Tree’, in which humans are ‘By Invisible Hatreds adjoind’, and asserting that ‘He who will not comingle in Love, must be adjoind by Hate’ (J66:48, 53, 56, E219).35 Blake wrote during a period in which French and English societies had become increasingly integrated with the state. Karen Swann helpfully links the philosophical and political dimensions of

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Albion’s fall ‘from humanity into a “state” – the state of Ulro, or, we might say, a bristling nation-state’.36 Swann’s latter comment is worth exploring further. Wright notes how patriotism ‘under the guise of allegiance to institutions’ became ‘more powerful during Blake’s lifetime’, especially during war.37 In a curious moment towards the end of the first chapter of Jerusalem, ‘Albions Circumference was clos’d’ (J19:20, E164) and, fleeing inwards, he finds ‘Jerusalem upon the River of his City soft repos’d / In the arms of Vala, assimilating in one with Vala’ (J19:40–41, 45, E164), and ‘Dividing & uniting into many female forms’ (J19:40–45, E164). This may be the embrace depicted on Plate 28, and suggests Albion becomes unable to distinguish between the ‘assimilating’ emanations. Vala is repeatedly connected to the corrupt, earthy Natural Man, Jerusalem to the regenerative Spiritual Man: ‘Vala produc’d the Bodies. Jerusalem gave the Souls’ (J18:7, E163). Jerusalem personifies freedom (‘JERUSALEM IS NAMED LIBERTY AMONG THE SONS OF ALBION’ (J26, E171)), achieved through imagination, intellect, and creative culture: ‘Let every Christian as much as in him lies engage himself openly & publicly before all the World in some Mental pursuit for the Building up of Jerusalem’ (J77, E232). Blake seems to suggest that the liberty, culture, and creativity Jerusalem represents has become assimilated into her dark double. Vala is usually identified as a goddess of nature and war, worshipped by the Spectres. But at key moments, Blake suggests her affinity to the militarized nation-state: Then All the Daughters of Albion became One before Los: even Vala! And she put forth her hand upon the Looms in dreadful howlings Till she vegetated into a hungry Stomach & a devouring Tongue. Her Hand is a Court of Justice, her Feet: two Armies in Battle Storms & Pestilence: in her Locks: & in her Loins Earthquake. And Fire. & the Ruin of Cities & Nations & Families & Tongues. (J 64:6–11, E215)

Like the Polypus, Vala agglomerates the Daughters into one entity, feeding an aggressive appetite via institutional limbs. She personifies the warlike nation state. In Albion’s confusion, he cannot distinguish Jerusalem from violent institutional government. However, Vala also transcends national boundaries, her body comprising two foot-armies and the ruin of plural nations. Vala embodies multiple nation states, particularly England and France orientated towards war. Jerusalem’s liberty and culture have become absorbed into and distorted by the claims of these nation states.

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In Jerusalem, Los must distinguish and protect Jerusalem’s independent reality from destruction by Vala and the Sons and Daughters of Albion.

Conclusion: The ‘Human Harvest’ Denise Gigante provocatively argues that Jerusalem itself embodies an ‘epigenesist poetics’, linked to biological theories of self-generation and self-renewal. ‘For Blake regeneration was a material process with spiritual correlatives’, and positive visual and verbal images of natural growth, especially linking branches and wings, challenge ‘the widespread critical assumption that the processes of Vegetation and Generation are symbolically negative for Blake’.38 This can be clarified to show Blake complicating straightforward oppositions of rootedness and rootlessness. The most negative images of rooting occur in the depictions of Urizen’s Tree of Mystery, modelled on the Indian Banyan tree in fallen Eden (see Paradise Lost 9:1101–10) and the reputedly poisonous Upas tree of Java.39 In Jerusalem, it is identified as the ‘deadly Tree’ or ‘Moral Virtue, and the Law’ (J 28:15, E174). Albion sits beside it at Tyburn: The Tree spread over him its cold shadows, (Albion groand) They bent down, they felt the earth and again enrooting Shot into many a Tree! an endless labyrinth of woe! (J 28:17–19, E174)

This cold, dark tree absorbs life (its assonantal ‘o’s echoed in Albion’s groan) and issues in formless vegetative growth. In contrast, Jerusalem’s exuberant plant life rises up the page, aspiring beyond its rooted origins. While Albion’s oak groves also ‘overspread’ the earth, this is associated with the rooting of the Polypus and the Tree of Mystery. Blake envisaged a contrary form of natural growth, moving from roots towards spiritual fruition. After a catalogue of counties and nations, the narrator urges ‘Return! O Albion let Jerusalem overspread all Nations / As in the times of old!’ (J72:35–36, E22). This growth nurtures and involves culture in both senses of the word.40 Its telos is the human harvest of The Four Zoas and Milton, the final plate of which promises ‘To go forth to the Great Harvest & Vintage of the Nations’ (M43:1, E144) and depicts two human ears of corn either side of a nude vine-like woman. The nation, then, can be conceived of as a necessary space in which human cultivation takes place. Human destiny ultimately lies in reintegration into the Divine Humanity, but the Natural Man resists, with the nation-state institutionally facilitating rerooting.

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Blake’s approach to the nation and the homeland is distinctive and sometimes contradictory. He evokes and contests primordial, rooted nationhood, while at the same time trying to evade the attenuation of an abstract Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. The nation conceived as a homeland seems for Blake to be a necessary foundation upon which ‘those feet’ may walk and Jerusalem may be built, but only if it remains open, imaginative, and free enough to enable its people to open out to other nations and aspire towards their ultimate homeland in Eternity.

Notes 1. David V. Erdman (ed.), The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, 3rd edn (New York: Anchor, 1988), 1–16, Plate 1, p. 95. Subsequent references to this edition include an abbreviated title: FZ = Vala; or, The Four Zoas, M = Milton, and J = Jerusalem. Poems have plate (or, for The Four Zoas, Night and manuscript page) and line numbers, followed by the page number from Erdman prefixed by E. References will thus follow the format (M1:1–16, E95). 2. See A.D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 17. 3. David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680– 1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 3, 6. 4. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, p. 70. 5. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, A.D.990–1990 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 42. 6. Quoted in Bell, Cult of the Nation, p. 9. 7. Susan Matthews, ‘Jerusalem and Nationalism’, in Stephen Copley and John Whale (eds.), Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts, 1780–1832 (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 79–100, at p. 82. 8. Julia M. Wright, Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004), p. 137. 9. Steve Clark, ‘Jerusalem as Imperial Prophecy’, in Steve Clark and David Worrall (eds.), Blake, Nation and Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 167–85, at p. 171. 10. See title page reproduction in David V. Erdman and Cettina Magno, The Four Zoas: A Photographic Facsimile of the Manuscript With Commentary on the Illuminations (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1987). 11. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 30. See Wright, Blake, Nationalism, p. 113, for the analogy in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). 12. Steve Clark and David Worrall (eds.), Intro. to Blake, Nation and Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), p. 4. 13. Colley, Britons, pp. 17–8, 33–7. 14. David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire, 3rd edn (New York: Dover, 1991), pp. 72–4.

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15. See S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), pp. 255–7. 16. David Hume, ‘Of National Characters’, Essays, Moral and Political, 3rd edn (London: A. Millar, 1748), pp. 267–88, at p. 267. 17. Ibid., pp. 273–4. 18. Ibid., pp. 267. 19. David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 64. 20. Ibid., p. 4. 21. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley, 1790), p. 119. 22. Ibid., pp. 54–5. 23. Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect it has Produced in Europe (London: J. Johnson, 1794), pp. 26–7. 24. Ibid., p. 29. 25. Ibid., pp. 510–1. 26. Ibid., p. 252. 27. See Percy Bysshe Shelley, Preface to The Revolt of Islam (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1818), pp. viii–ix. 28. Brian Wilkie and Mary Lynn Johnson, Blake’s Four Zoas: The Design of a Dream (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 43. 29. This might explain why France’s emanation is called ‘Shiloh’ (J55:29, E204), which was the name of the Messiah to whom Joanna Southcott’s followers believed she would give birth in 1814 but who failed to appear. 30. Burke, Reflections, p. 127. 31. Eric Gidal, ‘Civic Melancholy: English Gloom and French Enlightenment’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 37 (2003), 23–45. For English gravity, materialism, taciturnity, and xenophobia, see Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character 1650–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 56–64, 73–82, 175–84, 219–25. 32. George Cheyne, The English Malady: or, A treatise of nervous diseases of all kinds (London: G. Strahan, 1733). 33. Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, Basic Writings (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 243–55, at pp. 253–4. 34. See Alexandra Franklin and Mark Philp, Napoleon and the Invasion of Britain (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2003), pp. 98–9. 35. This may echo the famous distinction in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense: Addressed to the Inhabitants of America (Philadelphia: R. Bell, 1776), p. 1. 36. Karen Swann, ‘Blake’s Jerusalem: Friendship with Albion’, in Charles Mahoney (ed.) A Companion to Romantic Poetry (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 538–53, at p. 539. 37. Wright, Blake, Nationalism, p. 115.

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38. Denise Gigante, ‘Blake’s Living Form’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 63 (2009), 461–85, at 463, 473. 39. See S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973), p. 411; and Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden; Part II: The Loves of the Plants (London: Joseph Johnson, 1791), pp. 115–6 (3:237–54), and pp. 188–94. 40. Whereas for Wright, Blake, Nationalism, pp. 158 and 165, Blake’s ‘Fibres of love’ are ‘structurally similar’ to the Polypus, my analysis suggests important differences between two forms of growth. Blake’s imagery foregrounds their confusability, as with the merging of Jerusalem and Vala.

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chapter 15

Jane Austen and the modern home Gary Kelly

Jane Austen used ‘home’ hundreds of times and represented dozens of homes in her novels. In this she was addressing her time.1 In the Romantic onset of modernity, home as idea and actuality became increasingly important and controversial. For many, home maintained its historic functions as the principal space for biological, cultural, and economic reproduction of the family; centre of its household, community, professional, and other networks; and symbol of its social and cultural status and financial credit. But for increasing numbers, home also acquired new significance as the site for making, nurturing, educating, and repairing the self-reflexive subject capable of ‘pure’ relationships of disinterested love, intimacy, domesticity, friendship, and sociability, and hence able to engage successfully with the ‘consequences of modernity’.2 These included increasing dependence on abstract systems from banking to government, and heightened relations of risk and trust, need to understand new chronotopes or representations of time and space, and ability to disembed from ‘unmodern’ identities, relationships, and networks and re-embed in ‘modern’ ones. What made a home modern was debated in an extensive literature on every aspect: from landscaping, architecture, decoration, and furnishings through provision of material and physical comforts, and financial and social management, to moral, intellectual, cultural, religious, and ethical life and practice, and the roles of men and women. Much of this debate was popularized in the ‘modern novel’, so called, especially the identity-mystery romance.3 Here, the protagonist learns to practise modern self-reflexive subjectivity by being disembedded from home, traversing unfamiliar chronotopes, undertaking relationships of risk and trust, grappling with abstract systems such as the law and property, forming ‘pure’ or disinterested though intense relationships, and re-embedding in a modern home of his and her own. This mythic form was commercialized, relentlessly varied, widely circulated, and persistent, suggesting that its readership of predominantly middle-class agents 219

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of modernization took it to address their situation as self-consciously meritorious subjects contesting an unmodernized or ‘erroneously’ modernized order and aspiring to modernize it in their own interests. Austen was an observant, informed, and professionally interested novel reader, and her novelistic practice developed critically all aspects of the identity-mystery romance, including its representation of home, in several ways. Her novels’ thematics of modernization is largely elaborated through their representation of homes and networks of homes. Her novels’ moral and ethical character typology is largely developed through characters’ perception of and relationship to the homes they inhabit and visit, and according to their ideas of modernity. For this purpose, the novels make distinctive use of the recently developed technique of free indirect narrative discourse, or representation of characters’ inner speech and thought with third-person narration, to represent homes both personally, from certain characters’ perspectives, and critically, from the omniscient narrator’s perspective. The novels compare and contrast these homes as differentially modern or unmodern, and hence variously formative and expressive of their owners and inhabitants as individual subjects and as participants in domestic and social relationships. The novels’ homes implicitly form networks synecdochic of nation and empire in a global contest of modernization reaching its crisis just as these novels were being published. The novels formalize home as part and scene of this struggle by representing home ironically – defamiliarized, estranged, revisioned, misperceived, relative to other homes, or contrary to expectations. The novels implicate the reader in such irony through use of free indirect narration, purposefully blurring characters’ and narrators’ ‘voices’, now merging and now separating them, drawing the reader into the novels’ representation of a character’s enactment and acquisition of self-reflexive modern identity relative to the implied and implicitly modern consciousness of the narrator. Use of irony with free indirect discourse participates in the novels’ larger strategy of enforcing on protagonists and hence engaging readers with a form of the critical self-reflexiveness central to formation of the subject in and for a certain version of modernity. For this purpose, the novels thematize the role of reading and particularly novel-reading in forming the kind of modern subject Austen’s novels model, perform, and promote. This triangulation of modernity, reading, and home is strikingly illustrated in Northanger Abbey, Austen’s first completed and sold but last published novel, and named (though not by Austen) after a home. Northanger Abbey is well known in literary history for its narrator’s defence of novels, novel-writing, and novel-reading (30–1, 1.54), and it advertises

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itself as a reader’s test from its first page, humorously indicating the ways in which it is not a romance, its protagonist not a heroine, and so on. The structure of the identity-mystery romance is greatly varied without being abandoned, as the seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland is not forced from her home at the outset but willingly accompanies family friends for six weeks residence in Bath, a fashionable spa and resort, and hence apt chronotope of modernity’s transience, instability, and transformative power, for better and worse. Catherine’s encounters, adventures, and relationships here test her intellect, feelings, and self-awareness. In this testing she relies on her manifest good nature but calls for assistance with her reading, especially those manuals of modernity – novels – and particularly Gothic novels and novels of manners, sentiment, and emulation. The novel’s particular reading reference is the chronotope comprising castles dangerous, ruins perilous, and cottages uncanny deployed in the contemporary Gothic novel, such as those specifically mentioned in Northanger Abbey. It is in the novel’s eponymous and most fully represented and prominent home that Catherine spends over a quarter of the novel’s chapters as a guest and undergoes her severest test as a modern subject, a test from which she emerges a more fully formed modern subject. Northanger Abbey, as its name suggests, was a medieval religious house, now converted into a thoroughly, and for Catherine disappointingly, modernized home. As such, it is a chronotope of English history and the contradictions and ambiguities, disruptions and continuities, of modernization. Catherine tries but fails to read this home Gothico-novelistically and instead reads its owner that way, as the secret abuser and murderer of his wife, a conclusion with which the reader, through the semi-transparency of free indirect narration, may sympathize. Catherine’s admirer Henry Tilney’s consequent rebuke thus addresses both Catherine and the reader: Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. . .. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? (p. 203, 2.9)

To Henry, what Catherine and the reader have imagined cannot happen in a modern home in the modernized England rapidly sketched here. Catherine soon agrees, and the reader likely concurs, but both are again

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wrong: if not a Gothic villain, General Tilney turns out to be a domestic despot. Ironically, his obsession with modernizing his house and advancing his social status has driven him to create an unmodern home, insisting his children marry for money and social connections, and not the modern subjective absolute of love as a ‘pure’ relationship. This irony is made clear when the General ejects Catherine from his house for having an insufficient dowry and, trebly ungallantly considering his profession, sex, and standing as Catherine’s host, sends her home alone and unprotected. Ironically, in another adaptation of the identity-mystery romance, Catherine’s involuntary disembedding from her temporary home and courageous and successful negotiation of the journey to her family home prove that she has begun to acquire modern autonomous selfhood, an acquisition ironically accelerated by the General’s action. The irony is doubled when Catherine, on return to her family’s much more modest house, and basking in their love, realizes that it is superior as a home to Northanger Abbey. The final irony is that the General’s unmodern act of domestic despotism precipitates his son’s proposal to Catherine, and in their marriage the creation of a new home at his vicarage of Woodston, which earlier, and when Catherine was in his good graces, the General had invited her to imagine ‘improving’. In this characteristic Austenian closure, compatible with the Anglican theological doctrine of Austen’s family faith, from evil cometh good. Sense and Sensibility deploys a variation on the initiation phase of the identity-mystery romance, in which a character’s disembedding is forced by the landed class’s practice of entailing the family estate on the nearest male relative, which Austen’s novels represent as an obstructive vestige of unmodernity and which recurs in Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion. Early in Sense and Sensibility Mrs Dashwood and her three daughters leave their lifelong home of Norland Park, Sussex, following the death of Mr Dashwood and possession by the heir, her grasping stepson John, and his condescending wife Fanny. The Dashwood women re-embed in Barton cottage, Devonshire, which becomes the centre of the novel’s action and relationships, and its major representative of the modern home. Furthermore, rather than experiencing testing and reformative adventures on the road, these adventures and tests come to and mostly happen about this home. Ironically, however, Barton cottage has little inherent meaning, in the course of the novel coming to mean different things to different characters according to their interests. To Mrs Dashwood and her three daughters, it is a welcome refuge after virtual expulsion from Norland Park. Generously offered at low rent by its owner,

