The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts 9781474484183

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The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts

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Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities Recent volumes in the series The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies Edited by Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories Edited by Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts Edited by Roxana Preda The Edinburgh Companion to Elizabeth Bishop Edited by Jonathan Ellis

The Edinburgh Companion to W. B. Yeats and the Arts Tom Walker, Adrian Paterson and Charles Armstrong The Edinburgh Companion to Jane Austen and the Arts Joe Bray and Hannah Moss The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre Adrian Curtin, Nicholas Johnson, Naomi Paxton and Claire Warden

The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts Edited by David Punter

The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900–2000 Nicola Wilson, Elizabeth Gordon Willson, Alice Staveley, Helen Southworth, Daniela La Penna, Sophie Heywood and Claire Battershill

The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music Edited by Delia da Sousa Correa

The Edinburgh Companion to British Colonial Periodicals Caroline Davis, David Finkelstein and David Johnson

The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts Catherine Brown and Susan Reid

The Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals Marysa Demoor, Cedric van Dijck and Birgit Van Puymbroeck

The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville

The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts Catherine Gander

The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense Anna Barton and James Williams

The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies Helen Groth and Julian Murphet

The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Global Literature Edited by Jeanne Dubino, Catherine W. Hollis, Paulina Pajak, Celise Lypka and Vara Neverow The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism Maud Ellmann, Sian White and Vicki Mahaffey The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay Mario Aquilina, Nicole B. Wallack and Bob Cowser Jnr.

The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion Suzanne Hobson and Andrew D Radford The Edinburgh Companion to the Eighteenth-Century British Novel and the Arts Jakub Lipski and M-C. Newbould The Edinburgh Companion to Curatorial Futures Bridget Crone and Bassam El Baroni

The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies Laura Wright and Emelia Quinn The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology Alex Goody and Ian Whittington

Please see our website for a complete list of titles in the series https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ecl

Forthcoming The Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts Edited by Juliet John and Claire Wood The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës and the Arts Amber Regis and Deborah Wynne The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities Gavin Miller, Anna McFarlane and Donna McCormack

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The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts

Edited by Maureen McCue and Sophie Thomas

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organization, Maureen McCue and Sophie Thomas 2023 © the chapters their several authors 2023 Cover image: Sophia Anne Delaval, Mrs John Jadis (1755–1793), holding a Claude glass to the Landscape. Attributed to Edward Alcock © National Trust Images/John Hammond Cover design: Jordan Shaw Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10 / 12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 8417 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 8418 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 8419 0 (epub) The right of Maureen McCue and Sophie Thomas to be identified as Editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgementsxx Introduction1 Maureen McCue and Sophie Thomas Part I: Perspectives   1. ‘The happiest vehicles of antiquarian knowledge’: The Visual Arts and Romantic Antiquarianism Katharina Boehm

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  2. The Gothic Aesthetic: Word and Image Katie Garner

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  3. Aesthetic Landscapes: Travel and Tourism Mary-Ann Constantine

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  4. Visualising the Indigenous Pacific Kacie L. Wills

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  5. Elite and Popular Orientalisms James Watt

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Part II: Exhibition, Commerce and Culture   6. Collecting and the Country House, 1750–1840 Joan Coutu   7. Public Improvement as ‘National Ornament’: Commerce, Culture and Patriotism in London and Edinburgh Alison O’Byrne

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 8. Commemoration, Domestic Display and the Decorative Arts: Romantic Nelsonia146 Charlotte Boyce  9. Building(s) for Art: The Evolution of Public Art Galleries in England, 1780–1840165 Susanna Avery-Quash 10. Exhibitions Culture, Consumerism and the Romantic Artist Martin Myrone

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vi contents 11. Portraiture: Commerce and Celebrity Peter Funnell

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12. Convergence and Dissonance: Romantic Theatre and the Visual Arts Heather McPherson

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13. Sound and Vision in Blake’s London James Grande

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14. Taken By Storm: Multisensory Learning in the Lecture Room Sarah Zimmerman

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15. Romanticism, ‘Real’ Illusions and the Transformation of Experience in Modernity Peter Otto

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Part III: Circulations: Print Culture and the Arts 16. Romantic Art and the Novel Jillian Heydt-Stevenson

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17. Mired in Print: Romantic Writers and Caricature Ian Haywood

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18. ‘A Point to Aim at in a Morning’s Walk’: Encounters at the Print Shop Maureen McCue

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19. Illustrated Poetry in the Romantic Period Susan Matthews

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20. Fashioning the Female Artist: Allegory and Celebrity in Lady Diana Beauclerk’s Watercolours of The Faerie Queene374 Laura Engel 21. Angelica Kauffman and the Sister Arts Thora Brylowe

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22. Illustrated Magazines and Periodicals: Visual Genres and Gendered Aspirations Jennie Batchelor

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Part IV: Romanticism Reimagined, the 1830s and Beyond 23. Album Culture: Begging for Scraps Samantha Matthews 24. Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Poetry: Mise-en-Page and the Visual Rhythms of Seriality Alison Chapman

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25. Romantic Caricature and Comics Jason Whittaker

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26. Cultural Manifestations of Romanticism on the Contemporary Screen Hila Shachar

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27. Looking Back Through Fashion: Regency Romances and a ‘Jumble of Styles’ Hilary Davidson

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Notes on Contributors 523 Index529

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Illustrations

Figures Figure I.1 Edward Alcock (attr.), Sophia Anne Delaval, Mrs John Jadis (1755–1793), holding a ‘Claude glass’ or ‘landscape mirror’ to the Landscape, 1775–8. Oil on Canvas. Seaton Delaval Hall, Northumberland. © National Trust Images. Figure I.2 Isaac Cruikshank and George Cruikshank, ‘A Shilling Well Laid Out. Tom and Jerry at the Exhibition of Pictures at the Royal Academy’. Pierce Egan, Life in London 1823, Plate 31. Hand-coloured etching. British Library, 838.i.2.  Figure I.3 William Heath, ‘The flushing phantasmagoria or Kings conjurors amuseing John Bull’, 1809. Hand-coloured etching. Published by Walker. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Figure I.4 Engraving by Benjamin Smith after Thomas Banks, ‘Shakespeare attended by Painting and Poetry’, c. 1789. A Collection of Prints, from Pictures Painted for the Purpose of Illustrating the Dramatic Works of Shakspeare, by the Artists of Great-Britain. London: John and Josiah Boydell, 1805. Plate I: The Alto-relievo in front of the Shakespeare Gallery, Pall-Mall. Public Domain. Figure I.5 George Cruikshank, ‘Victory of Peterloo’. Proof of an illustration for the newspaper A Slap at Slop. 2 August 1821. Wood engraving on India paper. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Figure 1.1 Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Veneration’ from the series Le Brun Travested, or Caricatures of the Passions, 1800. The print is lettered: ‘This passion is represented by an Antiquary, contemplating an Unique’. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Figure 1.2 James Basire, Bronze Age Horns with Medieval Brooch, ArmRings, and Shield. Plate 20 in vol. 2 of Vetusta Monumenta, 1789. Copper-plate engraving. © Vetusta Monumenta: A Digital Edition. Courtesy of the Division of Special Collections, Archives and Rare Books, Ellis Library, University of Missouri. Figure 1.3 George Vertue, ‘Sandal Castle in Yorkshire’. Plate 11 in vol. 2 of Vetusta Monumenta, 1789. Copper-plate engraving. © Vetusta Monumenta: A Digital Edition. Courtesy of the Division of Special Collections, Archives, and Rare Books, Ellis Library, University of Missouri.

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viii illustrations Figure 1.4 Richard Bernard Godrey, ‘Queen’s Cross’. Plate included in Francis Grose, The Antiquities of England and Wales, 1772–87. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 31 Figure 1.5 [John Dadley?], ‘Pārvatī or some holy female at the ceremony of linga pūjā in honour of mahādēva’. Plate 22 in Edward Moor, The Hindu Pantheon, 1810. Engraving after line-drawing by Moses Haughton. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 36 Figure 2.1 David Teniers the Younger, The Temptation of St Anthony, Seventeenth century. Oil on panel. Minneapolis Institute of Art. 41 Figure 2.2 James Gillray, ‘Tales of Wonder!’ 1802. The Art Institute of Chicago. 42 Figure 2.3 Joshua Reynolds, Count Ugolino and his Children in the Dungeon, 1773. © National Trust Images / Brian Tremain. 45 Figure 2.4 Benjamin West, The Cave of Despair, 1772. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 48 Figure 2.5 Joseph Wright of Derby, William and Margaret from Percy’s ‘Reliques of Ancient English Poetry’, c. 1783. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 50 Figure 2.6 Frontispiece and title page for Thomas Percy, ed., Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3 vols, vol. 1, 1765. By permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge. 50 Figure 2.7 William Blake, engraved by Louis (Luigi) Schiavonetti. Title page [‘The Skeleton Reanimated’] for Robert Blair, The Grave, 1808. Courtesy of the University of St Andrews Special Collections. 53 Figure 2.8 Robert Scott, frontispiece engraving for James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. London, 1824. British Library.  55 Figure 3.1 Richard Wilson, ‘Snowdon from Llyn Nantlle’, c. 1765. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. 59 Figure 3.2 Moses Griffith, ‘An image [of a Hoopoe bird]’, from a unique set of eight extra-illustrated volumes of Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Wales, 1778. National Library of Wales.  61 Figure 3.3 Moses Griffith, engraved by C. Grignion, ‘Women at the Quern and Luaghad with a view of Talyskir, on the Isle of Skye’, from Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides MDCCLXXII. Chester, 1774. 62 Figure 3.4 ‘Tintern Abbey’, aquatint from William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, 1782. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. 65 Figure 3.5 John Warwick Smith, ‘Hafod: Upper Part of Cascade’. Watercolour over graphite, 1793. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.66 Figure 3.6 J. M. W. Turner, ‘Nant Peris, looking towards Snowdon or possibly Nant Ffrancon from Llanllechyd’, c. 1799–1800. Tate. Photo: Tate. 66 Figure 3.7 ‘A city not made with hands’, Catherine Hutton’s map of Snowdonia, c. 1800. National Library of Wales MS 19079C. 69 Figure 3.8 William Smith, A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales with Part of Scotland, 1815. © The British Library Board, c13167-29.  72

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illustrations

Figure 4.1 Engraved by John Jacobi after Sir Joshua Reynolds, Omai, a native of the island of Utietea, 1777. Mezzotint. Dixon Library, State Library of New South Wales, DL Pf 75. Figure 4.2 John Verelst, Tee Yee Neen Ho Ga Row ‘Emperor of the Six Nations’, c. 1710. Oil on Canvas. Library and Archives Canada / acc. no. 1977-35-4 / e011179910, C-092415. Acquired with a special grant from the Canadian Government in 1977. Figure 4.3 Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (attr.), Omiah. A Native of the Sandwich Islands, c. 1785. Watercolour and ink. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, SSV/142. Figure 4.4 Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, A man of New Zealand, 1785. Watercolour and ink. National Library of Australia, PIC Solander Box A68 #R150. Figure 4.5 Tupaia, Maori trading a crayfish with Joseph Banks, 1769. Watercolour on paper. © The British Library Board, Add MS 15508, f 11 a. Figure 4.6 William Hodges, Old Maori man with a grey beard / Old Man of New Zealand, 1773. Chalk. National Library of Australia, PIC Drawer 11 #R749. Figure 4.7 Tupaia, Otaheite: Dancing Girl and Chief Mourner [pictured here: Dancing Girl], 1769. Pencil and watercolour on paper. © The British Library Board, Add MS 15508, f 9. Figure 5.1 From Skelt’s Scenes in Timour the Tartar. Courtesy of the Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford. Figure 5.2 Sezincote House. Photograph, courtesy of Bärbel Czennia. Figure 5.3 Augustus Charles Pugin, ‘Royal Pavilion, Brighton: the Steine front as built’, 1824. RIBA Collections. Figure 5.4 George Cruikshank, ‘The Court of Brighton a la Chinese!!’, 1816. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Figure 5.5 George Cruikshank, ‘The Joss and his Folly’, for The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder, 1820. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Figure 6.1 1st and 2nd Marquis of Rockingham, Henry Flitcroft, Marble Hall, Wentworth Woodhouse, from 1734. Photo © Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust. Figure 6.2 Robert Adam, Marble Hall, Kedleston Hall, from 1759. Photo © Country Life / Bridgeman Images. Figure 6.3 Robert Adam, Sculpture Gallery, Newby Hall, North Yorkshire, c. 1767. Photo © Country Life / Future Publishing Ltd. Figure 6.4 William Chambers, The Townley Collection in the Dining Room at 7 Park Street, 1794–5. Pen and grey ink and watercolour, with some bodycolour. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Figure 6.5 Johann Zoffany, Charles Townley and His Friends in the Towneley Gallery, 33 Park Street, Westminster, 1781–3. Oil on canvas. © Towneley Hall Art Gallery and Museum / Bridgeman Images. Figure 6.6 Jeffry Wyatville, Chatsworth Sculpture Gallery, 1818–40. Illustration by F. W. Fairholt, in ‘A Day at Chatsworth’ by Mrs S. C. Hall, The Art-Journal 4 (1852): 31.