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Barton cottage is a respectable home that Mrs Dashwood, as a widow, can afford. As a ‘cottage’, and sight unseen, it first suggests to its prospective occupants, and probably to the reader, a favourite chronotope of the culture of Sensibility: the retired but cultivated home of modern subjectivity and ‘pure’ domestic and social relationships. It turns out, however, to be called a ‘cottage’ as the dependent property of a manor-house, Barton Park, and to be an unromantically substantial but unremarkable modern building suitable for a tenant farmer or estate steward.5 Accordingly, to Mrs Dashwood it is also on first sight an opportunity to imagine ‘improving’ (pp. 34–5, 1.6) by enlarging and embellishing, ironically to recapture something of the lost grandeur of Norland Park. Unlikely to be able to afford such modernization, however, Mrs Dashwood and her daughters ‘were wise enough to be contented with the house as it was’, and they endeavour, ‘by placing around them their books and other possessions, to form themselves a home’ (p. 35). Paradoxically and provocatively, this ‘cottage’, and not one of the grand manors, is the novel’s signifying centre. New relationships formed in and from it create new meanings for it. On one hand is the comic exchange between the ill-matched couple Mr and Mrs Palmer on first visiting the Dashwoods at the cottage. Mrs Palmer exclaims with characteristic hyperbole, ‘what a delightful room this is! I never saw anything so charming!. . . how it is improved since I was here last!. . . How I should like such a house for myself!’ (pp. 123–4, 1.19). She asks her husband to agree, but as usual he ignores her and on leaving ‘only observed, after again examining the room, that it was very low pitched, and that the ceiling was crooked’ (p. 125). On the other hand is Willoughby’s characteristically self-centred, extravagant, and insinuating response when Mrs Dashwood again imagines ‘improvements’. ‘“What!” he exclaimed—“Improve this dear cottage! No. That I will never consent to. Not a stone must be added to its walls, not an inch to its size, if my feelings are regarded.”’ Barton cottage is, he declares, ‘faultless’, indeed ‘the only form of building in which happiness is attainable’, and, against Elinor’s amused scepticism, he insists that if he were richer he would demolish his own manor house and build a copy of Barton cottage as the only home in which he could be happy. Through extravagant praise of Barton cottage, Willoughby obviously implies what he dare not declare: his desire, genuine enough but eventually trumped by his desire for money and status, for a home with Marianne (pp. 84–5, 1.14). Pride and Prejudice sharpens its predecessors’ variations on the identitymystery romance related to the modern home. Representations of homes, in a more elaborate and interrelated network, are more detailed. How

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homes variously and contrastingly form and express their owners and inhabitants is more explicit, as is the place of the modern home in the chronotope of nation and empire. But again the destabilizing effect on homes of the practice of entailing estates is foregrounded and reinforced by making home rather than ‘the road’ the site of identity formation and character-testing adventures. Like Norland Park in Sense and Sensibility, Longbourn estate produces the family’s income, both sustaining and symbolizing its social status. But Longbourn is entailed to a male heir, which Mr and Mrs Bennet have failed to produce, leaving their daughters dependent on marriage for a respectable ‘establishment’, or home of material comfort and social consequence. The Bennets also failed to achieve modern conjugality. He married for beauty, receiving little property with his wife for bolstering dowries and hence achieving better matches for their five daughters. She is recognizably the unmodern ‘notable’ woman, skilled in domestic artisanship and family interest but lacking the informed and self-reflexive subjectivity thought necessary to sustain modern ‘pure’ family relationships, prudent domestic economy, properly modern intellectual and subjective formation of her daughters, and classappropriate social and cultural respectability for her family, frequently remarked on by other characters. The character of the modern home is elaborated through representation of a network of homes extending from Longbourn. Significantly, Jane and Elizabeth Bennet spent much time and seem to have been formed subjectively in their uncle and aunt Gardiner’s home in Gracechurch street, London, centre of the nation’s and empire’s commercial capital. Gardiner is in ‘trade’ and lives in sight of his warehouses, and is hence ungenteel in the snobs’ opinion; but his trade is ‘respectable’, the Gardiners are cultivated, their children are a rare instance in Austen’s novels of well-behaved shyness, and their home is elegant and tasteful. By contrast, Lucas Lodge near Longbourn was so named to advertise his social ascent by its owner Sir William Lucas, also in ‘trade’ but knighted for local civic services; in fact, Lucas Lodge proclaims its owner’s self-importance, disdain for the means that enabled his material and social ascent, and pretensions to genteel status and courtly manners. Ironic reversal of expectation characterizes representation of Hunsford rectory, home of Collins and his wife Charlotte, Elizabeth’s cultivated friend and Sir William’s daughter. She married a man she knew to be a fool, for an ‘establishment’ rather than the modern ‘pure’ relationship of love, and Hunsford has the further disadvantage of proximity to Rosings, pompously decorated home (p. 84, 1.16) of the overbearing Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Accordingly, Elizabeth (and

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hence the reader) expects to find Hunsford a domestic hell, but Charlotte has so arranged Hunsford’s rooms, domestic economy, and relations with Rosings as to secure her privacy, subjective autonomy, and dignity (pp. 176–8, 2.5; p. 189, 2.6). If Longbourn centres the plot and action of the novel, Darcy’s Pemberley centres its version of modernity. Pemberley is discussed briefly but resonantly early in the novel but, characteristically, fuller representation occurs after that of other homes, augmenting by contrast Pemberley’s qualities as exemplary and mythic modern home, validated through character interaction and more largely through protagonist-centred use of free indirect narration. Pemberley as chronotope of the modern nation is constructed in terms of what many, including Austen, apparently, considered the best and distinctively English taste in architecture, landscaping, and furnishing associated with Humphry Repton, modernizing and harmonizing with what already existed. More importantly, the novel politicizes Pemberley’s aesthetic attributes by extending them to the moral, ethical, and cultural values embodied in its owner, implied in similar language and tropes applied to both and anticipated early in the novel, significantly, in a discussion of reading. When Caroline Bingley fawningly praises Pemberley’s library, Darcy responds that ‘It ought to be good’ because ‘it has been the work of many generations.’ Complimented again for augmenting it, he declares, ‘I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these’ (p. 41, 1.8), linking the state of home libraries to the state of the nation undergoing modernization in a Burkean chronotope of modernity as ideally the continuation, augmentation, and application to the present of ‘the work of many generations’. The role of women in such modernity was widely debated at the time, and in Austen’s novels. So when, a few pages later, discussion turns to female ‘accomplishments’, which Caroline maliciously defines in terms of social caste thus implicitly disqualifying Elizabeth, Darcy responds that to these the ‘accomplished’ woman ‘must add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading’ (p. 43). This the novel shows Elizabeth to have acquired, implying her suitability to be what she later imagines herself to be and at the close becomes: ‘the mistress of Pemberley’. ‘Improvement’ was commonly used for modernization in Austen’s period.6 ‘Improvement’, well-conceived or misguided, proper or improper, appropriate or inappropriate, social and economic, technological and commercial, political and intellectual, spiritual or cultural recurs throughout Austen’s novels but most prominently in Mansfield Park. Here

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‘improvement’ thematizes the difference between foolishly and sensibly modern characters, and between inadequately, excessively, or appropriately modern homes. In a characteristically ironic reversal from its predecessor, Mansfield Park centres on an apparently flourishing but actually dysfunctional Pemberley, insufficiently modernized and hence vulnerable to excessive and mistaken modernization, and producing and attracting excessive and mistaken modernizers. For, like Mr and Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram are unmodernly ill-matched, for similar reasons and with similar effects on their children, though rather than ‘notable’ (the role of her sister, Mrs Norris) Lady Bertram is indolent. Mansfield Park sharpens this representation of home by using the perspective of a familiar character type in identity-mystery romance, the orphan in ‘exile’. As in Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion, other characters misprize and marginalize the protagonist for much of the novel, but free indirect narration makes her perspective the novel’s moral and ethical centre, and estranges Mansfield Park and its unmodernized or falsely modernized world for the reader, as with Catherine at Northanger Abbey and, differently, Elizabeth at Pemberley. Like Elizabeth, Fanny is gradually created as a properly modern female subject awaiting the properly modern home the reader knows she merits. Having arrived at Mansfield Park in the second chapter, Fanny is ‘[a] fraid of every body, ashamed of herself, and longing for the home she had left’ (p. 14, 1.2), and ‘to these sorrows was added the idea of the brothers and sisters among whom she had always been important as play-fellow, instructress, and nurse’ (p. 16). The grandeur of the house astonished, but could not console her. The rooms were too large for her to move in with ease; whatever she touched she expected to injure, and she crept about in constant terror of something or other, often retreating towards her own chamber to cry. (p. 16)

Even Fanny’s unsympathetic aunt Norris denies ‘that her being sorry to leave her home is really against her, for, with all its faults, it was her home, and she cannot understand as yet how much she has changed for the better’ (p. 15). Thanks to the Bertrams’ younger son, Edmund, who can perceive her subjective merit, she gradually becomes ‘more comfortable’ (p. 19) and learns ‘to transfer’ in Mansfield Park’s ‘favour much of her attachment to her former home’ (p. 22), so that, ironically, when forced late in the novel to return to her parents’ home in Portsmouth she becomes painfully aware of its and their unmodern deficiencies. The novel’s plot, again ironically, bears out Fanny’s initial perception of Mansfield Park’s unhomeliness,

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exposes the excessive or mistaken modernity pursued by other characters in their homes, and closes with Fanny and Edmund home-making at his vicarage and, ironically again, recognized as the moral and ethical centre of Mansfield Park, thanks to her conventional female and Christian virtues of patience, forbearance, and endurance combined with modern knowledge and culture – Austen’s recurring formulation of women’s role in modernity. Accordingly, the novel could well have been titled Fanny, but the published title is more apt. Like its predecessors, Mansfield Park figures the home as the battleground of contending modernities in which women have a major role for good or ill, and argues that modernity unguided by certain moral, ethical, and spiritual principles is dangerous and destructive. The novel’s avid modernizers (the Crawfords, Rushworth, Maria Bertram, Yates) cause or come to mischief, while those subjectively disciplined (Edmund and Fanny), here with religion’s aid, make a happy home able, the closure suggests, to properly modernize Mansfield Park. The novel is largely set in its eponymous home and homes connected with it, and concerns the kinds of subjects they form and the relationships they encourage, for better and worse. Again, most of the character-testing adventures of the identity-mystery romance are brought into these homes, especially Mansfield Park, Sotherton Court, Thornton Lacey, and the Prices’ home in Portsmouth, represented from different characters’ perspectives and interests. Like Austen’s other novels but more fully and sharply, Mansfield Park represents various versions of the chronotope of home, contrasts them with each other, converges such representations with management of narration, uses ironic reversal of expectations experienced by the protagonist and hence the reader, treats good and bad ‘improvement’ of home and estate as a synecdoche for modernization more broadly, and suggests that the particular modernity of the nation’s homes is symptomatic of the ability of nation and empire to defeat an apparently more radically and totalizingly modernizing global rival. Emma’s first sentence contains ‘home’, but here home is more a network in and about the ‘large and populous village, almost amounting to a town’ of Highbury (p. 5, 1.1). Highbury recalls Meryton in Pride and Prejudice, anticipates Sanditon in Austen’s unfinished last novel, and participates in the proliferating town– and village-writing spurred by modern urbanization, commercialization, and redevelopment. Factual chorographies noted architectural, social, cultural, political, economic, and institutional remains of unmodernity set against accessions of modernity for better and worse. Fictional verse and prose chorographies similarly illustrated

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modernization of the local for better and worse, as in The Parish Register and The Borough (1810) by one of Austen’s favourite poets, George Crabbe. Austen herself declared that for a novelist ‘3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on’,7 while soon after Austen’s death Mary Mitford’s enduringly popular ‘sketches’ Our Village expanded that project, celebrating Austen’s representation of the village, probably Highbury, on its first page. The sociotopography of Highbury as home is elaborated from Emma’s outset, in terms of relationships that are both unmodernly hierarchical and modernly sociable. Highbury’s homes vary accordingly. Pre-eminent is Hartfield, Emma’s and her father’s home and hub of the novel’s sociability, which, despite ‘its separate lawn, and shrubberies, and name, did really belong’ to Highbury. Here ‘the Woodhouses had been settled for several generations’ as ‘the younger branch of a very ancient family’, with considerable wealth but ‘inconsiderable’ landed property, with correspondingly ‘small, but neat and pretty grounds’ and a ‘modern and well-built house’. The Coles, though ‘settled some years in Highbury’ and ‘friendly, liberal, and unpretending’, are ‘of low origin, in trade, and only moderately genteel’, but modernization recently brought ‘considerable increase of means’ with corresponding increase of ‘views’: ‘They added to their house, to their number of servants, to their expenses of every sort; and by this time were, in fortune and style of living, second only to the family at Hartfield’ (p. 223, 2.7). The as yet unmarried clergyman Elton has a ‘not large’ and ‘old and not very good’ vicarage, which he has, however, ‘very much smartened up’ (p. 89, 1.10) or modernized for a future Mrs Elton who soon materializes. Randalls, the ‘little estate adjoining Highbury’ (p. 14, 1.2), was long desired by Mr Weston, husband of Emma’s former governess, and eventually acquired through his diligence in ‘trade’, to become ‘the centre of every domestic comfort’ (p. 17) – a major value of commercialized modernity. Humblest is the home of the Bateses, who live ‘in a very small way’ in the rented ‘drawing-room floor’ of a house belonging to ‘people in business’ which, however, ‘was every thing to them’ (p. 20, 1.3). Nearby and illustrating interdependence of town and country are two homes. Robert Martin tenants Knightley’s property of Abbey Mill farm with its homely pleasures (including modern if downmarket books), longingly described by Harriet Smith (1.4), disdained by Emma, but eventually Harriet’s home. The novel’s ideal home, however, again described late for impact and ‘about a mile from Highbury’ (p. 8, 1.1), is Knightley’s estate and manor house of Donwell Abbey, powerfully represented through free indirect narration as essentially, exemplarily,

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and emphatically ‘English’ (p. 391, 3.6). Farther afield, in Brunswick Square, London, and undescribed but socially and culturally significant in the novel, is the home of Emma’s sister Isabella and her husband John Knightley, lawyer and younger brother of Donwell’s owner. Recently built, Brunswick Square was known for modest modern elegance and well-to-do professional residents, and named after Princess Caroline of Brunswick, scandalous and estranged consort of the novel’s dedicatee, the Prince Regent, notoriously an excessive modernizer of ancient royal homes and builder of controversially un-English new ones. The proximity of the novel’s homes facilitates the central theme of modern sociability mediating unmodern if inevitable social distinctions. Through the chronotope of a ‘populous village, almost amounting to a town’ rather than a rural stately home, country cottage, or metropolis, Emma can foreground, more than its predecessors, modern sociability as the local formation, maintenance, and reproduction of ‘pure’ or disinterested relationships in a semi-private, semi-public sphere implicitly constituting the modern nation-state. This implication is humorously indicated by the newcomer Frank Churchill’s intention to ‘prove myself to belong to the place, to be a true citizen of Highbury’ by buying ‘something’ at Ford’s, Highbury’s ‘principal woollen-draper, linen-draper, and haberdasher’s shop united’: ‘It will be taking out my freedom’ (p. 215, 2.6), or ‘right of participating in the privileges attached to citizenship of a town or city’.8 Accordingly, the novel could well have been titled Highbury, but the published title was again critically apt. For women’s role in creating, sustaining, and guiding sociability as a specifically modern and modernizing practice had been debated for several generations and exemplified in theory by David Hume’s widely read essays on civil society, in practice by Elizabeth Montagu’s much-discussed ‘Bluestocking circle’, and in literature through Austen’s chosen genre of the widely read novel of manners, sentiment, and emulation as the manual for modernity. Emma’s protagonist illustrates the danger of such power if misguided or unguided and insufficiently or incorrectly modern. Unlike its predecessor and successor, Emma presents a protagonist who enjoys social prominence, but reads and reflects little and consequently misprizes and misunderstands herself and others, and impulsively, repeatedly, and almost disastrously tries to ‘manage’ them and herself. She does so by manipulating a sociability she presumes to dominate so as to establish couples she aims to arrange in homes she considers appropriate. These limitations are highlighted by contrast with a better version in the retiring Jane Fairfax, a worse version in the interfering Mrs Elton, and an unformed