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x illustrations Figure 6.7 J. M. W. Turner, The North Gallery at Night: Figures Contemplating Flaxman’s Statue, ‘St Michael Overcoming Satan’, 1827. Ink, watercolour and bodycolour on paper. Tate. Photo: Tate.  125 Figure 7.1 Robert Acon after Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, ‘Buildings on the East Side of Regent Street’, 1828. Engraving. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 132 Figure 7.2 Joseph Michael Gandy, ‘Design for an imperial palace for the sovereigns of the British Empire, imagined to be in Hyde Park, London: perspective of a triumphal entrance’, 1826. Drawing. RIBA Collections. 134 Figure 7.3 S. Lacey after Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, ‘The Marble Arch’ c. 1830s. Hand-coloured engraving. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 134 Figure 7.4 William Wallis after Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, ‘The Quadrant, and Part of Regent Street’, 1828. Engraving. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 136 Figure 7.5 James Johnstone after George Meikle Kemp, ‘The Calton Hill’, c. 1833. Engraving. National Library of Scotland. CC BY 4.0 licence. 137 Figure 7.6 George Cooke after J. M. W. Turner, ‘Edinburgh from Calton Hill’, 1820. Open etching and line engraving. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 139 Figure 7.7 George Meikle Kemp, ‘Calton Hill, Edinburgh With Proposed National Monument – From Summit of Salisbury Crags’. Lithograph. © Courtesy of HES Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland Collection. 142 Figure 8.1 W. M. Craig del., J. Godby sculpt., ‘The Funeral Procession of Lord Nelson’. Published by Edward Orme, 1806. Coloured engraving. © The British Library Board. K.Top.22.13 147 Figure 8.2 Hand-painted earthenware jug by the Cambrian Pottery, Swansea, c. 1806. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Caird Fund. 147 Figure 8.3 Porcelain Coalport plate, painted in the workshop of Thomas Baxter Senior, 1806. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London. 147 Figure 8.4 Lead-glazed, earthenware mug by the Newcastle Pottery, c. 1805. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London. 154 Figure 8.5 Earthenware jug, unknown maker, 1806. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Sutcliffe-Smith Collection. 157 Figure 8.6 Earthenware, transfer-printed jug, Herculaneum Pottery, Liverpool, c. 1805. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London. 157 Figure 8.7 Picture transfer-printed on glass by J. Hinton, 21 November 1805. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. 160 Figure 8.8 Thomas Baxter, Jr, Painting Room of Mr Baxter, No 1 Goldsmith Street, Gough Square, London, 1810. Watercolour. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London. 161 Figure 9.1 J. M. W. Turner, Rome from the Vatican: Raffaelle, Accompanied by La Fornarina, Preparing his Pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia, 1820. Oil on canvas. Tate. Photo: Tate. 165

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Figure 9.2 James Stephanoff, Cartoon Gallery at Hampton Court, c. 1815. From W. H. Pyne, The History of the Royal Residences, 1819, II, plate 44. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. 167 Figure 9.3 William Hallett, The Foundling Hospital: The Interior of the Court Room, wood engraving. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.168 Figure 9.4 ‘Elevation of New Gallery, Cleveland House’, from William Young Ottley’s Engravings of the most noble the Marquis of Stafford’s Collection of Pictures in London, 4 vols, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, etc., 1818. 172 Figure 9.5 A. E. Chalon, Students at the British Institution, 1805. Pen and brown ink with watercolour. © The Trustees of the British Museum.174 Figure 9.6 James Stephanoff, Viewing at Dulwich Picture Gallery, c. 1830. Pencil and watercolour with heightening and gum arabic on paper. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. 177 Figure 9.7 Frederick Mackenzie, The National Gallery when at Mr Angerstein’s House, Pall Mall. Exhibited 1834. Watercolour. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 179 Figure 9.8 Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, The National Gallery and Nelson’s Column, 1854. Lithograph on paper. National Gallery, London. 180 Figure 10.1 Pietro Antonio Martini after Johann Heinrich Ramberg, ‘The Exhibition of the Royal Academy, 1787’, 1787. Engraving and etching on medium, slightly textured, cream paper. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 185 Figure 10.2 Henry Thomas Alken after Henry Thomas Alken, ‘Exhibition Somerset House: Tom and Bob’, 1821. Hand-coloured engraving. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 186 Figure 10.3 Alfred Joseph Woolmer, Interior of the British Institution Old Master Exhibition, Summer 1832, 1833. Oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 187 Figure 10.4 John Downman, The Ghost of Clytemnestra Awakening the Furies, exhibited at Royal Academy 1782. Oil on panel. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 193 Figure 10.5 Henry Fuseli, Dido, exhibited Royal Academy 1781. Oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 193 Figure 10.6 Francis Wheatley, View of the interior of the Shakespeare Gallery, 1790. Watercolour on paper. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.  194 Figure 11.1 Joshua Reynolds, Mrs Billington as St Cecilia, 1786–9. Oil on canvas. Gift of Lord Beaverbrook. The Beaverbrook Art Gallery (Fredericton, New Brunswick). 201 Figure 11.2 Thomas Lawrence, Elizabeth Farren, Later Countess of Derby, 1790. Oil on canvas. Bequest of Edward S. Harkness, 1940. Metropolitan Museum of Art. 202 Figure 11.3 Thomas Lawrence, Princess Sophia, 1825. Oil on canvas. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022. 210

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xii illustrations Figure 11.4 Lemuel Francis Abbott, Joseph Nollekens, c. 1797. Oil on canvas. © National Portrait Gallery, London. 211 Figure 11.5 Richard Westall, Lord Byron, 1813. Oil on canvas. © National Portrait Gallery, London. 213 Figure 11.6 Thomas Phillips, Lord Byron, 1814 (after a portrait of 1813). Oil on canvas. Newstead Abbey.  214 Figure 11.7 Thomas Lawrence, Sarah Siddons? as Mrs Haller in ‘The Stranger’, c. 1796–8. Oil on canvas. Tate. Photo: Tate. 217 Figure 12.1 Henry Fuseli, Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers, 1812. Oil on canvas. Tate. Photo: Tate. 223 Figure 12.2 Thomas Beach, John Philip Kemble as Macbeth and Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth, 1786. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Garrick Club, London. 225 Figure 12.3 Thomas Lawrence, John Philip Kemble as Cato, 1812. Oil on Canvas. National Portrait Gallery, London. Photo: Hugh Kelly; © Joseph Friedman, Ltd. 226 Figure 12.4 Thomas Lawrence, Sarah Siddons, 1804. Oil on canvas. Tate. Photo: Tate. Acquisition presented by Mrs C. Fitzhugh, 1843. 228 Figure 12.5 Thomas Lawrence, Isabella Wolff, 1803–15. Oil on canvas. W. W. Kimball Collection, The Art Institute of Chicago.  230 Figure 12.6 George Romney, Siddonian Recollections, c. 1785–90. Oil on canvas. Princeton University Art Museum, Museum purchase, Surdna Fund y1992-13. 233 Figure 13.1 Songs of Innocence, Copy G, Plate 1, Frontispiece, 1789. Yale Center for British Art. Paul Mellon Collection. 239 Figure 13.2 Songs of Innocence and Experience, Copy Z, Plate 54, ‘The Voice of the Ancient Bard’, 1826. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. William Blake Archive. 239 Figure 13.3 ‘Justices and Old Bailey’ (Roud 300), 1828–9, and ‘Kathleen O’Regan’ (Roud V2123), 1780–1812. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Harding B 17 (153a, 153b).  243 Figure 13.4 Milton a Poem, Copy D, Plate 18, 1818. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. William Blake Archive. 244 Figure 13.5 Songs of Innocence and Experience, Copy Z, Plate 46, ‘LONDON’, 1826. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. William Blake Archive. 248 Figure 13.6 Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion, Copy E, Plate 84, ‘Highgates heights & Hampstead . . .’, 1804–20. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 249 Figure 13.7 Illustrations of the Book of Job, Copy 1, Plate 1, ‘Job and His Family’, 1826. Collection of Robert N. Essick. William Blake Archive.250 Figure 13.8 Illustrations of the Book of Job, Copy 1, Plate 21, ‘Job and His Family Restored to Prosperity’, 1826. Collection of Robert N. Essick. William Blake Archive. 251 Figure 14.1 James Gillray, ‘A Lecture on pneumatics at the Royal Institution, London’, 1802. Coloured etching. Wellcome Collection. 258

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Figure 14.2 Thomas Rowlandson after his drawing, ‘A chemical lecture at the Surrey Institution’, 1809 [c. 1810]. Coloured etching. Wellcome Collection.258 Figure 14.3 J. C. Stadler after Thomas Rowlandson and Auguste Charles Pugin, Surrey Institution, Blackfriars Road, Southwark, London: the interior of the rotunda, Friedrich Accum lecturing, 1809. Coloured aquatint. Wellcome Collection. 259 Figure 14.4 Robert Blemmell Schnebbelie, The London Institution, Moorfields: the interior of the lecture theatre [1820]. Watercolour. Wellcome Collection. 261 Figure 14.5 After George Scharf, Lecture on Sculpture by Sir Richard Westmacott, 1840. Lithograph. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020. 261 Figure 14.6 Joseph Mallord William Turner, Various Perspective Diagrams, Lecture Diagram: Reflections in a Single Polished Metal Globe and in a Pair of Polished Metal Globes [c. 1810]. Oil and graphite on paper. Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856. Tate. Photo: Tate. 263 Figure 14.7 John Bell or Andrew Fyfe, Drawing of an experiment showing the negative geotropism of an inverted shoot of Tagetes under illuminated conditions [c. 1780]. Published with the permission of the Board of Trustees, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. 266 Figure 15.1 Charles Williams, ‘The Moving Panorama – or Spring Garden Rout’, hand-coloured satirical print. London: Samuel W. Fores, June 1823. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 273 Figure 15.2 ‘Great Room, Spring Gardens. Novelty! Marshall’s grand historical peristrephic panorama of the ceremony of the coronation’, Advertisement [1823]. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 274 Figure 15.3 ‘A Section of the Rotunda in Leicester Square in which is exhibited The Panorama’. Aquatint from Robert Mitchell’s Plans and Views in Perspective, with Descriptions of Buildings Erected in England and Scotland, London: Wilson & Co., 1801. © The British Library Board 56.i.12. 277 Figure 15.4 Panorama, Leicester Square, London, ‘Short account of Lord Nelson’s defeat of the French at the Nile: . . . The view of Margate is in the upper circle: open from eight till dusk, 1799’, London: J. Adlard, [1799]. Engraving. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund. 279 Figure 15.5 Edward Francis Burney, ‘The Eidophusikon of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, presenting a scene from “Satan Arraying his Troops on the Banks of a Fiery Lake, with the Raising of the Palace of Pandemonium”’, c. 1782. Watercolour. © Trustees of the British Museum. 282 Figure 15.6 Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, ‘Bullock’s Museum, 22, Piccadilly’, 1810. London: R. Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, 1 June 1810. Coloured aquatint. Wellcome Collection.  286

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xiv illustrations Figure 15.7 Willey Reveley, ‘Section of an Inspection House’, c. 1791. Pencil, pen and ink, and watercolour sketch on paper. The Bentham Papers, UCL Library Services, Special Collections 119a/119.  288 Figure 15.8 ‘Bird’s eye View from the Stair-Case & the upper part of the Pavilion in the Colosseum, Regent’s Park’. From Graphic Illustrations of the Colosseum, Regent’s Park, in Five Drawings by Gandy, Mackenzie, and other Eminent Artists. London: R. Ackermann and Co., 1 June 1829. Guildhall Library, City of London. 289 Figure 16.1 After Claude Lorrain, Landscape with the Father of Psyche Sacrificing at the Temple of Apollo. Oil on canvas. Indianapolis Museum of Art. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. 297 Figure 16.2 Nicolas Poussin, The Empire of Flora, c. 1631. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 297 Figure 16.3 Peter Paul Rubens, Hercules and Omphale, 1606–7. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre. Public Domain. 303 Figure 16.4 François Boucher, Hercules and Omphale, c. 1731–4. Oil on canvas. Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 303 Figure 16.5 Frontispiece (Vol. 1), for Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho: a Romance; Interspersed with Some Poetry. Illustrated with copperplates. The fifth edition. London: G. and J. Robinson, 1803. Public Domain, British Library, 1508/384. 305 Figure 16.6 Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Portrait of Madame de Staël as Corinne on Cape Misenum, c. 1808–9, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 307 Figure 16.7 Firmin Massot, after Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun, Madame de Staël as Corinne, 1810. Chateau de Coppet. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.  308 Figure 17.1 Edmund Dyer, after Joseph Severn, Keats at Wentworth Place, 1933. Courtesy of Keats House, City of London Corporation. K/PZ/05/037.314 Figure 17.2 William Hogarth, ‘The Distrest Poet’, 1740. Wilhelm Busch Museum.315 Figure 17.3 James Gillray, ‘Smelling Out a Rat: -or- the atheistical-revolutionist disturbed in his midnight “calculations”’. Published by Hannah Humphrey, 3 December 1790. Wilhelm Busch Museum. 316 Figure 17.4 James Gillray, ‘New Morality, -or- the promis’d Installment of the High-Priest of the Theophilanthropes, with the Homage of Leviathan and his Suite’. First published in the Anti-Jacobin Review, 1 August 1798. Wilhelm Busch Museum. 317 Figure 17.5 ‘Rival Candidates for the Vacant Bays’. Published in the Scourge, 1 December 1813. Wilhelm Busch Museum. 321 Figure 17.6 Charles Williams, ‘A Poet Mounted on the Court Pegasus’. Published by John Johnston, 1 April 1817. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 323