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version in the impressionable Harriet Smith. But free indirect narration makes Emma, not them, the novel’s exemplary self-reflexive subject progressing to proper modernity, marked by her (and simultaneously her readers’) recognition that she should accept the Coles’ invitation, that she doesn’t love Frank Churchill, that she erred in humiliating Miss Bates, that she unwittingly misled Harriet and tormented Jane Fairfax, and, most critically, that she should allow Knightley to confide in her whatever he wished, which turns out to be to marry her. Like all Austen’s protagonists, Emma has the saving grace – the religious implication matters – of acquiring the self-reflection that constitutes the modern subject able to form ‘pure’ relationships of intimacy, conjugality, domesticity, sociability, community, and nation. Ironically, at the closure, circumstances leave the newlywed Knightleys voluntarily exiled, until her father’s death, from the mythic modern home, Donwell Abbey. Persuasion, like its predecessors, uses homes to represent modernity as a field of struggle, now paradoxically intensified by the apparent conclusion in 1814 of Britain’s long struggle against its rival in modernization for global power. Again the novel’s homes are linked by family or friendship, situated in country and town, and spread across several English counties, but the representation is now sharpened by the quest for homes by heroes, here navy-men. The navy, besides including two of Austen’s brothers, represented modernity in requiring modern knowledges, being open to merit, and leading Britain’s military triumph, despite the corruption, incompetence, and resistance to modernization of the nation’s military, political, and social ruling class.9 Significantly, Sir Walter Elliot, the novel’s most prominent representative of this class and another of Austen’s satirical versions of her novels’ admirer the Prince Regent, disdains the navy as liable to ruin a man’s complexion by sea air and to raise commoners by wealth acquired as spoils of war. Sir Walter’s daughter Anne, the novel’s protagonist, views the navy-men quite differently. She loves Captain Wentworth, now enriched by such spoils and seeking a wife and home, but earlier rejected by her on grounds of prudence pushed by her mentor and late mother’s friend Lady Russell. Anne admires the humble but modern home of the disabled but happily domesticated Captain Harville. And she counsels Captain Benwick against excessive modern subjectivity as he indulges grief for his recently deceased fiancée by reading Romantic poets, but surprisingly finds a wife despite himself. Anne’s is also the principal perspective through which all of the novel’s homes are viewed. For, in a variation of the identitymystery romance, she is at the outset expelled from her beloved family

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home and forced to traverse a succession of variously modern and unmodern homes of others. Though little of Persuasion passes at Kellynch, Sir Walter’s ancestral ‘seat’ (p. 4, 1.1), it is the novel’s symbolically central home, its unstable leadership and uncertain future a synecdoche for the nation’s. Like Longbourn in Pride and Prejudice, Kellynch is entailed to a male heir. This Sir Walter failed to produce, leaving the ambitious William Elliot as ‘heir presumptive’. Worse, unlike Collins in Pride and Prejudice, instead of compensating for this accident of mortality by marrying Sir Walter’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, William ‘had purchased independence by uniting himself to a rich woman of inferior birth’ now deceased; hence he cares nothing for Kellynch, and seems likely to sell on inheriting it. Worse still, Sir Walter is governed by unmodern caste-consciousness and falsely modern self-centredness, leaving Kellynch saddled with debt, requiring that it be sold or rented. Like Longbourn and Mansfield Park, Kellynch houses a family dangerously ill-equipped for modernity because of a marriage for beauty alone, though here by the wife. Thanks to the late Lady Elliot’s ‘youthful infatuation’ with the ‘remarkably handsome’ young Sir Walter, he gained ‘a wife of very superior character to any thing deserved by his own’ (p. 4, 1.1), who guided the family while she lived. Free indirect narration discloses that Sir Walter’s middle daughter Anne is the moral and ethical heir of Kellynch, but she is regarded by her father and sisters as ‘nobody’ and ‘only Anne’ (p. 6, 1.1). Through the identity-mystery romance device of adventures on the road, here the traversal of a series of homes, Persuasion emplots Anne’s testing and demonstrating of the properly modern subjectivity that qualifies her to become the actual heir of Kellynch. There is the nearby ill-managed home of Sir Walter’s snobbish and domestically incompetent youngest daughter Mary and her lazy husband Charles Musgrove, once Anne’s suitor, and so once a possible home for her, and where she strives to alleviate the domestic disorder and disharmony. There is the disabled Captain Harville and his family’s humble home in Lyme with its ingenious contrivances for domestic convenience and comfort, effectively (and symbolically) transferring the navy-man’s military practicality and modern technical know-how to peace-time home use. Here Anne finds a hominess and sociability lacking in Kellynch and a prospect of what a modern home with Wentworth could be. And in the fashionable spa-town of Bath, scene of ten of the novel’s twenty-four chapters, Anne traverses a set of homes carefully discriminated according to quality, cost, and social status, from Sir

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Walter’s extravagant apartments and Lady Dalrymple’s grand dwelling to the humble lodging of Anne’s friend Mrs Smith, which she prefers to the empty grandeur of the others.10 Incapable of modern ‘pure’ relationships, Sir Walter disdains Mrs Smith and her downmarket home and is angered at Anne’s preference for it, but here Anne learns of Walter Elliot’s schemes to block Sir Walter’s remarriage and possible fathering of a male heir for Kellynch, schemes that include openly admiring Anne, thereby raising the possibility, encouraged by Anne’s mentor Lady Russell, of her becoming mistress of Kellynch through marriage to its ‘heir presumptive’. Intrigued by but unable to love Elliot, Anne rejects even the possibility. Anne’s modern subjectivity enables her to endure and triumph over neglect, disdain, and even feigned admiration, as the schemers once again effect their own discomfiture, restoring Anne and Wentworth to their formerly ‘pure’ relationship and in prospect of forming their own, properly modern home, although it is unspecified in the novel and shadowed by the possible renewal of war. Austen wrote when home, in several senses, was in crisis, undergoing a revolution as a field of struggle between contending interests in the onset of modernity. The ‘home’ of and in that struggle could be a nation, locale, town, property, estate, house, dwelling, power-base, social network, culture, literal and metaphorical place of greatest physical and subjective security or vulnerability, or combination of these. At the same time, there was a major and related transformation in the novel. Austen’s novels represented the homes of the modernizing revolution, while promoting a certain version of it, certain interests, and a certain modernity against others, by using recent novelistic techniques in a way that was becoming and would remain dominant. The kind of modern home Austen represented, in the double sense of ‘depicted’ and ‘spoke for’, became an ideal and norm for certain kinds of people, down to the present. Further, the way Austen thematized and enjoined a certain kind of reading as a major technology for forming a certain version of the modern subject made her novels ‘classics’ eligible for several kinds of use and display in a certain kind of modern home. Austen’s reward, though posthumous, was for her novels to become part of both the culture and the furniture of many modern homes from the Romantic onset of modernity to today, from the 1830s Bentley’s Standard Novels edition that enabled the Victorian creation of ‘Austen’ as a modern classic to the 2010s Knickerbocker Classics and similar editions that indicate ‘Austen’s’ continuing usefulness to many in today’s late modernity.11

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Notes 1. S. M. Abdul Khaleque, ‘Jane Austen’s Idea of a Home’, Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal On-Line, 26.1 (Winter 2005), n.p. 2. See Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). 3. Gary Kelly, ‘Romantic Fiction’, in Stuart Curran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction, 2nd edn (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 187–208. 4. All references are to the novels’ texts in Janet Todd (gen. ed.), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), by page number, and by volume and chapter number. 5. See Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. Edward Copeland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 445 n2. 6. See Alistair Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). 7. ‘Jane Austen to Anna Austen, 9 Sept. 1814’, in Deirdre Le Faye (ed.), Jane Austen’s Letters, 3rd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 275. 8. OED Online, s.v. ‘freedom, n.’, accessed January 19 2015, www.oed.com/vi ew/entry/74395?rskey=b40QVf&result=1&isAdvanced=false. 9. See Brian Southam, Jane Austen and the Navy (London: Hambledon, 2003). 10. Keiko Parker, ‘“What Part of Bath Do You Think They Will Settle In?”: Jane Austen’s Use of Bath in Persuasion’, Persuasions: Journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America 23 (2001), 166–76. 11. See Gillian Dow and Clare Hanson (eds.), Uses of Jane Austen: Jane’s Afterlives (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

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chapter 16

‘All things have a home but one’: exile and aspiration, pastoral and political in Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy and Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘To Autumn’ Geoffrey Payne

The Mask of Anarchy was Shelley’s most immediate poetical response to the national crisis that surrounded the infamous ‘Peterloo’ massacre of 1819, written with the ‘torrent of [his] indignation [. . .] boiling in [his] veins’.1 Although not an isolated event, Peterloo served as a symbol for the type of nation that had emerged from the defeat of Bonaparte’s armies at Waterloo and inspired a reinvigorated debate about the shape that the nation was to take in Regency England.2 In the ensuing months and years, as James Chandler has observed, ‘the modes and means of national self-representation were contested in the most fundamental ways’.3 Shelley, an avid agitator for reform in both political and aesthetic spheres, sought strenuously to participate in determining new ways for representing the national sphere, though his dual roles of exiled émigré and social pariah undermined his ability to cast an influence upon contemporary audiences, as his poems largely failed to permeate beyond the narrow sphere of his literary circle. Regardless of its failure to reach a broad contemporary audience, the poem is indicative of Shelley’s thinking about new ways in which the nation could be imagined. This chapter aims to examine how The Mask of Anarchy participated in a process of re-visioning the nation through a revision of formal structures that had, in previous times, been used to suggest national cogency – specifically through his appropriation and reworking of motifs and themes drawn from the pastoral tradition. Comparing Shelley’s practices to those exhibited by Keats in the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘To Autumn’, it will argue that the younger generation of Romantic poets sought to authorize versions of the national homeland that would provide alternatives to the restrictive and exclusive nation that predominated under the Liverpool regime of the 1810s. 234

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Pastoral, of course, is a term that is in need of definition, as its use in current scholarly criticism takes a variety of forms. In the context of the present discussion, the term is linked to the first two kinds of usage identified by Terry Gifford, one arising from ‘the artifice of the specific literary form’ based upon Roman and Greek models from Classical antiquity, and the other a reference to ‘an area of content’ concerned with ‘literature that describes the country with an implicit or explicit contrast to the urban’.4 As was common for poets of their time, Shelley and Keats were acutely aware of the inherited poetic tradition in which they participated, and measured their successes by their abilities to innovate within formally recognizable frameworks.5 As a genre with a strong tradition among their literary heroes (especially in the works of Shakespeare and Milton), the pastoral presented as an appealing literary model for appropriation to modern uses despite its receiving criticism from writers such as Hugh Blair, who identified it as the genre ‘most meagre commonly in the subject, and the least diversified in the strain’.6 Perhaps spurred on by other critiques such as Hazlitt’s that identified an ill fit between England and the Pastoral,7 both poets utilized the genre in more or less obvious ways at various times throughout their poetical careers, though typically as features of poems composed upon hybrid generic systems.8 Pastoral works also help to determine the ideological structures that underpin a view of nationhood presented within texts. Hazlitt’s critique of the ‘ill fit’ between Arcadia and England depends upon our recognition that the Arcadian ideal was actually frequently employed to give a sense of definition to aspects of the national character. Such political dimensions of the pastoral can be brought into light by considering other facets of the pastoral paradigm, paying attention for instance to Gifford’s further observation that ‘pastoral can be a mode of political critique of present society, or [. . .] a dramatic form of unresolved dialogue about the tensions in that society, or it can be a retreat from politics into an apparently aesthetic landscape that is devoid of conflict and tension’.9 While acknowledging the truth of the formulation that sees pastoral as ‘essentially a discourse of retreat’, it is important to register that such retreats can function in different ways, facilitating either an ‘escape from the complexities of the city, the court, the present, “our manners” or promoting a venue to explore them’.10 Texts written in the pastoral tradition presuppose a corrupt world that is in need of recuperation and effects the narrative of redemption by deploying rural idylls, where courtly figures ‘learn to accommodate [their] courtly desires, notions, and manners to the “mean” condition of the country’.11 Such a formulation is suggestive of a

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mechanism that directs benefits from the margins to the centres of social life, but, as Susan Snyder identifies, the favoured structures of pastoral are infused by opposition and tension, governed by ‘complex interactions of artifice and nature’ and deriving power ‘from including, or being predicated upon, antipastoral elements’.12 At the heart of the pastoral dynamic, therefore, are sets of oppositions placed in tension and seeking dominance. The various categories delineated in such a manner include oppositions between artifice and nature and between innocence and experience as well as the opposition between urban and rural life. For the present discussion, however, the opposition between what constitutes true or false senses of nationhood will be subjected to scrutiny, especially insofar as a discourse of ‘home’ is used to privilege particular visions of Englishness in the poems under consideration. In choosing to represent the national crisis facing England by deploying tropes from the pastoral tradition, Shelley offers significant direction for understanding his vision for the nature of the national crisis of 1819 and of his vision for its resolution. The Mask of Anarchy elaborately explores the ‘manners’ of life exhibited by the classes who occupied England’s political centre by associating them with a process that is corruptive of a pastoral vision. He subjects them to scrutiny by that process, opening a pathway to potential change by juxtaposing those actions to a purer mode of pastoral vision that is embedded in the poem’s second visionary movement and by setting the discussion entirely within a simple framing device that is indicated in the speaker’s status as exile. A condition of exile serves as the base condition of The Mask of Anarchy, setting the oppositional dynamic of the pastoral mode in place from the outset, and from the opening stanza England is framed by the condition of the poet-persona’s exclusion from it. The trauma of the speaker’s exclusion demands a formal mechanical response, and produces the device of the dream vision that is employed to bridge the otherwise insurmountable gap between the speaker’s isolated position and the crisis unfolding at home. The speaker, ‘asleep in Italy’ (1), is situated in a dormant and passive position, removed from direct contact with the events that catalyse the national crisis.13 The disembodied voice of ‘great power’ (3) – by implication representative of the disturbed voice of England following Peterloo – becomes a motive trope that underpins the poem in a broader sense, and provides a clear contrast to the condition of the speaker’s dormancy. The effect is to shift the emphasis from the personal experience of the persona to a national signification, despite the poem’s action being clearly located in internal space via the internal idiosyncratic state of the dream vision.14

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The initial retreat from the condition of exile described in the poem projects the speaker into an anti-pastoral nightmare. Far from setting out a polished, idyllic Arcadian vision of natural plenitude, the poem instead depicts motifs and themes derived from the pastoral tradition in a pointedly negative form. The presentation emerges during the section of the poem that relates the triumphal progression of Anarchy as he cuts a swathe of murderous destruction across the land: With a pace stately and fast, Over English land he passed, Trampling to a mire of blood The adoring multitude. [. . .] And with glorious triumph they Rode through England proud and gay, Drunk as with intoxication Of the wine of desolation. O’er fields and towns, from sea to sea, Passed the Pageant swift and free, Tearing up, and trampling down, Till they came to London town: And each dweller, panic-stricken, Felt his heart with terror sicken Hearing the tempestuous cry Of the triumph of Anarchy.

(38–41; 46–57)

In these lines, important formal aspects of the pastoral mode are presented as distorted or corrupted via the triumph of Anarchy. The scene depicted preserves the trajectory of pastoral verse, enabling points on the rural margins of national life to bear influence upon life at the centre. Anarchy traverses terrain that is representative of the nation’s margins – moving from fields to towns (not cities), spanning the island’s borders from sea to sea – before turning to the metropolitan heartland in London. However, where conventional pastoral verse locates innocence at the margins that acts as a curative for a corrupt centre, in these lines the pasture itself is, quite literally, corrupted by the bloody actions of Anarchy’s ‘trampling’ (52) army, whose actions bear a clear resemblance to the forces who acted in the massacre at St Peter’s Field. The initial triumph of this anti-pastoral vision serves a desecrating function, sickening all ‘dwellers’ (54) in the nation with terror. In this sequence, as in the broader frame that depicts the triumph of Anarchy, pastoral elements are depicted as corrupted via their

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exploitation at the hands of tyrannical and abusive power. In the hands of the political elites that are inscribed in this vision, Arcadia is submerged ‘ankle-deep in blood’ (127), and Hope is extinguished. It is also, however, from the corrupted vision of Arcadia that new hope emerges. The second embedded vision that is opposed to the first sits within the oratory performance of England’s ‘own indignant Earth / Which gave the sons of England birth’ (139–40) and rises above the prostrate form of despairing Hope to redeem the nation from Anarchy’s oppressive regime. That second vision, too, introduces a critique of the national hegemony upon pastoral terms, proffering an incisive description of the exploitation and enslavement of the disenfranchised working classes. The poem shows workers to be positioned as subservient tools designed not for the pursuit of their own interests, but framed as servants of ‘Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade’ (165) that operate solely for the ‘defence and nourishment’ of Anarchy’s social elites. In an action that is pre-emptive of the consciousness-raising tactics of later Marxism, the speaker seeks to emphasize the constructed nature of the social order, combatting the apparent power of the exploitative regime with the interative construction of the power of the mob: ‘Ye are many, they are few’ (155, 372). That the mob is positioned as the true possessors of the English character is one of the poem’s significant revolutionary acts, shifting the emphasis upon a new mode of imagining the constitution of the national identity.15 It is in the second, embedded vision that the clearer (and purer) pastoral tropes occur, and by juxtaposing the ideal utopian dream that lies at the heart of the pastoral idyll with the corrupt nation instituted under Anarchy’s reign, the poem emphasizes the failure of that model to supply a viable national identity. The chief failure of the nightmarish vision of nationhood presented in the opening vision is emphasized via the absence of home that sits within the second vision’s pastoral dream in the line employed for this chapter’s title. Right at the poem’s heart, appearing just after the poem’s midpoint (lines 201–4 of 370 in total), Shelley mobilizes a fleeting, but unmistakable, pastoral image: Asses, swine, have litter spread And with fitting food are fed, All things have a home but one— Thou, Oh, Englishman, hast none!