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Figure 17.7 William Hone and George Cruikshank, ‘A New Vision!’ From A Slap at Slop, August 1821. Wilhelm Busch Museum. 325 Figure 17.8 Charles Williams, ‘A Noble Poet Scratching up His Ideas’. Published by John Johnston, 1 January 1823. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 327 Figure 17.9 Robert Cruikshank, ‘The Great Unknown Discovered in Ireland’. Published by John Fairburn, July 1825. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 329 Figure 17.10 Robert Cruikshank, ‘The Great Unknown and the Great Captain Cutting Up Napoleon the Great’. Published by John Fairburn, July 1827. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 330 Figure 18.1 Theodore Lane, ‘Honi. Soi. Qui. Mal. Y. Pense: The Caricature Shop of G. Humphrey, 27 St. James’s Street, London’, 12 August 1821. Hand-coloured etching. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1917. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 338 Figure 18.2 William Heath, ‘The March of Morality’, 1827–9. Hand-coloured etching. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1971. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 341 Figure 18.3 Richard Newton, ‘William Holland’s Print Room’, 1794. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 344 Figure 18.4 Engraved by Richard Earlom, after Michel Vincent Brandoin, ‘The Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Painting in the Year 1771’, 1772. Mezzotint in black on cream laid paper. Sara R. Shorey Endowed Acquisition Fund, The Art Institute of Chicago. 345 Figure 18.5 ‘Fan depicting King George III and his family visiting the Royal Academy, 1788’, 1789. Royal Collection Trust/ © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022. 347 Figure 18.6 Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Connoisseurs-or Portrait Collectors!!!’, 1807. Hand-coloured etching for John Britton, Pleasures of Human Life. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 349 Figure 18.7 Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin, ‘Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, 101 Strand’, 1809. Courtesy of Special Collections, Graphic Arts Collection, Princeton University Library. 350 Figure 19.1 William Blake, ‘Where shall I find Him?’, from Young’s Night Thoughts, 1795–7, Night II, page 23. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 358 Figure 19.2 Engraved by I. B. Drayton after Thomas Stothard, ‘Sweet converse’. Poems by William Cowper, London: Joseph Johnson, 1798, Vol. II, facing page 96. Private collection.  361 Figure 19.3 Engraved by Legat after Thomas Stothard, ‘Kate is Craz’d’. Poems by William Cowper, London: Joseph Johnson, 1798, Vol II, facing page 25. Private collection. 361 Figure 19.4 Engraved by William Bromley after Henry Fuseli, ‘Kate is crazed’, 1 March 1807. Frontispiece (Vol. II) for Poems by William Cowper, London: Joseph Johnson, 1808. © Royal Academy of Arts, London. 362

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xvi illustrations Figure 19.5 Engraved by H. T. Ryall after J. W. Wright, ‘Zuleika, Bride of Abydos’, Frontispiece for The Gallery of Byron Beauties; Portraits of the principal female characters in Lord Byron’s Poems. From Original Paintings by Eminent Artists. London: Tilt and Bogue, 1836. Private collection. 364 Figure 19.6 Engraved by Richard Golding after Richard Westall, ‘These are Clan Alpine’s warriors true/ And Saxon – I am Roderick Dhu’. Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake: a Poem. Fifth Edition. Edinburgh: Ballantyne and Co.; and London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, and W. Miller, 1810. Proof. Creative commons licence. 365 Figure 19.7 J. M. W. Turner, engraved by W. Miller, ‘Loch Katrine’, Frontispiece for The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart, Vol. 8. Edinburgh: printed for Robert Cadell and Whittaker, London, 1834. Proof. Tate. Photo: Tate. 368 Figure 19.8 J. M. W. Turner, engraved by W. Miller, ‘Loch Achray’, Title page vignette, The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart, Vol. 8. Edinburgh: printed for Robert Cadell and Whittaker, London, 1834. Proof. Tate. Photo: Tate. 368 Figure 20.1 Lady Diana Beauclerk, Drawing for Book I, Canto IX, 33–37 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, c. 1781. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 380 Figure 20.2 Lady Diana Beauclerk, Drawing for Book III, Canto IX, 22–23 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, ca. 1781. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 381 Figure 20.3 Lady Diana Beauclerk, Drawing for Book III, Canto X, 43 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, c. 1781. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 383 Figure 20.4 Lady Diana Beauclerk, Drawing for Book III, Canto XII, 30–33 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, c. 1781. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 385 Figure 20.5 Lady Diana Beauclerk, Drawing for Book VI, Canto IX, 7–9 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, c. 1781. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 385 Figure 20.6 Lady Diana Beauclerk, Portrait of the artist’s daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, reading a book, c. 1780. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 386 Figure 20.7 Francesco Bartolozzi, Lady Diana Beauclerk’s daughters sitting on a bench, 15 May 1780. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 386 Figure 20.8 Lady Diana Beauclerk, Plate 4 from Leonora, 1796. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 388 Figure 21.1 Richard Earlom after Joseph Zoffany, ‘Life School at the Royal Academy. The Royal Academy of Arts’, 1773. Mezzotint. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 394 Figure 21.2 Angelica Kaufman, The Artist in the Character of Design Listening to the Inspiration of Poetry, 1782. Oil on canvas. Inscribed (top): For George Bowles Esq. English Heritage, Kenwood. (The Ernest

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Edward Cook Bequest Presented by the National Art-Collections Fund) Kenwood House, London. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.396 Figure 21.3 Thomas Burke after Angelica Kauffman, ‘The Portrait of Angelica Kauffman in the character of Design, listening to the Inspiration of Poetry’, 1787. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 399 Figure 21.4 Angelica Kauffman, Self-portrait of the Artist Hesitating between the Arts of Music and Painting, 1794. Oil on canvas. © National Trust Images. 402 Figure 21.5 Annibale Carracci, The Choice of Hercules, 1596. Oil on canvas. Museo di Capodimonte, Naples. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.403 Figure 21.6 Charles Bestland after Henry Singleton, ‘Portraits of the Royal Academicians’, 1802. Stipple engraving. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 405 Figure 22.1 ‘Frontispiece’, Lady’s Magazine, 1780. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Per. 123 m-11 urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10613832-5. 409 Figure 22.2 ‘Two Ladies in the newest Dress’, Lady’s Magazine, May 1775. Private collection. 411 Figure 22.3 ‘Monument to the Memory of Chatterton’, Lady’s Magazine, February 1784. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Per. 123 m-15 urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10613836-7. 412 Figure 22.4 ‘Miss Jane Butterfield’, Lady’s Magazine, August 1775. Private collection.414 Figure 22.5 ‘A Young Woman of Otaheita bringing a Present’, Lady’s Magazine, July 1784. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Per. 123 m-15 urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10613836-7.416 Figure 22.6 ‘Oriental Revenge’, Lady’s Magazine, February 1776. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Per. 123 m-7 urn:nbn:de:bvb:12bsb10613828-2.418 Figure 22.7 ‘The Assault’, Lady’s Magazine, April 1798. Private collection. 420 Figure 22.8 ‘London Walking and Evening Dress’, Lady’s Magazine, March 1812. Private collection. 422 Figure 23.1 ‘[Album title page, depicting a group of young girls holding out their albums]’. London: Ackermann and Co. [1830–58]. John Johnson Collection, Trade in Prints and Scraps 1 (1), Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence. 430 Figure 23.2 Richard Salmon, ‘Specimens of Art’, Frontispiece. London: J. McCormick [1820–60]. John Johnson Collection, Trade in Print and Scraps 1 (5), Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence. 435 Figure 23.3 E. Hull, ‘A Thing of Shreds and Patches. Hamlet’. North Brixton/ [London]: Rowe & Waller, March 1825. Lithograph. Wellcome Collection.437 Figure 23.4 Edward Purcell, ‘Pray give a trifle’. Engraving. London: S. & J. Fuller, 1826. John Johnson Collection, Trade in Print and Scraps 1 (12), Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence. 437