The lines utilize an unmistakable pastoral trope: domesticated animals who are furnished with care in a nurturing idealized setting that contrasts with the experiences of those humans who occupy the centre of lived experience.16

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That role is filled, here, by the ‘Englishman’ who is denied the home that is made the defining characteristic of the idealized pastoral space that underpins the poem’s vision of England itself. Although the poem’s evocation of the absent home is presented in a fleeting moment, it does not appear in isolation and is embedded in a system of structures that reinforce the dynamics of the pastoral impetus. Surrounding the stanza quoted above are further figures that accentuate the poem’s engagement with the pastoral mode and modify its ability to convey a political message. The preceding stanza emphasizes the simplicity of the natural life by glancing at the satiety of birds in their nests or forest beasts in ‘woody lair’ (197–9), while the subsequent stanza highlights the ‘slavery’ (205) to which the English are subjected when compared to more natural beings: ‘[. . .] savage men, / Or wild beasts within a den / Would endure not as ye do’ (205–7). In a properly constituted England, built upon a system that prioritizes homely aspects of a pastoral idyll, the injustices endemic in the state of the nation can be overturned. The existence of a real pastoral world (naturally construed) emphasizes the injustice of the system that impedes the nation’s true owners from the possibility of participating in its wealth and in the comforts of home. To this extent, Shelley’s use of the pastoral imagery fulfils a relatively straightforward function. Arcadia exists as an absent presence, notionally at loggerheads with the exploitative and uneven nation that Shelley envisions in the Anarchy sections of the poem. The poem’s pastoral imagery serves to supply a formal possibility for an idealized national homeland that remains imaginable for the displaced Englishmen who have been deprived of their birthright. The poem exploits the tensions between states of innocence and experience that are endemic to all pastoral literature, and which are primarily mapped upon differences between urban and rural life, though also encompassing antitheses of nature and art, savagery and civilization, tyranny and liberty. Moreover, the dynamic of the second vision accords with the primary dynamic set out in the poem’s opening providing a figurative link between the exiled poet and those Englishmen living outside the centralized spheres of power, who are effectively exiled from an authentic national heritage. Like the ‘many’ members of the mob empowered by the poem, the pastoral motifs also supply the speaker with a means by which to enact a new system, despite his position as exile. Although the conditions of his exclusion from the political life of England are different in kind to those experienced by Shelley, Keats occupied a similar position of political and social isolation from the centres of the cultural establishment, even if he was not literally living in exile in the manner that Shelley was. For the speakers of Keats’s odes in particular,

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the ideal vision of England is as disparate from lived experience as for the speaker in Shelley’s Mask and is supported by a rendition of pastoral that operates in a similarly idealized manner. Unlike Shelley, however, Keats’s pastoral vision does not overtly respond to the national crisis elicited in response to the events at Peterloo, and instead presents a more subtle critique of a nation that excludes from its body those very figures upon whom its prosperity and happiness depends. Those figures emerge from within a set of pastoral images that recur in several poems, best exemplified by the rendition of the biblical figure of Ruth that appears overtly in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and more subtly in ‘To Autumn’. Even though Keats’s poetical responses to Peterloo are more subtle in their address than Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy, the poems he produced during 1819 are strongly evocative of the crisis that pervades his world. In particular, the odes upon which his reputation for posterity largely rests explore a world that is similarly structured to Shelley’s fractured England, exhibiting a strong division between the ideal worlds of poetic vision and the ‘actual’ worlds inhabited by speakers who feel the strength of their exclusion. The shape of the political vision expounded is also similarly dependent upon the forms chosen to express it, and the presence of pastoral motifs in a number of his odes is suggestive of a strong connection with the same kinds of formal thinking that has been discussed in relation to Shelley’s work. In contrast to the tumultuous surface of The Mask of Anarchy, ‘To Autumn’ presents a vision of an idyllic tranquil pastoral landscape. Each of its three stanzas focuses on presenting different aspects of rural life: the portrayal of the cottage garden in the opening stanza moving to a consideration of productive rural industry in stanza two and a more removed pastoral vision of ‘stubble-plains’ (26), ‘river sallows’ (28), and ‘hilly bourn’ (30) in stanza three.17 Aside from the personified elements of landscape and season, the world presented is devoid of human figures, suggestive of a similar type of exclusionary space that Shelley explores in his poem. The result is a curious mix: a pastoral retreat that typifies many traits attendant to the genre but undercut by its removal from the active spheres of human society. Several other features of the presentation also serve to unsettle the poem’s presentation of idyllic tranquillity. In studying the first stanza alone, we may identify elements that disturb the overwhelming sense of abundance and aesthetic beauty that are packed into its lines. Of particular significance are the elements that are suggestive of the duplicity or trickery involved in producing the sense of fruitful abundance that the cottage

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garden produces, whether the season’s conspiracy with the maturing sun (2–3), the deception of the bees into a belief that times of plenty will never end (10), or the cloying constitution of the ‘clammy cells’ (11) with which the stanza concludes. Such elements support the poem’s broad thematic engagement with notions of loss, change, and death. The third stanza’s focus on the ‘mournful’, ‘wailing’ qualities of the songs of Autumn (27) and the impending slaughter of the now full-grown lambs (30) amplify and extend the tonal disturbance of the pastoral idyll, helping to introduce the kind of dynamic tension between ideal and real experienced worlds that mark the pastoral qualities in The Mask of Anarchy that contribute to Shelley’s vision of an envisioned model for an aspirational national identity. As noted above, Keats’s political vision is embedded in the poem in more subtle ways than in Shelley’s poem, and, indeed, the notion that Keats’s poems encode a studied retreat from a political world remains a critical commonplace, although it is a position that simultaneously generates much critical debate.18 In recent times, discussions of the political dimensions of Keats’s poems have taken a prominent position in the community of Romantic scholarship, beginning with Jerome McGann’s provocative ‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’, which argued that one could not ignore the political even when approaching Keats’s apparently most apolitical ode, ‘To Autumn’.19 McGann’s subsequent argument that the poem’s political vision emerges from its attempts to articulate a retreat from the ‘real’ political world from which it emerges has been strongly challenged by more recent scholars, with the result that ‘To Autumn’ has become a significant staging ground for debates about the nature of a politicized Keats (if one accepts the possibility of his existence).20 Of especial interest for the argument of the present discussion are those articles that focus upon the pastoral elements of Keats’s poems and link them to a political frame. Andrew Bennett, for instance, focuses attention on the significance of the figure of the gleaner that appears in ‘To Autumn’, observing how the figure connects to a series of reports from Hunt’s Examiner that discuss the prosecution of rural workers for gleaning, a traditional practice in earlier times that had become criminalized under the auspices of the Corn Law passed in 1815.21 Bennett’s attention to the figure of the gleaner supplies a useful mechanism for connecting the vision presented in the Autumn ode with the figure of Ruth that appears in the penultimate stanza of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and for understanding the political nature of Keats’s national vision in a broader sense. There is a well-established pathway of scholarship examining connections between the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, the ode ‘To Autumn’, and the

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biblical Book of Ruth. As long ago as 1952, Frederick Gwynne observed a ‘touching homesickness’ (471) that Keats infuses into what he views as an otherwise straightforward employment of Ruth’s character towards the conclusion of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, and to the ‘less noticeable [. . .] but more organic’ use of Ruth in ‘To Autumn’ (471–2).22 In establishing the latter connection, Gwynne notes how the poem echoes the Biblical diction of Ruth, pointing to the coalescence of reapers, gleaners, winnowing, and threshing that populate both texts and similarly highlighting the ‘mellow fruitfulness’ of the biblical character, linked as she is to notions of ‘abundance and fruition’, all of which portend to the same kinds of pastoral interest as Shelley displays in The Mask of Anarchy. Where Gwynn’s article aims to exonerate ‘To Autumn’ from an accusation that it lacked ‘the sexual overtones present in all the other great odes’,23 our interest for the present discussion lies in the suggestive connection between Ruth’s homesickness in the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and her function in framing Keats’s vision of an English homeland in ‘To Autumn’. Keats’s use of Ruth in ‘To Autumn’ functions as part of a broader system of representation that interrogates official visions of the English homeland and recasts it in idealized terms that accord with an aspirational, visionary quality of his poetry, especially in the way that it engages with some of the troubling political issues that dominated England in 1819. Keats’s use of Ruth in ‘To Autumn’ is less overt than it is in the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, limited more to figurative, phraseological and thematic echoes than to a direct depiction as we encounter in the earlier poem. The recurrence of the pastoral idyll, however, which is presented even more clearly than in any of the other poems discussed, combined with the similar presence of the gleaning figure (who approximates Ruth’s function in ‘Ode to the Nightingale’) helps connect the poem to a national myth of home and revise and enrich the several approaches to reading the poem’s political nature that have been advanced by scholars of the poem in recent times. The more personal frame of Keats’s earlier lyrical ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ sets up a mechanism for reading the vision of home that he constructs in his later text. Of primary importance is the treatment that Keats gives to Ruth in order to convey a paradigm of home in ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ where the deployment of the figure has a sharpness of definition that allows a fair view of his use or interpretation of the myth that is heightened because of the limited scope of its insertion into the poem’s discourse. In the Nightingale ode, Ruth appears in the penultimate stanza, at the moment before the poem returns the speaker from his fanciful flights in the ideal world to the limited and limiting inanities of everyday ‘reality’,

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focusing upon the comforting, consoling nature of the nightingale’s song. Sitting at the point at which Pretap Biswas identifies as the beginning poem’s ‘second movement’, which sees a ‘total withdrawal from the world of fancy’,24 the motion of the poem seems to accord with oppositional dynamic of the poem, suggesting its engagement with the similar dynamics of conventional pastoral verse. In considering the detail of the presentation, however, new opportunities for understanding the political vision advanced by Keats may be revealed. The stanza is worth recounting in its entirety: Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days, by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

(61–70)

Here, it is of primary importance to register the transgressional nature of Keats’s invocation of Ruth, as he misrepresents the biblical original by inserting a new episode into the narrative and uses that invention to stand for the myth in its broad sense. At no point does the biblical Ruth stand in tears amid the corn pining for home and, to the contrary, the opening chapter of Ruth furnishes her most iconic characteristic as she rejects Naomi’s offer to allow her to return to her ancestral homeland, instead choosing to accompany Naomi back to Israel. The episode also supplies the passage that is arguably the most well-known text from the book, as Ruth espouses her philosophy of home with the words: ‘whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God’.25 When Gwynn looks at Keats’s figuration of Ruth, he casts it as an act of misprision, arguing that she is used to invest the poem with a quality of ‘touching’ homesickness or yearning that does not properly belong in the biblical source. Such a reading has predicated most recent attempts to explain Keats’s use of the myth,26 and is powerful because of the manner in which it registers how Keats takes liberties with the framing biblical narrative. However it is also a limited reading, as I will argue, because of its insistence upon the backward-looking nature of Ruth’s homesickness, and indeed, Gwynn’s use of the word ‘homesickness’ inserts a misleading

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and limiting reading of the situation, because of the term’s strong association with a nostalgic, backwards-looking form of longing.27 The idea that Keats does not understand the biblical original and unconsciously misrepresents it is, however, a fraught position, especially given his status as a careful reader who developed his religious knowledge as an adult, rather than a child, and who expressed particular interest in Ruth in other places. A sounder strategy develops from considering the ramifications of the depiction when viewed in the context of Keats’s presentation of other pastoral elements in his works. Offering a depiction of a woman standing in tears amid alien corn and longing for a lost idealized place of origin, Keats presents a woman who is alienated and, in that context, ‘sick’ from a lack of home, creating an absent ideal that impinges her present circumstances and must be made up through her actions.28 In the biblical narrative, Ruth fills this lack of home by embracing the customs and lifestyle of her chosen nation, and her participation in the harvest and its festival – as gleaner and then wife – precipitates her entry into the life of God’s chosen people. Far from exhibiting traces of a touching homesickness, Ruth embraces the potential for change and looks forward to the chance of forging a new homeland. The movement in the biblical text is both forward-looking and aspirational, serving not only the narrative trajectory of Ruth in isolation, but also serving the broader trajectory of the Old Testament books that drive towards the establishment of the Jewish homeland via David’s kingship and the building of the temple of Jerusalem by Solomon. The level of agency afforded to Ruth in the biblical narrative differentiates it from the majority of other paradigmatic myths of home that permeated the eighteenth-century thought-structures, whether drawn from the biblical tradition – dominated by myths of Eden, Exodus, and Promised Land – or from classical sources, especially in Homer’s Odyssey or any of the several accounts presenting myths of a Golden Age. Especially useful for Keats’s poem is the anthropocentric focus involved in the process of selection that determine the places upon which yearnings for home can be mapped. In the other biblical narratives, the yearning for home is a product of exile from a native home and/or an ideal future home, in each case a product of divine ordinance or sanction, and the journey towards achieving home is accordingly structured upon a divine plan. Such features also dominate Classical sources, whether considering the intercession of Aphrodite and Poseidon (among other deities) in determining the length and nature of Odysseus’s exile, the punishments meted out to humanity following the actions of Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Pandora in

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Hesiod’s Book of Days, or the potential future Golden Age predicted in Virgil’s fourth eclogue, which is predicated by the return of the divine figures of Justice and Saturn as well as a new race of men sent down by the gods, who participate in the construction of an ideal political order that is constituted upon a divine plan.29 In Ruth, however, we encounter a human figure who exercises an agency that places her in opposition to those figures, disavowing a need for her aspirational yearnings for home to be determined either by a question of nativity or by the decree of the religious order she has inherited from her prior life. If we accept this reading, then the yearning for home that Keats invokes is a core element of the biblical original and his misrepresentation of the myth becomes a mechanism for exploring the necessary affordances of the myth’s insertion into the poem’s discourse. If we read Keats’s line on Ruth with this sense of the biblical narrative in mind, the manner in which it fits into the poem alters significantly, and offers an effective mechanism for reading the Ode’s concluding sections. Where other scholars have argued that the passage infuses the poem further with ‘a sense of grief and regret, plaintive loss and longing’ that harkens back to the imagery built up in the earlier sections of the poem,30 it is also possible to see the episode as offering the speaker a way forwards, providing a mechanism both for registering the absence of home and homeland within the context of the idealized world symbolized by the Nightingale’s song and for registering how such an absence carries within it a challenge to strive towards the creation of a new home, one that is constituted not upon the grounds of nativity or divine order but that is anthropocentric and constituted by acts of wilful selfassertion, of human agency. Such a reading of the poem is further supported by the episode’s position in the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, particularly as it pertains to a mechanism for observing the interaction between the speaker and a sense of place that will later transfer to a sense of nationhood in ‘To Autumn’. In ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ Ruth appears within the frame of the Nightingale’s song, which functions as a symbol of an absent presence. As noted by Harold Bloom in The Visionary Company, the nightingale itself, the spirit of place, is located in ‘some melodious plot / Of beechen green’,31 and the song of the nightingale is its ode to Summer (its ‘plaintive anthem’ as we learn in the final stanza) that leads the speaker to dwell upon his sense of isolation and alienation. Situated within the idealizing frame of the nightingale’s visionary song, the biblical pastoral image from Ruth sits alongside the ‘perilous’ vision of the realms of faerie, indicative of the folkloric English tradition that Keats championed in other poems, indicated via

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such experiments as his verses to Reynolds on Robin Hood and in other major works, such as The Eve of St Agnes. In aligning the song’s subject dealing with the comforts or consolations of home with ideas of place and season via the figure of the Nightingale, the poem sets up a dynamic that is alluring in providing a mechanism for reading Keats’s later seasonal ode. In both poems, the pastoral ideal sits at a point removed from the direct experience of the speaking personae, but at no further remove from the mechanisms of power that structure the ‘real’ observed world. The pastoral elements of the poems, therefore, serve to create a more positive aspirational ideal that serves to inspire where the other depresses, and offers inclusivity despite its apparent impossibility. In ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, the mundane world of pain and suffering depicted in the opening stanzas is enlivened by the existence of the absent pastoral idyll, and the fusion of spaces indicated in the poem’s final lines: ‘Was it a vision or a waking dream / [. . .] Do I wake, or do I sleep’ (79–80) collapses the opposition and enlivens the poet’s lived experience. Ruth’s home becomes a new home for the speaking persona, and constitutes a new possibility for England that lies in accord with the pastoral idyll of Shelley’s invention in The Mask of Anarchy.