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xviii illustrations Figure 23.5 Edward Purcell, ‘Pray give a trifle’. Lithograph. London: S. & J. Fuller, 1827. John Johnson Collection, Trade in Print and Scraps 1 (10), Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence. 437 Figure 23.6 Anonymous, ‘Pray Remember Me’. Lithograph. [1820–50]. John Johnson Collection, Trade in Prints and Scraps 2 (4), Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence. 437 Figure 23.7 [G. S. Tregear], ‘The Gatherer. A Snapper up of unconsidered trifles’, 1833–5. London: G. S. Tregear. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 443 Figure 24.1 Thomas Stothard, ‘[a figure of a woman holding a child]’, Italy, A Poem, by Samuel Rogers. London: T. Cadell and E. Moxon, 1830, p. iv. Special Collections and Archives, University of Victoria. 454 Figure 24.2 Shirley Brooks, ‘Once a Week’. Illustrated by John Leech. Once a Week series 1, vol. 1, no. 1, 2 July 1859, p. 1. Special Collections and Archives, University of Victoria. 457 Figure 24.3 Shirley Brooks, ‘Once a Week’. Illustrated by John Leech. Once a Week series 1, vol. 1, no. 1, 2 July 1859, p. 2. Special Collections and Archives, University of Victoria.  458 Figure 24.4 Charles Turner, ‘Ascent of Snowdon’. Illustrated by J. Mahoney. Good Words 11, 1 March 1870, p. 201. Special Collections and Archives, University of Victoria. 461 Figure 24.5 J. M. W. Turner, ‘The Great St. Bernard’. Italy, A Poem, by Samuel Rogers. London: T. Cadell and E. Moxon, 1830, p. 11. Special Collections and Archives, University of Victoria.  462 Figure 24.6 J. M. W. Turner, ‘The Great St. Bernard’. Italy, A Poem, by Samuel Rogers. London: T. Cadell and E. Moxon, 1830, p. 16. Special Collections and Archives, University of Victoria. 463 Figure 24.7 ‘January 1866; “Out in the Snow”’. Illustrated by Edward Hull. Once a Week series 2, vol. 1, no. 1, 6 January 1866, p. 28. Special Collections and Archives, University of Victoria. 465 Figure 24.8 Walter Thornbury, ‘February. The Hunting Field.’ Illustrated by Edward Hull. Once a Week series 2, vol. 1, no. 5, 3 February 1866, p. 140. Special Collections and Archives, University of Victoria. 466 Figure 25.1 James Gillray, ‘The Prophet of the Hebrews, – The Prince of Peace, Conducting the Jews to the Promis’d-Land’, 1795. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.  473 Figure 25.2 Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Dinners Drest in the Neatest Manner’, 1811. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 475 Figure 25.3 George Cruikshank, ‘Fare Thee Well’, 1816. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 477 Figure 25.4 John Riordan, William Blake, Taxi Driver, 2007. Reprinted with permission of the artist. 484 Figure 26.1 The sublime domestic needle in solemn close-up. Bright Star, 2009, directed by Jane Campion, Pathé Renn Productions/Screen Australia/BBC Films/UK Film Council. 489

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Figure 26.2 The first electronic ‘sparks’ of creative feminine individuality. Mary Shelley, 2017, directed by Haifaa al-Mansour, HanWay Films/ BFI/Parallel Films/Gidden Media. 490 Figure 26.3 Lux (Kirsten Dunst) as a feminine Romantic wanderer. The Virgin Suicides, 1999, directed by Sofia Coppola, Paramount Pictures/ American Zoetrope/Muse Productions/Eternity Pictures. 493 Figure 26.4 Jane (Mia Wasikowska) battling sublime blue landscapes. Jane Eyre, 2011, directed by Cary Fukunaga, BBC Films/Ruby Films/ Universal Pictures/Focus Features. 493 Figure 26.5 Emma (Anya Taylor-Joy) as a beautiful Burkean statue. Emma., 2020, directed by Autumn de Wilde, Perfect World Pictures/Working Title Films/Blueprint Pictures/Focus Features/Universal Pictures. 496 Figure 26.6 Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) complicating the fragmented female body. Lost in Translation, 2003, directed by Sofia Coppola, American Zoetrope/Elemental Films/Focus Features. 498 Figure 27.1 ‘Fashionable Morning & Evening Dress as Worn in October 1807’, La Belle Assemblée, London, 1 November 1807. Hand-coloured etching on paper. Gift of Dr and Mrs Gerald Labiner, Los Angeles County Museum of Art . 504 Figure 27.2 Timeline of women’s fashions from 1812 to 1834 showing the expansion of Romantic fashion. Detail of Women’s fashion in every year from 1784–1970, Imgur.  505 Figure 27.3 Sampson Towgood Roch, Portrait of Priscilla Bertie, 21st Baroness Willoughby de Eresby, c. 1815 after a miniature by [George?] Saunders painted in 1810, gouache on paper. [UK] Government Art Collection. 508 Figure 27.4 Fashion plate, ‘Parisian Evening Dress’, London, 1 December 1821. Hand-coloured engraving on paper. Gift of Dr and Mrs Gerald Labiner, Los Angeles County Museum of Art . 509 Figure 27.5 Costume for Maria Stuart, Costumes des Trauerspiels von Schiller: Maria Stuart: Vorgestellt auf dem Gesellschaftstheater des Grafen Clam Gallas im Monath März 1816 zum Besten des Hospitals der barmherzigen Brüder zu Prag. 24 colorirte Blätter, nach den original Handzeichnungen der Gräfin von Schönborn gebohrene Freyinn von Kerpen. Heinrich Friedrich Müller, 1816. 513 Figure 27.6 Fashion plate, ‘Parisian Carriage Dress’, London, December 1820. Hand-coloured engraving on paper. Gift of Dr and Mrs Gerald Labiner, Los Angeles County Museum of Art . 514

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Screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s work.