Notes 1. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letter to Charles Ollier, 6 Sept. 1819, in The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), vol. 2, p. 117. 2. Some pertinent facets of repressive government policy under the Liverpool administration include the imprisonment and censorship of radical writers or speakers such as the Hunt brothers in 1812, the passage of the Corn Laws in 1815, and the suspension of Habeas Corpus in 1817. For a thorough discussion of connections between political events and literary discourse in that year, see James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Romanticism and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 3. Chandler, p. 19. 4. Terry Gifford, Pastoral (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 2. 5. In A Defence of Poetry (1822), Shelley argued for the need for poets to invigorate poetry by ‘innovation upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his versification’ in order to facilitate a poem’s participation in ‘legislating’ a new political order. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (1822) in Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, eds. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 674–701, at p. 679. 6. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres (1783), II, p. 345. Blair does, later, suggest that the fault may lie with those who have attempted to write pastoral verse, and tacitly urges experimentation in the form that pays attention

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9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

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to the commonality of human nature, which is ‘much the same in every rank of life’ (p. 346). William Hazlitt, Lecture V in Lectures on the English Poets (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1818), pp. 168–205, at p. 193. For Shelley, the pastoral mode is sustained most purely in Adonais (1821), his elegy written upon Keats’s death, but the genre informs many of his poems, from the motif of retreat and solitude employed in Alastor (1815) to the pastoral retreat of Prometheus and Asia in the third act of Prometheus Unbound (1819). Keats’s works typically do not specifically invoke the pastoral genre, but many of his major works bear pastoral motifs: Endymion is a shepherd, the two Hyperion poems mobilize pastoral elements linking to Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’ (1819) identifies the ‘cold pastoral’ communicated by its object of attention. For a discussion of the uses of pastoral among Romantic writers, see Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), esp. ch. 5, pp. 85–127. For discussions of the Romantic predilection for blended or hybrid genre forms, see Curran, ch. 8, pp. 180–203 and David Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. ch. 5. Gifford, p. 11. Ibid., p. 46. Paul Alpers. “What is Pastoral?” Critical Inquiry 8.3 (1982), 437–60, at 455. With this quotation, Alpers is describing the pastoral episode from book 9 of The Faerie Queen as one of two typical versions of the pastoral. The other, exemplified in Mount Acidale’s woodland world in canto 10 of the same poem, is more removed from the common sphere, ‘explicitly off bounds to “the ruder clowne”’, and reserved for urban elites to develop the finer graces in an uncorrupted rural environment. Susan Snyder, Pastoral Process: Spenser, Marvell, Milton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 2–3. Quotations are from Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy (1819) in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, eds. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1977), pp. 301–10. Subsequent reference is from this edition. Later in the poem, for instance, the motive force becomes the ‘rushing light of clouds and splendour’ that is ‘heard’ (135–7) as it gives new life to nearvanquished hope and it motivates and mobilizes the ‘[. . .] strong and simple words / Keen to wound as sharpened swords’ (299–300) that draw together the ‘vast assembly’ (295) who gather in opposition to the marshalled forces of tyrannical oppression. Such a view is reiterated in Shelley’s sonnet on Peterloo, ‘England in 1819’, where the poem invests with power ‘[a] people starved and stabbed in th’untilled field’, whose suffering ultimately enables social change. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘England in 1819’ (1819) in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, eds.

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16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

geoffrey payne Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1977), p. 311. The presence of the pastoral frame within this section of the poem is reinforced if we allow for the inclusion of a stanza that appears in Shelley’s Holograph Intermediate Fair Copy, though it was later omitted from editions published by Hunt and Mary Shelley. The cancelled stanza reads: ‘Horses, oxen have a home / When from daily toil they come / Household Dogs, when the wind roars / Find a home within warm doors’. Reproduced in Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy, ed. Donald H. Reiman. The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics. Facsimile edition (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1985), p. 21. Quotations from ‘To Autumn’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ are taken from John Keats, ed. Elizabeth Cook, The Oxford Authors (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Subsequent reference is from this edition. For instance, Bruce Greaver’s entry on ‘Pastoral and Georgic’ in Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of Romanticism (2012) suggests that, for Keats, ‘[t]he beauty of classical pastoral [. . .] lies precisely in its artificiality, in the ways in which it is “far above” all breathing human passion’. ‘Pastoral and Georgic’, in The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), pp. 986–93, at p. 992. Jerome McGann. ‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’ MLN 94.5 (1979), 988–1032. Examples include Nicholas Roe’s ‘Keats’s Commonwealth’, which studies how the poem’s diction is driven by the poet’s response to national calamities of 1819, and Jonathan Bate’s study of the poem’s concerns with the connections between humans and their environment in Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth. Nicholas Roe, ‘Keats’s Commonwealth’ in Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). See also Chandler’s discussion of ‘The Week when Keats Wrote To Autumn’ in England in 1819, pp. 425–32; and Arnd Bohm’s articles ‘Hunt’s The Descent of Liberty and the Seasonal Politics of Keats’s “To Autumn”’, Romanticism 15.2 (2009), 131–43, and ‘The Politics of Gathering in Thomson’s Autumn and Keats’s “To Autumn”’ ANQ 20.2 (2007), 30–32. Bennett claims that by acknowledging the socio-political dimension of gleaning we understand more fully how the poem’s language choices invoke ‘not only a pastoral nostalgia for a time when gleaning was legal, but a defiant rewriting of the text of history through the discourse of poetry in order to reassert the [practice’s] legitimacy’. Andrew J. Bennett, ‘The Politics of Gleaning in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and “To Autumn”’, KeatsShelley Journal 39 (1990), 34–8, at 38. Frederick L. Gwynn, ‘Keats, Autumn, and Ruth’, Notes and Queries 197.22 (1952), 470–1. Gwynn, 471.

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24. Pretap Biswas, ‘Keats’s Cold Pastoral’, University of Toronto Quarterly 47.2 (1977/8), 95–111, at 101. 25. Ruth 1:16. Reference is from The Holy Bible: Quatercentenary Edition, intro. Gordon Campbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 26. For a summary of recent attempts to account for the figure of Ruth in the ‘Ode’ see Bennett, pp. 36–7. 27. The earliest citations for homesickness that appear in the OED use homesickness and nostalgia as interchangeable terms. 28. As indicated in note 18, above. Victor Lams characterizes the biblical Ruth as ‘a willing, energetic, uncomplaining girl who leaves her own land and people and is thereafter obviously content with her new home’. While broadly true when considered from the aspect of the narrative’s resolution, such an assessment does not take in the indeterminate position that she occupies in the immediate circumstance of her husband’s death and of her ambiguous social status at the moment that we glance her in Keats’s poem. Victor J. Lams, ‘Ruth, Milton and Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”’, Modern Language Quarterly 34.4 (1974), 417–35, at 420. 29. See Virgil, Ecloga IV. ‘iam redit et Virgo, / redeunt Saturnia regna, / iam noua progenies caelo demittitur alto’ (6–7). In Virgil, Eclogues, ed. Wendell Clauson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 11. 30. Mark Sandy, Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 82. 31. Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company, rev. edn (New York: Cornell University Press, 1971), p. 407. The emphasis is Bloom’s.

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chapter 17

Sir Walter Scott: home, nation, and the denial of revolution Dani Napton

Our environment, conceived as landscape scenery, is fundamentally linked to our political landscape.1

Scott, as a private individual, as a public figure, and as an historical novelist, has long been associated with notions of the home, homeland, and nationhood. Critical attention has consistently considered how his representations of Scotland and England in the Waverley novels have incorporated various constructs of these locales as both personal and political homelands. Scott’s use of the Highland and Border landscapes to represent the home of the anachronistic Jacobite cause, and conversely, his representation of the Lowland and English landscapes as the future of a united and prosperous Britain are familiar. Of far greater interest is how Scott uses landscape in both Waverley and Redgauntlet to represent the (actual or aspiring) sovereign body politic and thereby construct – ultimately – a counter-revolutionary unification of the national narrative.2 Landscape theorist Kenneth R. Olwig’s interrelated notions of landscape, country, nature, nationality, and sovereignty are a valuable prism through which to explore the concepts of the nation as homeland and of the homecoming as both personal and political experiences. The nexus of landscape, politics, and sovereignty therefore provides a framework to interrogate how Scott constructs the failed and degenerative nature of rebellion and the Jacobite cause through the concept of the political homeland and his representation of individual, dynastic, political, and geographical landscapes in both Waverley and Redgauntlet. Scott twins the various characters and their families with the associated landscape to position rebellion as an inherently futile and barren endeavour. Conversely, counter-revolutionary support of the Hanoverian monarchy is represented as innately regenerative. Furthermore, Scott uses the concept of the ‘body geographical’ as a means of depicting the fading relevance of the Stuart dynasty in the face of the Hanoverian monarchy’s social and 250

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political dominance throughout Britain. In both Waverley and Redgauntlet, therefore, notions of place, space, and landscape are fundamental to Scott’s depiction of the dwindling importance of the Stuart sovereign body politic, and thus of the Hanoverian monarchy’s consolidation of its political stature and stability.

*** Being a rebel is no easy career choice in Scott’s novels. Nor, he asserts, is it the choice of the rational, principled, and clear-sighted moderate. Rather, rebellion is represented as delusional fanaticism operating in a maelstrom of sectarianism and fantasy. This is especially true in Waverley and Redgauntlet: at no time does Scott confer on his rebellious characters the future of prosperity, social inclusion, and domestic harmony that his counter-revolutionary characters ultimately enjoy. He does, however, explore the fates of both the revolutionary and the conservative characters through the same three narrative lenses in both novels. Scott considers the significance of key characters’ fates in terms of personal, socio-political, and geographic landscapes. Each character’s fate has individual ramifications, dynastic consequences, and impacts on the locale to which he or she is linked. It is valuable to consider the relationship between landscape and political discourse, given that Scott, like many others at the time – Whig and Tory – ‘tended to identify with the country as the natural source of political legitimacy. [As such, the] landscape of the country provided the site for a social and political discourse concerned with the naturalization of power.’3 Scott’s use of various personal, political, and geographical landscapes in both novels allows consideration of the ‘social and political discourse’ between the adherents to the Stuart monarchy and those loyal to the Hanoverian sovereign body politic. Alexander Welsh argues that [t]he face of the land as well as the features of heroes and heroines physically represent the dualism of law and nature, reason and passion, sobriety and romance. Physiognomy and topography together supply the primary symbols for the thematic structure of the Waverley Novels.4

However, in Waverley and Redgauntlet at least, it is through both the landscape and the fates – individual and dynastic – of various characters that Scott seeks to represent the dualism of political past and future. In the context of this duality, the characters of Sir Everard and Rachel Waverley, Richard Waverley, Fergus and Flora MacIvor, and the Baron of Bradwardine, and their respective locales of Waverley-Honour, Glennaquoich, and Tully-Veolan are especially significant in Waverley.

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Hugh Redgauntlet, Lilias and Darsie Redgauntlet, and Alan Fairford are similarly important in Redgauntlet, as are the locations of Brockenburn Glen and Cumberland. Through these characters and locales, using the notions of past and future, degeneration and renewal, Scott demonstrates the waning significance of the Stuart cause in the face of the Hanoverian dynasty’s domination. The early chapters of Waverley introduce the reader to the history and intricacies of the Waverley dynasty. Sir Everard Waverley and his sister, Rachel, are securely ensconced at Waverley-Honour, the ancestral domicile of the Waverley family. Two aspects of these characters’ lives are emphasized: their traditional politics and their single status. The ardency of their Jacobite sympathies has resulted in estrangement from their Whig brother, Richard. Sir Everard has long since embraced bachelorhood; Rachel Waverley is a confirmed spinster. By depicting familial regeneration being effected by their alienated brother whose politics, and indeed livelihood, are premised on his Hanoverian sympathies, Scott implicitly aligns Jacobitism with infertility. However, Scott makes no attempt to portray Richard Waverley as in any way morally superior to Sir Everard. Indeed, he stresses the entirely self-serving reasons for Richard’s turning Whig. That regeneration is possible at Waverley-Honour, despite its current barrenness, is demonstrated by Scott’s establishing Richard Waverley’s son, Edward, as the defacto son of the house: a simultaneous emblem of familial reconciliation and rejuvenation. Edward’s upbringing – positive and negative – is linked overtly with this locale: his love of romance, history, and adventure is kindled and nurtured; his lack of discipline, naivety, and social isolation continue unchecked. His quixotic journey into the Highlands and into Jacobitism is founded, therefore, in his upbringing at WaverleyHonour, a representation of a dynastic tradition of nostalgic attachment to a cause – the time of which has passed. It is no accident that chapter II is titled ‘Waverley-Honour – a Retrospect’. This locale is brought from the past to the future through the regeneration ultimately effected by Edward Waverley, as he dissociates himself from his individual and dynastic Jacobite advocacy and re-establishes his allegiance to the Hanoverian monarchy. Towards the end of the novel, Scott positions his return from Scotland to Waverley-Honour in terms of superiority of landscape, dynastic restoration, and improvement in Edward’s own character: [Edward]. . . began to experience that pleasure which almost all feel who return to a verdant, populous, and highly cultivated country from scenes of

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waste desolation or of solitary and melancholy grandeur. But how were those feelings enhanced when he entered on the domain so long possessed by his forefathers. [. . .] The appearance of Waverley, embrowned by exercise and dignified by the habits of military discipline, had acquired an athletic and hardy character, which. . . surprised and delighted all the inhabitants of Waverley-Honour. (pp. 463–4)

Edward Waverley’s excursion into the political and geographic landscapes of Scotland is defined primarily by another august Jacobite dynasty, the MacIvors. While Waverley’s family is ‘inclined in principles to the Stuart race’, Fergus and Flora MacIvor are far more zealous in their Jacobitism and their fates are similarly harsh (p. 225). Regeneration in any form is not an option for either sibling. Flora MacIvor’s affections are divided between a long-dead Royalist hero, Captain Wogan, and her ‘enthusiastic zeal’, which allows her no ambition save ‘the restoration of [her] royal benefactors to their rightful throne’ (p. 224). Both are fruitless passions, historical and current failed endeavours. Flora MacIvor’s chosen sterility is constructed as her political enthusiasm denying her a fulfilled life. ‘Flora’s tragically limited vision’ and her fanatical attachment to the Jacobite cause ultimately results in a stunted existence, whether consumed by futile rebellion or cloistered in a convent.5 Her physical deterioration, resulting from her anguish at the Chevalier’s defeat and Fergus’s death sentence, represents a more comprehensive wastage, that of a life and a dynasty wholly committed to a desperate, delusional, and ultimately failed cause. If Flora – and her fate – are representative of feminine Jacobite enthusiasm, Fergus is the equivalent depiction of masculine zealotry. Fergus MacIvor – both ‘a diagnosis and a commemoration of Jacobitism’ – is permanently exiled from life itself.6 Waverley traces Fergus’s decline from a gallant Chief fulfilling his hereditary role over the Glennaquoich clan and landscape to a confined traitor condemned to a tortuous death: Is it of Fergus Mac-Ivor they speak thus’, thought Waverley, ‘or do I dream? Of Fergus, the bold, the chivalrous, the free-minded, the lofty chieftain of a tribe devoted to him? Is it he, that I have seen lead the chase and head the attack, the brave, the active, the young, the noble, the love of ladies, and the theme of song,—is it he who is ironed like a malefactor, who is to be dragged on a hurdle to the common gallows, to die a lingering and cruel death, and to be mangled by the hand of the most outcast of wretches? (p. 453)

Just as Waverley-Honour traces the capacity of the Waverley family to forgo the futility of the Jacobite cause and embrace the potential for stability, prosperity and regeneration embodied by the Hanoverian

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monarchy, Glennaquoich – the MacIvor estate – is an apt landscape representation of the infertility and barrenness of the Jacobite movement. Glennaquoich embodies the desperation and paucity of the Jacobite cause and the narrow existence of the MacIvor family. Ultimately it has no ongoing relevance, no potential for the rehabilitation that infuses both Waverley-Honour and Tully-Veolan, both sites of regeneration under the stewardship of Edward Waverley. Increasingly, Glennaquoich functions merely as an identifier: the appellations ‘Glennaquoich’ and ‘MacIvor’ become virtually interchangeable. Both terms signal the degeneration of a noble clan with no future and no place in a unified Britain post-1745. By comparison with the assumed forfeiture of Glennaquoich and the absence of the MacIvor dynasty, Scott’s closing chapters of Waverley depict at length the restoration and capacity for regeneration of Tully-Veolan and its ties with Waverley-Honour. By doing so, he implies reconciliation between England and the Scottish Lowlands. Within one of those emblems of rejuvenation – Tully Veolan – Scott neatly conflates the Highland landscape and the characters of Fergus MacIvor and Edward Waverley into a pictorial representation of their ill-fated and anachronistic endeavour. The Jacobite cause is masterfully represented as frozen in time and consigned to the status of treasured historical memorabilia, a painting representing Fergus Mac-Ivor and Waverley in their Highland dress, the scene a wild, rocky, and mountainous pass, down which the clan were descending in the background. [. . .] [T]he ardent, fiery, and impetuous character of the unfortunate Chief of Glennaquoich was finely contrasted with the contemplative, fanciful, and enthusiastic expression of his happier friend. (pp. 473–4)

Ultimately, therefore, Charles Edward’s cause has no physical presence beyond a romanticized and static geographic representation of his failed sovereign body politic. Scott, having confined the Jacobite cause and its adherents to a rosy-hued, nostalgic moment in time, redirects attention to the Waverley dynasty, newly reinvigorated, with Edward’s marriage to Rose Bradwardine signalling social stability, prosperity, and fertility in the unified Great Britain under Hanoverian rule. It is important to note the changes wrought in the Waverley family, which extend beyond Edward Waverley’s somewhat chastened return to his allegiance to the Hanoverian sovereignty. Most Waverley critics, preoccupied with the significance of Fergus MacIvor and Evan Dhu Maccombich’s deaths, overlook that of Richard Waverley. His passing intimates the breadth of Scott’s counter-revolutionary argument

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throughout Waverley. Earlier passages made clear Scott’s contempt for Richard’s reasons for embracing Whiggery and for his subsequent duplicity and disloyalty to his monarch. It is important to register that Richard dies (as does Fergus MacIvor) as the result of his own actions and choices against his monarch. Fergus dies at the hands of the law, Richard of ‘a lingering disorder, augmented by the unpleasant predicament of suspicion in which he stood, having been obliged to find bail to a high amount to meet an impending accusation of high-treason’ (p. 407). Nonetheless, the death of each is the direct result of their actions against, and disloyalty to, the Hanoverian monarchy. It is not inconsequential that Richard’s disingenuous interpretation of his downfall being due to ‘[a]n unjust monarch and an ungrateful country’ is overtly associated with concepts of both sovereignty and landscape (p. 210). There is value in comparing the selfish interests of an avowed Whig with the innate integrity of a Jacobite sympathizer, each descendants of an honourable lineage. While Richard Waverley besmirches his family’s name by his actions against the Hanoverian monarchy, the Baron of Bradwardine is assimilated into the future, unified Britain due to his nobility and through his coalition with the Waverley dynasty – themselves reclaimed from their Jacobite leanings, and hence resurrected. Through the union of Edward Waverley and Rose Bradwardine, Scott employs his typical metaphor of romance and marriage as a means of establishing individual happiness, ensuring dynastic continuance and signalling social unification. Both the Waverley and Bradwardine dynasties are therefore shown to be deservingly fruitful, prosperous, and secure.

*** Scott employs the narrative mechanisms of personal, familial, and geographic landscapes in Redgauntlet as well as in Waverley. Through both the landscape and the fates of specific individuals and dynasties, rabid Jacobitism is positioned – indeed, physically located – as an inherently marginalized enthusiasm, anachronistic to the point of absurdity in 1765. In Redgauntlet Scott depicts the overwhelming futility of the Stuart cause in a political landscape dominated by the Hanoverian monarchy through the characters of Hugh Redgauntlet, Lilias and Darsie Redgauntlet and Alan Fairford, and the locales of Brockenburn Glen and Cumberland. Intrinsic to analysis of the geographic landscape as a representation of the Jacobite cause throughout the novel is the notion of transience. Hugh Redgauntlet is, not unnaturally, pivotal to any exploration of Scott’s use of characters and their associated landscapes to represent the

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fates of the Stuart sovereign body politic. He is the predominant presence throughout the eponymous novel, entirely dedicated to supplanting the Hanoverian sovereign body politic with the resurrected Stuart monarchy. Donning numerous aliases, he is ‘a self-denying hermit at one time—at another, the apparent associate of outlaws and desperadoes—at another, the subordinate agent of men whom I felt in every way my inferiors’ striding restlessly between the various locales comprising his world, aiming to ignite a sustained passion for the Stuart cause to match his own fierce zealotry (p. 378). That world, however, is as anachronistic as his own endeavours. He is a fitting representative of the Jacobite movement in 1765: he is as reduced a figure as it is. Given Scott’s use of property as a means of determining political legitimacy, it is important to recognize the significance of Redgauntlet’s lack of estate. He does not preside over substantial property, as did MacIvor over Glennaquoich, Edward Waverley over Waverley-Honour, or the Baron of Bradwardine over Tully Veolan in Waverley. The Redgauntlet property and the dynastic name have already been forfeited for the Jacobite cause, a symbol of political illegitimacy. While known as the Laird by impoverished peasants and various outlaws, Redgauntlet in his many guises oversees little more than the hovel in Brockenburn Glen and the small house in Cumberland. His constant movement between these and other locales emphasizes his transient potency and political illegitimacy: he is as much a wanderer as Wandering Willie and, indeed, the ‘Royal Wanderer’ himself (p. 416). The peripheral nature of Charles Edward’s cause means that Redgauntlet, the fanatic, is not destined to play the role he craves nor have the impact on the political landscape he so ardently desires. Unlike MacIvor twenty years earlier, Redgauntlet faces neither death nor enforced exile upon discovery of his political activities. To his mortification, the threat he poses to the Hanoverian sovereignty is so insignificant that it warrants no punishment, no call to arms. The cause to which he has devoted his life is simply deemed unworthy of military attention: Colonel Campbell refuses to waste military resources on this endeavour. Faced with the inconsequentiality of himself and the cause that defines him, thwarted of the political martyr’s role visited upon MacIvor in Waverley, Redgauntlet removes voluntarily from Great Britain – where there is no longer any ‘place’ for the Stuart monarchy. Interestingly, his departure from the political and geographic landscape mirrors Flora MacIvor’s: he ultimately removes to the physically confined space of a cloister where regeneration – dynastic or political – is impossible. As with

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Flora’s fate in Waverley, in Redgauntlet Scott portrays irreclaimable revolutionary enthusiasm as redirecting only into religious zealotry. Such is the (in)significance of Redgauntlet as an individual, traced upon his personal landscape and fleetingly, lightly upon the wider political geography. However, as a representative of the Redgauntlet dynasty, he has additional relevance in Scott’s counter-revolutionary argument in the novel. He is, indeed, the last of his family, despite the existence of his dead brother’s children – Darsie and Lilias. Just as Scott emphasized in Waverley that Sir Everard and Rachel Waverley had no offspring, he makes the point that Redgauntlet also has no immediate descendants.7 While Edward Waverley becomes the defacto son of the House of Waverley and the means by which that line is regenerated, neither Lilias nor Darsie align themselves with the Redgauntlet dynasty, despite their hereditary loyalties and sacrifices. Nonetheless, issues of identity, loyalty, and dynastic fate are also intrinsic to Darsie Latimer. Darsie is defined early in the novel by his lack of identity, his ‘want of ancestry [and] want of connexions, [his being] a lone thing in this world’ (p. 16). His meandering on the Solway – so close and yet so removed from his native England – depicts the aimless wandering of one in search of family, heritage, and hence identity. His kidnapping at the hands of his uncle and his subsequent voyaging uncovers the truth. Far from lacking family and heritage, Darsie discovers he is the head of the ancient Redgauntlet dynasty, its fortunes irrevocably tied to various losing causes throughout the centuries. Darsie’s identity – his personal landscape – is merely confirmed by his adventures; it is not created by them. Despite his family’s traditional politico-religious loyalties, despite his father dying for the Jacobite cause in 1745, Darsie is a Protestant and a staunch Hanoverian, his sympathies defined more by his upbringing in the Fairford household than by his dynastic heritage. It is important to note that Darsie is not, as Edward Waverley was in Waverley, a defacto son of the dynastic house in which he has resided. Indeed, Saunders Fairford states that he stands in the position of ‘factor loco tutoris’ (in place of a tutor) and not factor loco parentis (in place of a parent) to Darsie (p. 97). As Scott emphasizes throughout the novel, Darsie Latimer is Alan Fairford’s brother in all but blood. The marriage between Alan Fairford and Lilias Redgauntlet has, therefore, multiple significances, more than is usual with the marriages with which Scott often closes his novels. Frequently the marriage in a Waverley novel signals a reconciliation of opposing politico-religious conflicts between two families, thereby signifying a wider restoration of social order and an ongoing familial lineage.

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Naturally, Alan and Lilias’s marriage signals a form of dynastic continuance, as it often does in the Waverley canon. However, the motif of familial regeneration in Redgauntlet differs markedly from that in Waverley. Fergus MacIvor and Flora MacIvor of Waverley each endure fates that preclude procreation, while Edward Waverley marries Rose Bradwardine, signalling the regeneration of that dynasty and the subordination of Jacobite sympathies to Hanoverian loyalties. By contrast, Scott’s representation of the House of Redgauntlet is ‘of a family once numerous, wealthy, and powerful, but now in decline partly because of its support for Jacobitism’.8 While the marriage between Alan and Lilias signals a form of dynastic continuation, it also represents the outcome Redgauntlet both feared and predicted: ‘if Scotland and my father’s house cannot stand and flourish together, then perish the very name of Redgauntlet! Perish the son of my brother, with every recollection of the glories of my family, of the affections of my youth’ (p. 379). Darsie, at the close of the novel, remains single and ‘[t]here is no indication that the Redgauntlet line will continue; in fact, it would seem that without a cause the family has no reason to exist.’9 Just as Hugh Redgauntlet’s politics have no place in Great Britain, neither, it would appear, does the fated House of Redgauntlet. On another note, earlier in the novel, the Chevalier has responded disparagingly to Alan Fairford’s bourgeois origins – ‘I have no hereditary claim to distinction of any kind’ (329). However, Lilias Redgauntlet’s marriage to Alan Fairford implies the generation of a new family and a new social order whereby merit trumps nobility of birth. Subsumed within the Fairford family, the Redgauntlets are transposed from an anachronism to an emblem of progress and prosperity. In this way Scott depicts ‘the Jacobite conspiracy dissolv[ing] before the unshakable power of the Hanoverian regime—a power that is unshakable precisely because it is founded on the freely given consent of men of property like the Fairfords’.10 In this context, it is important to recognize the absence of locale with regards to the marriage between Alan Fairford and Lilias Redgauntlet. So firmly established is the Hanoverian sovereign body politic and so marginalized the Stuart dynasty, Scott has no need to signal the reconciliation of two families, the restoration of political order and social unification through the merging of property ownership. A new dynasty is being built on very different grounds from those of earlier novels: Alan’s roots are not in some country estate, but in Edinburgh as a man of letters whose ability will determine his future in a world of political stability and prosperity. Further, Lilias and Alan’s marriage reinforces that Darsie, having always been their ideological brother, is now officially part

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of the progressive Fairford family, firmly committed to the stability and prosperity of the Hanoverian regime. Redgauntlet opened with Darsie Latimer having no known identity, cast adrift within society as a result, confined to Scotland, and vulnerable to the political zealotry of the Jacobite cause. Redgauntlet closes with Arthur Redgauntlet conscious of his identity, restored to his family and rightful position in society, able to move between Scotland and England as he pleases, and free to follow his own political preferences.

*** [T]he character of the body politic reflects, to some degree, its body geographical.11

Having explored Scott’s use of the nexus between character, space, and place to demonstrate the confined and doomed fate of rebellion through various individuals, dynasties, and landscapes, we turn to his application of those same inter-relationships to represent the failed Stuart monarchical dynasty itself in Waverley and Redgauntlet. Olwig draws attention to the representation of the sovereign body politic as ‘a means of symbolizing the embodiment of the state in a new and abstract way as a relationship in geographic space’.12 The portrayal of the Hanoverian sovereignty’s dominance through the ‘body geographical’ can be traced easily enough in both Waverley and Redgauntlet. There is greater value in exploring how Scott uses ‘place’ and ‘space’ to explore Charles Edward’s attempts to dominate the topographic and political landscapes of Great Britain. Olwig explains that in the early seventeenth century ‘[s]cenes of [an] imagined British landscape were created to provide the setting for [. . .] narratives legitimating the British hegemony of the [. . .] new ScottishEnglish Stuart dynasty’.13 In Waverley and Redgauntlet Scott constructs an imagined British landscape that illustrates the marginalized status of the Stuart monarchy and thus legitimates the sovereignty of the Hanoverian dynasty. Within that constructed landscape, Scott explores the Jacobite cause and its attempts to reinstate the Stuart sovereign body politic through the notion of the ‘“body geographical,” in which the body of the state becomes one with the landscape. The authority of the monarch now transcends his physical body and is made tangible in the landscape.’14 In this way the diminishment of the Chevalier and his cause becomes apparent through the geography through which he passes and the dwellings in which he resides. Welsh notes that the ‘ambulatory motion of the Waverley Novels is typically from south to north, from England to Scotland, from lowlands to

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highlands, and back again’,15 but suggests that the differences between the locales of England and Scotland, Lowlands and Highlands are sociological rather than political.16 Alternatively, David Blair suggests that in Waverley there is ‘a part of Scotland that is “mapped” and a part that is not. In the novel’s historical and imaginative geography, therefore, there exists [. . .] a line of cartographic demarcation [regulating] the representation of space and place.’17 Edward Waverley’s journey from England into the Highlands, Blair argues, ‘is a dim, anachronistic incursion into a part of Scotland represented as yet without the stable registers of history, of property, or of ideological possession’.18 These differences between Scott’s depictions of the Highlands, the Scottish Lowlands, and England in Waverley are highlighted during Charles Edward’s presence at Holyrood, St Leonard’s Hill, and journeying towards England through the Lowlands. Each locale functions as a geographical representation of the limitations and failed nature of his cause; each marks a critical point in Scott’s mapping of the journey from idealistic dreaming to the ultimate futility of the Jacobite cause. The specifics of the ‘body geographical’ in each locale illuminate the diminishment of Charles Edward as potential sovereign body politic. It is no accident that Edward Waverley is taken to Holyrood, that ‘palace of his ancestors’, for the specific purpose of meeting his ‘sovereign’ (p. 294). Scott thus represents the initial presence and the aspirations of the Stuart sovereign body politic through this hallowed geographical space, simultaneously redolent of Scottish and Stuart history, and emblematic of a superseded monarchy. As Kerr astutely observes, Scott consciously depicts the artificial construction of monarchical legitimacy through the dubious authenticity of the various portraits of the Stuart dynasty in Holyrood.19 Of greater significance is the depiction of Holyrood as a striking representation of the Stuart monarchy’s historic power now definitively made obsolete. The Stuart interest has receded from England to a remnant of its pre-Jacobean Scottish roots, and sovereign power in Britain now resides across the Border with the Hanoverian dynasty. Scott introduces Charles Edward, both as a character and in geographic terms, as inherently anachronistic, a spent historical force surrounded by the outmoded political structures of the Scottish clans. This depiction of the Stuart sovereign body politic is reinforced at St Leonard’s Hill, as the various clans comprising the Highland army prepare for battle. Charles Edward’s army is literally the physical body of the Jacobite cause. As such, it contains a number of prescient representations of a movement that is about to reach its zenith at the victory soon to be