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Acknowledgements

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n addition to the support of their long-suffering families, the editors gratefully acknowledge the Faculty of Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University for the award of a Special Project Grant, and the invaluable editorial assistance of Dana Mitchell.

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Introduction Maureen McCue and Sophie Thomas

Figure I.1  Edward Alcock (attr.), Sophia Anne Delaval, Mrs John Jadis (1755–1793), holding a ‘Claude glass’ or ‘landscape mirror’ to the Landscape, 1775–8. Oil on Canvas. Seaton Delaval Hall, Northumberland. © National Trust Images.

I

n the image that graces the cover of this book (see fig. I.1), we see Sophia Anne Delaval, in the descriptive words of its title, ‘holding a “Claude glass” or “landscape mirror” to the landscape’. The reflected landscape, contained within the tight bounds of the proffered mirror, floats freely before the verdant landscape within which Delaval stands – indeed the two are remarkably similar, perhaps indicating something of the homogenising effect of the Claude glass, which, like other optical devices deployed in the pursuit of the picturesque, framed and rendered landscapes in pictorial terms derived from the paintings of such seventeenth-century European masters as Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa. Edward Alcock’s painting, with its lush costuming and pastoral setting, epitomises a moment when such pursuits were gaining popularity as pervasive and genteel artistic practices, reflecting not

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only the conventions of eighteenth-century portraiture, but the extent of the culture of visuality that took hold in Britain from the mid-1800s onward. Cleverly, however, neither the painter, nor the viewer of the portrait, are visible in the mirror, where one might, on perspectival grounds, expect them to be. Delaval’s posture and intense gaze invite us to look at the miniature view she holds out to us – a view, moreover, of the landscape behind us, one that she herself sees – but where are we, and where should we rest our eager eyes? What promises are held, and what broken, in this aesthetic exchange – of looks, perspectives, and subject positions, that both interpolate and exclude the viewer – and that appear to pose the question, ‘what if’? This painting, which dates from the late 1770s, is poised on the threshold of changes – and further exchanges – that might be understood to reframe as well as respond to the many questions it raises. From the creation of the Royal Academy in 1768 to the civic-minded establishment of London’s National Gallery in 1824, the Romantic period witnessed important developments in how art was conceived, produced and consumed. Aristocratic practices surrounding collecting, and patronage of the arts, were inevitably affected by the profound upheavals that marked the turn of the nineteenth century in every sphere of life: increasing urbanisation and the transformation of the countryside through acts of enclosure; the fruits of exploration, in the form of expanded knowledge (and control) of the world at large; the political uncertainties and eventual reform ushered in by revolution and war; and the extensive effects of economic and technological development, which fostered a growing market for cultural productions that reflected Britain’s place on the global stage. Much of this played out in the realm of the visual arts, and was mediated in contemporary print culture. During this period, art moved increasingly out of exclusive private collections, and into more public and democratic spaces. By the early nineteenth century, a visitor to London with even a passing interest in the arts could access not only more established collections or exhibitions at the British Museum or the Royal Academy, but might also call in at the British Institution (established in 1805, for ‘Promoting the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom’), the sales room at Christie’s, Richard De Bourg’s Museum of Cork Models, or even William Bullock’s ‘Egyptian Hall’ in Piccadilly. By the late 1820s, a guidebook such as John Timbs’s encyclopedic Curiosities of London (1828) could list numerous picture galleries (now including the National Gallery and the Dulwich Picture Gallery) alongside the collections of palaces and mansion houses, and over fifty museums, many of which foregrounded aspects of the arts. If we expand our definition of the visual arts to accommodate a wider range of media and spectacle, we might also include developments such as the Diorama and Cosmorama, the Colosseum, and the Panorama, as well as the patent theatres, opera houses and public gardens. As these eclectic examples reveal, there was room in this new world for the connoisseur and the curious, for both Old Master and contemporary productions, and for both elite and more socially diverse audiences. The spirit of widening participation is captured perfectly, both visually and verbally, by Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821), which features Corinthian Tom and his country cousin Jerry, sampling everything London has to offer, from cockpits and alehouses to Drury Lane and the Royal Academy (see fig. I.2).

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Figure I.2  Isaac Cruikshank and George Cruikshank, ‘A Shilling Well Laid Out. Tom and Jerry at the Exhibition of Pictures at the Royal Academy’. Pierce Egan, Life in London 1823, Plate 31. Hand-coloured etching. British Library, 838.i.2. The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts offers readers a provisional map of the changing cultural landscape of the Romantic period (for our purposes, roughly 1770–1840, with a sharp focus on Britain, and on the visual arts, broadly conceived). The changes that made it more possible to view art were shaped by important social, institutional and commercial contexts and networks. These impacted the conditions under which artists worked as well as the places and forms in which their work was consumed. Art exhibitions, for instance – as Martin Myrone shows in this volume – represent one of the major cultural transformations of the era, redefining the public sphere, enabling female spectatorship and engagement, and promoting a variety of forms of visually oriented consumerism. At the same time, they had an enormous impact on print culture, which at once absorbed these changes, actively set the parameters for the public discourse on art, and informed their readers’ interactions with and understanding of the arts. The wide variety of texts through which these encounters took place – including forms such as periodical essays, tours, guidebooks and catalogues – meant that this discourse occupied a prominent place in readers’ and viewers’ everyday lives. This discourse, moreover, animates the preoccupations and the material forms of literary works, from the kinds of conversations depicted in novels, to the prominence of illustration in annuals and poetry alike. Even those readers without direct access to metropolitan galleries, then, could participate in contemporary debates by buying engravings or illustrated books, and by enjoying travelogues, reviews or novels. Both canonical and less well-known literary texts of the Romantic period engage extensively with the arts. A considerable body of scholarship has already addressed some prominent instances, including the interest in ekphrasis and enargeia (whereby

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texts respond to or attempt to render artworks into verbal forms, such as those by John Keats or Felicia Hemans), collaborative relationships between poets and painters (such as between William Wordsworth and George Beaumont, or Walter Scott and J. M. W. Turner), and in the multi-media work of a figure such as William Blake (see suggestions for further reading at the end of this chapter). The relationship between text and image in the period takes many forms, and what at first glance might seem competitive, has been shown to be fundamentally generative. Although the long-standing debates between the ‘sister arts’ of painting and poetry had favoured word over image, the thrust of this volume is to examine the period’s fruitful move towards intermediality, and the potential this offered for participatory consumption. The essays brought together here, by scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplines and institutions, address the richness of this dynamic relationship from a variety of perspectives; we have organised them into four parts that nevertheless intertwine and echo throughout.