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achieved at Prestonpans. It is at St Leonard’s Hill that Edward first sees the Chevalier’s army in its entirety, and witnesses the factionalism simultaneously underpinning and debilitating the Jacobite cause. While the standard of the Chevalier is positioned at the front of the column, behind it are myriad chieftain and clan standards – ‘rather too many in respect to their numbers’ (p. 321). As Edward Waverley gazes about him, the deficiencies of the army (and thus the cause) become apparent. The leading men of each clan are well armed, appropriately garbed, hardy, and disciplined. The lower ranks, however, are ‘indifferently accoutred, and worse armed, half naked, stinted in growth, and miserable in aspect [and] forced into the field by the arbitrary authority of the chieftains’ (p. 322). The rear of the army comprises actual brigands and outlaws, equipped with, at best, pole-axes, swords without scabbards, scythes, and stakes. Waverley’s disbelief mirrors the reader’s: ‘a body not then exceeding four thousand men, and of whom not above half the number, at the utmost, were armed, [aimed] to change the fate and alter the dynasty of the British kingdoms’ (323). Similarly, Scott draws ongoing attention to the factionalism that constantly undermines the unity of Charles Edward’s cause, again demonstrated through the body of the army. ‘It is of the very nature of [Scotland], as Scott conceives it, that its apparently bounded space is riddled with connections, visible or concealed, with other places, and that its apparently unified territory is full of concealed spaces and places where apparently historically redundant forms of society live on.’20 Through an army defined by the chieftains’ individual clan loyalties, purposes, and ambitions, Scott demonstrates the lack of a unified national identity across Scotland, a major factor leading to the failure of Charles Edward’s cause. The descent of Charles Edward’s army from the Highlands to the Lowlands of Scotland and into England is nuanced with geographical implications. Blair considers that ‘[t]he Jacobite incursion from that space into “mapped” Scotland is shown to be [. . .] a disruption of history, property, ideology, and of place itself’.21 However, the ‘disruption’ depicted by Scott is conspicuously muted. The Chevalier’s progress through various Scottish towns towards England, as commentated by Edward Waverley, demonstrates a significant diminishment of support for the Jacobites. In these locales the limited appeal of the Chevalier’s cause becomes apparent. Attention is drawn to the yawning disparity between the keenly anticipated cumulation of joyful Stuart supporters and the wary, suspicious reception actually experienced: the Jacobite cause is no longer the calling

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card for the influential, the wealthy, or the politically astute. It attracts the marginalized, the politically rabid, and those with little to lose. Scott depicts no groundswell of support for Charles Edward in any of these locales – rather, a deliberate absence of those expected to engage in the conflict. The Chevalier’s body geographical fails to increase in the face of sustained support for the Hanoverian monarchy. Consequently, the Jacobite army – but not its head, Charles Edward – retreats into Scotland, attempting to avoid the retribution of the Hanoverian sovereign body politic. Thus, the geographical space occupied by the Stuart monarchy is reduced, commensurate with its diminishing chances of success. Soon after, Edward Waverley is separated from the Chevalier’s army and Charles Edward quite literally disappears, from both the narrative and the political landscape. In the context of the body geographical representing the status of the sovereign body politic, Charles Edward’s withdrawal from Great Britain, and its inconsequentiality for Edward specifically, signifies the comprehensive failure of the Chevalier’s aspirations and his impact on Great Britain as a whole. If Waverley closes with the confirmed absence – and thus political insignificance – of the Stuart monarchy, Redgauntlet depicts a mere shadow of the Jacobite cause that invigorated parts of Great Britain in Waverley, with Scott again tracing its demise through landmark and landscape. Early on, Darsie Latimer comments to Alan Fairford that even the memory of Charles Edward is dead: ‘The Pretender is no more remembered in the Highlands, than if the poor gentleman were gathered to his hundred and eight fathers, whose portraits adorn the ancient walls of Holyrood’ (p. 31). No longer does the cause divide and disrupt society; those ‘out’ in 1745 live harmoniously beside their once deadly enemies. If Edward Waverley and the Baron of Bradwardine were concerned about the quality of those joining the Chevalier’s army in 1745 – ‘every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented’ (Waverley, p. 382) – those engaged in an ‘enterprise directed against a dynasty now established for three reigns’ would cause them far greater disquiet (Redgauntlet, p. 374). Redgauntlet’s endless wandering, inveterate transience, and unswerving loyalty to the Chevalier’s cause achieve only ‘encouragement from some, because they want a spell of money from him; and from others, because they fought for the cause once and are ashamed to go back; and others, because they have nothing to lose; and others, because they are discontented fools’ (p. 311). Waverley makes no reference to those chieftains and Scottish lords with substantial property and wealth who imbued the cause with stature. Redgauntlet is

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peopled with thieves, outlaws, hypocrites, and villains over whom Redgauntlet believes his dynasty can rule, as the chieftains did two decades earlier. The social landscape of the Jacobite cause is as reduced as the Royal Wanderer himself and the breadth of support afforded him throughout Great Britain. Redgauntlet’s vision of the political topography is very different from that of his nephew. While Darsie Latimer also interprets his world as political and geographical landscapes, he sees ‘a settled government—an established authority—a born Briton on the throne—the very Highland mountaineers, upon whom alone the trust of the exiled family reposed, assembled into regiments which act under the orders of the existing dynasty’ (p. 375). To Darsie, the Chevalier’s cause appears a mere vestige of outmoded air-dreaming, and not, as Redgauntlet believes, the basis of an ‘enterprise, for which [his] oppressed country calls with the voice of a parent, entreating her children for aid—or [a] noble revenge which [his] father’s blood demands’ (pp. 374–5). Not until Alan Fairford is taken to Fairladies is anything actually seen of this political ghost, Charles Edward. Even there, having been smuggled into the country, The Pretender is not only confined within a household with his wellbeing and safety due to two old maids, but, disguised as Father Buonaventure, he is unrecognizable as an aspiring monarch. This inability to recognize the Chevalier of former days extends well beyond his person. In Waverley, the Chevalier is at the head of an army of four to six thousand men moving from Holyrood to the Lowlands, into England and back again: a geographical representation of Charles Edward’s attempt to construct himself as the sovereign body politic of Great Britain. In Redgauntlet, a handful of men meet at an inn on the Solway in England to discuss their support for the Jacobite cause. The body geographical of the Stuart monarchy is indeed reduced. Scott demonstrates a further diminishment: those few gathered for the Jacobite cause are no more united than were the chieftains and clansmen in Waverley, whose divisiveness and discord contributed to the failure of Charles Edward’s cause in 1745. Only Redgauntlet, tragically obtuse to the equivocal nature of his collaborators’ enthusiasm, is resolute. Oblivious to their patent dismay, rejoicing in Charles Edward’s presence in the house, anticipating this will impel them ‘to execute as well as to deliberate’ (p. 411), Redgauntlet proclaims: Charles Edward has instantly complied with the wishes of his faithful subjects. [He] is in this country—. . . in this house!—Charles Edward waits but

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dani napton your present decision, to receive the homage of those who have ever called themselves his loyal liegemen. (p. 411)

Redgauntlet remains insensible of the Chevalier’s reduced status, both geographically and as the principal of a moribund political cause. Although the last of the Stuarts, Charles Edward, may well be in the country, in geographical terms this dynasty is now literally reduced to the confined space of a garret atop one house – a diminished man representing a futile cause in a restricted space. The Chevalier descends to the room where his supporters, such as they are, are gathered only when the conspirators realize their plot has been discovered. Accompanied by General Campbell, a forlorn cavalcade escorts the Royal Wanderer to the shores of the Solway. Scott’s reference to the landscape again is apposite in the context of the bodies geographical of both the Hanoverian and the Stuart monarchies: ‘There was solitude on the landscape, excepting the small party which now moved towards the rude pier’ (p. 440). Accompanied by Redgauntlet, Charles Edward Stuart departs, again leaving no impact on Great Britain. In both Waverley and Redgauntlet it is through the places and spaces Charles Edward occupies that Scott represents the inherently anachronistic, marginalized, and futile nature of the Stuart cause. In this way Scott shows how ‘England [is] now incorporated within the unified Britain that had once been the stuff of Stuart dreams, but it [is] now controlled by the political successors to the countrymen who had spoiled those dreams.’22

Notes 1. Kenneth R. Olwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), p. xxxii. 2. I will be referring to the following editions of Redgauntlet and Waverley: Sir Walter Scott, Redgauntlet (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1931); Sir Walter Scott, Waverley (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1931). 3. Olwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic, p. 102. 4. Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels—With New Essays on Scott (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 56. 5. Francis. R. Hart, Scott’s Novels—The Plotting of Historic Survival (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1966), p. 20. 6. Ibid., p. 24. 7. However, in Redgauntlet, Scott does not use this as a means of interpreting political or religious choices as he implicitly does in Waverley with regards to Sir

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8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

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Everard and Rachel Waverley. The Quaker brother and sister, Joshua and Rachel Geddes, also have no descendants, but are not defined as political or religious anachronisms as a result. Mary Cullinan points out that their significance – especially Joshua’s – is opaque, with markedly different interpretations being made about their thematic importance in the novel. ‘Some critics find him admirable, while others find him hypocritical and unpleasant.’ Mary Cullinan, ‘History and Language in Scott’s Redgauntlet’, SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 18.4 (1978), 672. Joanne Wilkes, ‘Scott’s Use of Scottish Family History’, The Review of English Studies 41.162 (1990), 201. Cullinan, ‘History and Language’, 674. S. Mack Douglas, ‘Culloden and After: Scottish Jacobite Novels’, EighteenthCentury Life 20.3 (1996), 101. Olwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic, p. 67. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. xxix. Ibid., p. 90. Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels, p. 56. Ibid., p. 56. David Blair, ‘Scott, Cartography, and the Appropriation of Scottish Place’, in Peter Brown and Michael Irwin (eds.), Literature & Place 1800–2000 (Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 87–108, at pp. 94–5. Ibid., pp. 106–7. James Kerr, Fiction Against History: Scott as Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 35–6. Cairns Craig, ‘Scott’s Staging of the Nation’, Studies in Romanticism 40.1 (2001), 21. Blair, ‘Scott, Cartography and the Appropriation’, pp. 106–7. Olwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic, p. 103.

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Barber, Mary. Poems on Several Occasions. London: Printed for C. Rivington, at the Bible and Crown in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1734. A Tale Being an Addition to Mr. Gay’s fables (Dublin, 1728), Eighteen Century Collections Online. Verses Said to be Written by Mrs Mary Barber. To a Friend Desiring an Account of Her Health in Verse. Lond. May 20, 1735. The Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 7, March 1737. Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Bate, Walter Jackson. The Achievement of Samuel Johnson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955. Baugh, Daniel A. ‘Wager, Sir Charles (1666–1743)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, Jan 2008. Accessed 4 September 2014, www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.library.vcu.edu/view/ article/28393. Baxter, Stephen. ‘William II as Hercules: the political implications of court culture’. In Lois Schwoerer (ed.), The Revolution of 1689: Changing Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 95–106. Beckles Willson, Anthony. Alexander Pope’s Grotto. Twickenham Museum, 1998. Mr Pope & Others at Cross Deep, Twickenham in the 18th Century. Twickenham: priv. pr., 1996. Beeston, Henry. A Poem to His Most Excellent Majesty, Charles the Second. London, 1660. Bell, David A. The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Bender, John. Imagining the Penitentiary. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Bennett, Andrew J. ‘The Politics of Gleaning in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and “To Autumn”’. Keats-Shelley Journal 39 (1990), 34–8. Biswas, Pretap. ‘Keats’s Cold Pastoral’. University of Toronto Quarterly 47.2 (1977/8), 95–111. Blair, David. ‘Scott, Cartography, and the Appropriation of Scottish Place’. In Peter Brown and Michael Irwin (eds.), Literature & Place 1800–2000. Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2006, pp. 87–108. Blair, Hugh. Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres. 3 vols. Dublin, 1783. Blake, William. Complete Writings. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. Nonesuch Press: London, 1967. Bloemendal, Jan and Frans-Willem Korsten (eds.). Joost van den Vondel (1587– 1679): Dutch Playwright in the Golden Age. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012. Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company. Rev. edn. New York: Cornell University Press, 1971. Boeckel, Bruce. ‘Landscaping the Field of Discourse: Political Slant and Poetic Slope in Sir John Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill”’. Papers on Language and Literature 34.1 (1998), 57–93.

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Vickery, Amanda. Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Virgil. Eclogues. Ed. Wendell Clauson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. von Maltzahn, Nicholas. An Andrew Marvell Chronology. Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ‘Adversarial Marvell’. In Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 174–93. Walcott, Derek. Collected Poems 1948–1984. London: Faber and Faber, 1986. Wall, Cynthia. ‘London’. In Jack Lynch (ed.), Samuel Johnson in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 243–50. ‘Novel Streets: The Rebuilding of London and Defoe’s a Journal of the Plague Year’. Studies in the Novel 30.2 (1998), 168–77. Wallace, John M. ‘Coopers Hill: The Manifesto of Parliamentary Royalism, 1641’. ELH 41.4 (1974), 494–540. Waller, Edmund. The Battle of the Summer Island. In G. Thorn Drury (ed.), The Poems (1893; rpt. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), pp. 66–74. To the King, Upon his Majesties Happy Return. London, 1660. Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Walsham, Alexandra. Providence in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Wasserman, Earl R. The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959. Weber, Harold. Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship under Charles II. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. Welsh, Alexander. The Hero of the Waverley Novels – With New Essays on Scott. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Westerbaen, Jacob. Gedichten. Ed. Johan Koppenol. Amsterdam: AthenaeumPolak & Van Gennep, 2001. Gedichten. The Hague, 1657. Wilcher, Robert. Andrew Marvell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. The Writing of Royalism 1628–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Wilcox, Helen. ‘Literature and the Household’. In David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (eds.), The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 737–62. Wilkes, Joanne. ‘Scott’s Use of Scottish Family History’. The Review of English Studies 41.162 (1990), 200–11. Wilkie, Brian and Mary Lynn Johnson. Blake’s Four Zoas: The Design of a Dream. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Williams, Abigail. Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681–1714. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Williams, Gweno. ‘Margaret Cavendish, A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding and Life’. In Anita Pacheco (ed.), A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002, pp. 165–76.

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Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester. The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Ed. David M Vieth. 1968; rpt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints. Ed. Sylvana Tomaselli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. A Vindication of the Rights of Women with Strictures on Moral and Political Subjects. New York: Whitson, 1982. An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe. London: J. Johnson, 1794. Worden, Blair. Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Wotton, Sir Henry. The Elements of Architecture. London, 1624. Wright, Julia M. Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004. Yoshinaka, Takashi. Marvell’s Ambivalence: Religion and the Politics of Imagination in Mid-Seventeenth Century England. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011. Zwicker, Steven. ‘Representing the Revolution’. In Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993, pp. 173–99.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107587571.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index

Act of Settlement, 6 Act of Union, 7, 119 Addison, Joseph, 133, See also Spectator, The Poem to His Majesty, A, 91–92 Albion, 163, 173, 204–205, 209–211 Alpers, Paul, 235 Anderson, Benedict, 171 Anglo-Dutch relations, 5–6, 61, 66–75, 89–90 Anne, queen of Great Britain, 7 Annesley, Samuel, 118 Arbuthnot, John, 133, 135 Astell, Mary Some Reflections upon Marriage, 8 Austen, Jane, 219–220 Emma, 227–230 Mansfield Park, 225–227 Northanger Abbey, 9–10, 220–222 Persuasion, 230–232 Pride and Prejudice, 154, 223–225 Sense and Sensibility, 222–223 Backschieder, Paula, 126 Baillie, Joanna Winter Day, A, 160–162 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 165 Barber, Mary, 155–160, 162–163 ‘Conclusion of a Letter to the Rev. Mr. C—, The’, 157–158 ‘Occasion’d by reading the Memoirs of Anne of Austria’, 158–159 ‘On Seeing an Officer’s Widow Distracted’, 160 ‘On Seeing the Captives, lately redeem’d from Barbary by his Majesty’, 162–163 ‘To a Lady, who Invited the Author into the Country’, 158 True Tale, A, 156–157 Verses between a Mother and her Son, 157 ‘Verses said to be written by Mrs. Mary Barber to a Friend Desiring an Account of her Health in Verse’, 159, 165–166

‘Widow Gordon’s Petition, The’, 160 Written for my Son to his Master on the Anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, 157 ‘Written from Dublin, to a Lady in the Country’, 158 ‘Written upon the Rocks at Tunbridge, on seeing the Names of several Persons written there’, 158 Bate, Jonathan, 248 Beeston, Henry Poem to His Most Excellent Majesty, 85 Bell, David A., 203 Bender, John, 114 Bennett, Andrew, 241 Bible echoes of biblical language, 50, 146 Exodus, 37, 117–118, 122–123 Job, 207 Luke, 126 Matthew, 146 Psalms, 37, 87, 118, 122, See also Calvin, John: commentaries on the Psalms Ruth, 241–245 Bisset, James Loyalists Alphabet, The, 212–213 Biswas, Pretap, 243 Blackstone, William, 175–176 Blair, David, 260, 261 Blair, Hugh, 235 Blake, William, 173, 174 All Religions are One, 202–203 Descriptive Catalogue, 204 ‘Edward the Third’, 206 Four Zoas, The, 204, 207, 209–210, 212 French Revolution, The, 206, 208 Jerusalem, 173, 204–206, 207, 210–215 ‘Jerusalem’, 202 Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The, 206–207 Milton, 209, 211 Bloom, Harold, 245 Boeckel, Bruce, 23

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Index

Boswell, James Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, A, 148–150 Life of Samuel Johnson, The, 147–148, 150–151 Brewer, John, 145 Britain compared with Israel, 39, 83, 98–109, 117–118, 122–123, 173, 205–206, 242–245 Empire, 2, 3, 120, 170, 189–190 British constitution, 176, 179, 190–191, 195–196, 199 Budd, Adam, 156 Bunyan, John Pilgrim’s Progress, The, 119 Burke, Edmund, 187–188 Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, An, 193–194 Letter to a Noble Lord, A, 11 on Britain, 189–195 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 190–193, 194–195, 208, 210 Burnet, Gilbert, 87–88 By the King. A proclamation for setting apart a day of solemn and publick thanksgiving throughout the whole kingdom, 81–82 Caesar, Augustus (Gaius Octavius), 4, 6, 93 Calvin, John commentaries on the Psalms, 34, 37, 40–41 contemptus mundi, 40–42 Institutes of the Christian Religion, 35, 40 Camden, William, 12–13 Carew, Thomas ‘My Mistris commanding me to return her letters’, 61 Caswall, George, 131 Cavendish, Margaret Claspe, The, 20–22, 30 ‘Hunting of the Hare, The’, 28, 29 ‘Hunting of the Stag, The’, 29 ‘Island of the Brain’, 30 ‘Of an Island’, 29 Philosophicall Fancies, 28–29 Poems, and Fancies, 19, 20, 27–28, 30–31 ‘Ruine of an Island, The’, 29–30 ‘When I did write the Booke, I took great paines,’, 28 Youth’s Glory and Death’s Banquet, 30 Chandler, James, 234 Chandler, Mary, 156 Charles I, king of England, Scotland and Ireland, 27 as St George, 25 Charles II, king of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 4, 67, 69, 70–72, 87, 92 and the Restoration, 81–86

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and the Restoration court, 114 compared to William III, 81, 89, 92–94 Cheyne, George English Malady, 210 Clark, J.C.D., 203 Clark, Steve, 203, 205 Clifford, Anne, 49–53, 58 and the Great Fire of London, 57–58 daughters, 52 Diaries, 50–51, 52–53, 58–60 family homes, 50–53 Coke, Edward, 191 Colley, Linda, 118, 162, 163, 205 Collier, Mary Woman’s Labour, The, 163–164 Colman, George, 156 country house poems, 72–75 Cowley, Abraham Ode Upon the Blessed Restoration, 83, 85 Cromwell, Oliver, 2–3, 4, 61–62 Cromwell, Richard, 84 Cullinan, Mary, 265 Daily Journal, The, 162 Damrosch Jr, Leopold, 125 Davies, John, 191 Davison, Carol Margaret, 175 de Witt, Cornelis, 71 Defoe, Daniel, 15 and the Dissenting tradition, 118–119 Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The, 122 Journal of the Plague Year, A, 7, 113–118 Life and Strange Suprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The, 120–123 Moll Flanders, 119–120, 125–126 ‘Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of England, The’, 124 Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, A, 112–113 True-Born Englishman, The, 171 Deleuze, Félix, 174 Denham, John ‘Coopers Hill’, 19, 22–27, 30–31 domesticity, 4, 6–7, 8–9, 50–55, 61, 62–63, 113, 154, 156–158, 163–165, 220, 224–225, 231–232 Donne, John, 59–60 Dryden, John Absalom and Achitophel, 89 Astrea Redux, 4, 83–85, 92–93 Heroique Stanzas to the Glorious Memory of Cromwell, 3 Duggett, Tom, 175–176 Eden, 6, 10, 29, 33–34, 39, 45, 72, 135–136, 215, 244

Index Edgeworth, Maria Castle Rackrent, 8 Elias, A.C., 156 Elizabeth I, queen of England, 90–91 Englands Joy, 83 Erasmus, Desiderius, 74 Erdman, David, 206 Erskine Hill, Howard, 14 Essay in Verse On the Fourth Day of November, Signaliz’d by the Birth of William Henry, Late Prince of Orange, An, 91 Evans, David R., 84 Evelyn, John Diary of John Evelyn, The, 82 exile, 33–34, 35–39, 42–43, 81–82, 85–86, 104–106, 116–119, 127–128, 132, 236–237, 239–240, 244–245 Fabian, Johannes, 150 Fane, Mildmay ‘Peppercorn or Small Rent Sent to My Lord Campden for the Lone of His House at Kensington, A’, 73 Fish, Stanley, 109 Fisk, Deborah Payne, 87 Fortunate Isle, 45 Foster, John Wilson, 23 French Revolution, The, 10–11, 179–180, 187–189, 206, 208–209 Freud, Sigmund, 174, 182 Future of an Illusion, The, 181 Fuller, Thomas A Panegyrick to his Majesty on His Happy Return, 86 Garden of the Hesperides, 45 Gay, John, 133 Fables, 156 George I, king of Great Britain accession of, 134–135 George II, king of Great Britain, 6, 162 Gibbons, Luke, 189 Gifford, Terry, 235 Gigante, Denise, 215 Glanvill, John Upon the Successes of the War, 90–91 Glorious Revolution, 5–6, 86–89, 130, 199 Golden Age, 6, 244–245 Golding, William Lord of the Flies, 170–171 Gothic, 9–10, 174–182 Great Fire of London, 56–58, 142 Grimston, Harbottle, 86 Guattari, Gilles, 174 Gwynn, Frederick L., 242, 243–244

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Hale, Matthew, 191 Hamilton, Elizabeth, 155 Hamilton, James, Lord Belhaven., 15 Hardman, C.B., 36 Harley, Robert, Earl of Oxford, 128, 131, 133, 134–135 Hazlitt, William, 235 Heidegger, Martin, 211 Heinsius, Daniel, 74 Heller, Zoe, 58–59 Herrick, Robert, 64–66 ‘His returne to London’, 65 To his Muse, 64–65 To the King, Upon his welcome to Hampton Court, 65 Upon Huncks. Epigram, 65 ‘Upon Slouch’, 65 Hesiod, 244–245 homeland, 10–11, 39, 73–74, 172–175, 179, 181–182 and Blake, 204, 206–207, 213 and Burke, 187–189 and Defoe, 117–120 and Keats, 242, 243–245 and Marvell, 63 and Scott, 250–251 and Shelley, 239 and Wollstonecraft, 187–189 in the Dissenting tradition, 117–120 patria, 42–43, 61–62, 63, 203 homelessness, 4, 160–162, 174, 238–239 Homer, 74 Odyssey, 244 translated by Pope, 127 homes and identity, 51–53, 55–56, 63–64 and memory, 51–52 as dwellings, 49–51, 53–54, 62–63, 113–114, 121, 211, 232, 259 as nations treated parodically, 44–45 as prisons, 113–114, 120–121 improving, 54–55 ironic presentation, 220 preservation of houses, 49 social functions of, 219 homesickness, 243–244 Howard, Henrietta, 138 Hughes, Lewes Letter, Sent into England from the Summer Islands, A, 33, 36 Hume, David, 195, 207–208, 229 Hunt, Leigh Examiner, The, 241 Hunter, J. Paul, 125 Huygens, Constantijn Hofwyck, 72–73

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Index

Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 62 History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, The, 3 Israel, Jonathan, 96 Jacobite uprisings, 7–8, 134–135 James I, king of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 2 Basilicon Doron, 13 James II, king of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 70, 81, 87, 88, 92, 157 Jervas, Charles, 133 Johnson, Mary Lynn, 209 Johnson, Samuel, 141–142, 147, 150–151 Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage, 144–145 Dictionary of the English Language, 146–147 Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, A, 148–150 London, 142–144 Rambler, The, 145–146 Jose, Nicholas, 84 Josselin, Ralph, 83 Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis), 142 Kairoff, Claudia Thomas, 164 Keats, John, 239–240 Endymion, 247 Eve of St Agnes, The, 245–246 Hyperion, 247 ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’, 247 ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, 241–246 ‘To Autumn’, 240–242 Keogh, John, 189–190 Kerr, James, 260 Kneller, Godfrey, 133 Krouse, Michael F., 108 Lacan, Jacques, 174 Landry, Donna, 29 landscape, 22–23, 251 and sovereignty, 259–260 Laurentius, Johannes ‘Naa-Klachte van den Britsen Konning’ (‘Complaint of the English King, The’), 70 Lewalski, Barbara, 108 Lewis, Matthew Monk, The, 178–179 liberty, 5, 93, 113–114, 214–215 and British or English identity, 66, 157, 162–163, 175–176 and the Dutch character, 71 Burke on, 190–191, 192

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Wollstonecraft on, 199, 208–209 Lintott, Bernard, 133 Locke, John Two Treatises on Government, 102 Loewenstein, David, 109 London and Rome, 65 as global city, 147–148 Lovelace, Richard Grasshopper, The, 4 Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus), 3 Lucian of Samosata, 74 Machiavelli Niccoló, 2 Mack, Maynard, 128 Madsen, William, 108 Magna Carta, 27, 175–176, 190–191, 195, 199 Marie Antoinette, queen of France, 193 marriage plot, 257–258 Martial (Marcus Valerius Martial) Epigrams, 65–66 Marvell, Andrew, 2 and Calvin, 39–40, 42 and the Dutch, 69 and the Oxenbridges, 33, 34–35 Bermudas, 33–34, 35–36, 38–39, 42–43, 45–46, 169–171 provenance of, 34 Character of Holland, The, 61, 66, 70 Damon the Mower, 62, 68 Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda, A, 62 ‘Eyes and Tears’, 61 First Anniversary of the Government under his Highness the Lord Protector, The, 3, 61–62 ‘Flecknoe, an English Priest at Rome’, 63–64 Horatian Ode, An, 2–3 Last Instructions to a Painter, The, 4, 67–69 ‘Mower to the Glow-worms, The’, 63 Mr Smirke, or the Divine in Mode, 63 Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn, The, 4 Poem upon the Death of his Late Highness the Lord Protector, A, 13 Rehearsal Transpos’d, The, 63 senses of ‘home’, 61–64 Third Advice to a Painter, The, 62–63 Tom May’s Death, 62 Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax, 4, 66, 72 Mary II, queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 5–6, 81, 92 Matthews, Susan, 203 Maturin, C.R. Melmoth the Wanderer, 180–181 McGann, Jerome J., 241

Index Milton, John nationalism, 101 on the morality of national service, 101–106 Paradise Lost, 10–11, 215, 247 Paradise Regained, 105, 204 Samson Agonistes, 98–110 Second Defence of the English People, 108 Montagu, Elizabeth, 229 Montagu, Mary Wortley, 128 Myerson, Julie, 51 national identity, 66–68, 90–92, 112–113, 114–115, 157, 203, 206–211, 238–240 nationalism, 101, 169, 171–173, 203, 205–206, 212–213 Nedham, Marchamont, 2 novels and modernity, 219–220 Nowers, Beaupre ‘To the Queen’, 90 O Hehir, Brendan, 19, 22 Olwig, Kenneth R., 250, 259 Oudaen, Joachim Op de Brittannische Verneedering door de Zeemagt van hare hoog mogentheden (On the British Humiliation by the States’ navy), 71–72 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 74 Paine, Thomas, 190, 213 panegyric, 2–3, 5–6, 66, 82, 83–87, 90–91, 92–93 Parker, Geoffrey, 96 Parnell, Thomas, 133 pastoral, 63–65, 134, 158–159, 206, 235–236 Patterson, Annabel, 45 Pepys, Samuel, 49, 53–54, 58 and the Great Fire of London, 56–57 Diaries, 54–57, 58–60 domestic improvements, 54–55 Persius (Aulus Persius Flaccus) Satires, 22 Peterloo massacre, 234, 236, 240, 247–248 Pincus, Steven, 69, 89 place names, 169 Pocock, J.G.A., 191 Pope, Alexander, 122–128, 129–131, 132–134, 135–136 and Twickenham, 128–129, 136–140 Dunciad, The, 129–130 Epistle to Arbuthnot, 139–140 Epistle to Augustus, 6 Epistle to Bathurst, 130–131 Rape of the Lock, The, 7, 133

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287

Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated, 139 Second Satire of the Second Book of Horace Paraphrased, 128 Windsor Forest, 128, 134 Porter, Roy, 144 Price, Richard, 190 Prior, Matthew, 134–135, 137 Carmen Seculare, 6 Promised Land, 33–34, 35–36, 39, 42–43, 49–50, 105, 117–119, 122–123, 244 Providence, 4, 34, 35–36, 42–43, 44, 81–82, 86–88, 120 Radcliffe, Ann Italian, The, 176–178 restoration as trope, 4–6, 116–117, 252–253 Restoration of 1660, 4, 81–86, 114 Robinson, Mary, 165 Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of Satyr on Charles II, A, 4 Roe, Nicholas, 248 Rogers, Thomas Lux Occidentalis, 88 ‘To the Queen’, 81, 92 Said, Edward, 178 Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus), 105 Sandys, George Paraphrase on the Psalmes of David, A, 36, 37–38, 39 Sassen, Saskia, 148 Savage, Richard, 144–145 Schellenberg, Betty A., 112–113 Schwoerer, Lois, 97 Scott, Walter Redgauntlet, 250–252, 259, 262–264 Waverley, 8, 255, 260–262 Scriblerus Club, 127, 131, 133 Seward, Anna ‘Elegy Written as from a French Lady’, 164–165 Seymour, Frances To the Countess of Pomfret Life at Richkings, 158–159 Shadwell, Thomas, 6 Congratulatory Poem on His Highness, A, 5 Congratulatory Poem to the Most Illustrious Queen Mary, A, 5 Votum Perenne, 5–6 Shakespeare, William Antony and Cleopatra, 68 Shelley, Percy Bysshe Adonais, 247

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Index

Shelley, Percy Bysshe (cont.) Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude, 247 Defence of Poetry, A, 246 ‘England in 1819’, 247–248 Mask of Anarchy, The, 234, 236–239 Prometheus Unbound, 247 Simpson, David, 208 Sinesius of Cyrene, 74 slavery, 120–121, 162–163 Smith, A.D., 203 Smith, Nigel, 29, 34 Smythies, Robert ‘On the Late Happy Revolution, A Pindarique Ode’, 92–93 Snyder, Susan, 235–236 social networks, 114–115, 232 South Sea Bubble, 131 Southcott, Joanna, 247 Spectator, The, 7 St John, Henry, Viscount Bolingbroke, 127, 128, 133, 134–135 St John, Oliver, 69 statehood, 1–2, 7 Steele, Richard, 133, See also Spectator, The Stevens, Paul, 101 Strickland, Walter, 69 Stuart, Charles Edward, the ‘Young Pretender’ as character in Scott’s novels, 254, 256, 260–264 Stuart, James Francis Edward, the ‘Old Pretender’, 134 Subjects Satisfaction, The, 90 Swann, Karen, 213–214 Swift, Jonathan, 127, 133 on Mary Barber, 155–156 Taylor, Ben, 199 Temple, William, 89–90 Ten Mile Act, 130 Thomas, Elizabeth ‘On Sir J— S— saying in a sarcastick Manner, My Books would make me Mad. An Ode’, 167 Thomson, James ‘Rule Britannia’, 171–173 Thornton, Bonnell, 156 Tilley, Charles, 203 Tonson, Jacob, 133 tragedy, 98 trauma, 173–174 Tucker, Bernard, 156 Turner, James, 23 Tutchin, John An Heroick Poem upon the Late Expedition, 88–89

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Van Crevald, Martin, 2 Vanbrugh, Sir John, 49 Vickery, Amanda, 154 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 74 Eclogues, 63, 245 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de, 191, 204, 207 Vondel, Joost van den ‘Zeegevier der vrye Nederlanden op den Teems’, 70 Vos, Jan Scheepskroon der zeehelden van de vrye Neederlanden (The Naval Crown of the Heroes of the Free Netherlands), 72 Wager, Charles, 162 Walcott, Derek, 170 Waller, Edmund, 24 Battle of the Summer Islands, The, 33, 44–46 Panegyric to my Lord Protector, A, 3 To the King, Upon his Majesty’s Happy Return, 85–86 Walpole, Horace and Strawberry Hill, 138 Castle of Otranto, 9 Walpole, Robert, Earl of Orford, 128 Wasserman, Earl, 27 Watson, Richard Apology for the Bible, An, 207 Watts, Isaac, 118 Welsh, Alexander, 251, 259–260 Westerbaen, Jacob Arctoa Tempe, 73–75 Wilkie, Brian, 209 William III, king of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and Prince of Orange, 5–6, 81, 86–89, 130, 134, 171 as Stuart King, 92–93 compared to Elizabeth I, 90–91 Winscom, Jane Cave, 165 Wolfe Tone, Theobald, 190 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 187 Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, 189, 198–199, 208–209 Vindication of the Rights of Men, A, 188–189, 195–198 Vindication of the Rights of Women, A, 9, 189 Worrall, David, 205 Wotton, Henry Elements of Architecture, The, 53 Wright, Julia M., 203, 214 Wycherley, William, 133 Zwicker, Steven, 90, 92