I: Perspectives Although, over the last few decades, researchers of British Romantic literature have become increasingly attentive to the material and cultural contexts inhabited by the period’s authors, these contexts remain underexplored and underemphasised, with scholars tending to separate the ‘visionary’ qualities of Romantic texts (and their authors) from their sensory and material foundations. Drawing on the interdisciplinary and inter-medial approaches that have allowed previously separate spheres of knowledge to be reframed and set in conversation with each other, the essays brought together in this Companion deepen our understanding of how thoroughly inter-implicated key cultural discourses are, or could be. With this in mind, the essays we have set alongside each other in Part I do not attempt to define the field in a comprehensive way, but rather model a method of inquiry fostered by the volume as a whole. While these essays treat what might be considered foundational theories and practices essential to an understanding of visual and aesthetic discourse in late eighteenth-century Britain (such as antiquarianism, the sublime and the picturesque, Orientalism, the Gothic, landscape, travel and tourism), they show how our understanding of the past can be deepened through making the visual integral, rather than seeing it as incidental or merely supplementary. This section opens with Katharina Boehm’s chapter on antiquarianism, which explores the role of visual media as generators, conduits and repositories of antiquarian knowledge, and shows how the absorption of antiquarian information into a range of popularising visual forms (from prints of picturesque ruins and antiquities, to simulations of historical environments at the panorama) began to democratise access to such knowledge while also turning the past into a marketable commodity. As Boehm argues, antiquarian research widened the historical and geographical horizons that framed the evolution of the visual arts in this period. Similarly, Katie Garner interrogates the close interaction of visual and textual forms in the emergence of a Gothic aesthetic at the end of the eighteenth century. Garner treats a range of authors from Ann Radcliffe to James Hogg, and engages with both high and popular art by artists as diverse as Teniers, Gillray and Blake to show how the visual arts, whether in the form of paintings, illustrations, physical ruins or tattered documents, were a vital part of how the Gothic established itself as a cultural movement.

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In addition to introducing key terms and tropes, Part I explores what also might be considered key sites of visual culture: locations and geographies that inspired and shaped a number of visual practices and forms. Travel from Britain to the European continent on the Grand Tour has attracted much attention, since it offered direct experience of the work of Old Masters, and unmediated contact with classical sites, which in turn informed the representation and ‘improvement’ of British landscapes and country estates. However, increasing domestic tourism during the Napoleonic Wars promoted appreciation of the landscapes and antiquities of Britain on their own terms and inspired new ways of writing about the experience of travel, often with a fresh emphasis on the embodied responses of the travelling ‘self’. Mary-Ann Constantine shows how the growing popularity of pedestrian tours in Britain from the 1790s, for example in Wales and Scotland, gave rise to a body of writing that further fostered rich connections between Romantic-period travel, travel writing and the visual arts – while making clear that neither Wales nor Scotland were on a ‘Celtic Fringe’, but rather central to the period’s understanding of both itself and its aesthetic preoccupations. Travel writing would also become one of the most popular genres in the period because of Britain’s mercantile, colonial and scientific interests around the globe. Voyages of exploration were consumed by reader-viewers back home in Britain through eyewitness accounts and in a variety of other media, including plays, prints and scientific treatises. Such works were often accompanied by visual material, which while ostensibly serving an educational purpose, also compounded their popular appeal. Kacie Wills focuses on visual representations of encounter during the Cook voyages, both by European painters (such as Joshua Reynolds and Philippe de Loutherbourg’s depictions of Mai), and from the indigenous perspective, as seen through the Ra‘iatean high priest Tupaia’s illustrations of the same events and people. By bringing together these divergent perspectives, Wills demonstrates the complexity of legitimating and popularising knowledge through print and visual culture, ultimately unsettling the primacy of the European lens with its ideological blind spots. Encounters with the other, and their location in geographies and cultures with a potent grip on the European imagination, inform the discourse of Orientalism in ways that have always involved the ‘spectatorial pleasure’ that Jim Watt explores in relation to both elite and popular culture. At the intersection of visual and literary representation, popular theatrical productions such as Matthew Lewis’s melodrama Timour the Tartar (1811) are positioned alongside works ostensibly addressed to a more elite audience, such as those by William Beckford and Lord Byron. Watt traces these tensions and currents through a number of consummate Orientalist performances, including the ‘Regency Orientalism’ at play in the period’s most popular periodicals, illustrated poetry, and in the creation of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton by the Prince Regent. As with other key terms and concepts treated in Part I, we see the productive and unstable nature of this shifting cultural landscape, and how Britons’ lived relation to empire (as well as to its own material history) in this period is expressed in subtle ways through its visual print culture.

II: Exhibition, Commerce and Culture The chapters in Part II trace how the display of art moved from exclusive private collections to more public and democratic spaces. In particular, it focuses on how

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the public discourse surrounding art manifested itself in viewers’ everyday lives, and how the production and consumption of culture was fostered by specific contexts and commercial networks. From the Regency estate to the middle-class dining room, the stages of London’s West End to public monuments in Edinburgh, the essays here ask questions about access to and audiences for art, by delving into private and public practices of collecting and commemoration, urban planning and private decorative arts, popular spectacles and celebrity portraiture. Beginning at the more privileged end of the social spectrum, Joan Coutu’s chapter focuses on collections of classical sculpture installed in country houses from the mid-eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, at a moment when standards of ideal beauty (and accepted canons) were undergoing revision, viewing them as culturally coded expressions of taste and connoisseurship. This changing relationship to history, emerging through attitudes to copies and fragments (most evident perhaps in debates over the value of the ‘Elgin’ Marbles), inflect the purpose, and the nature of the performance, intended from the creation of such private displays of cultural and material capital. Shifting from the country to the city, and to the signifying potential of public spaces, Alison O’Byrne examines contemporary proposals for and developments of urban improvements and public monuments in London and Edinburgh, proposals which consciously sought to articulate particular aspects of urban and national identity. Worries that London’s landscape did not sufficiently project the nation’s claims to prosperity and polite refinement led to extensive alterations to the capital’s West End and the erection of monuments commemorating Britain’s role in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Meanwhile, Edinburgh was staking its claim as Britain’s cultural capital through a series of monuments and public buildings planned for Calton Hill. Taken together, such efforts point to a moment when artists and planners were shaping cities that reflected urban, regional and national identities, informed by a mutually improving relationship between commerce, patriotism and the arts. This cultural expression of patriotism could also be seen in individual households, and in the materials of everyday life. Charlotte Boyce examines the many forms through which Lord Nelson was commemorated in the wake of the naval hero’s death in October of 1805. In addition to public memorials, the death of Nelson also gave impetus to the field of the decorative or applied arts, inspiring a range of commemorative ceramics, textiles and glass-pictures intended for domestic display. These commemorative wares enabled aspirational middle-class consumers to participate in the art-culture of the Romantic period and, through acts of domestic display, to contribute actively to the construction of wider, national narratives of mourning and heroic apotheosis. The flourishing of social, cultural and artistic life in Britain during the period also included an increasing prominence given to the collecting and display of paintings, especially from the past. Until the early nineteenth century, and unlike in other European capitals, there were no public art galleries in the UK – and initiatives from the government and monarchy to foster the arts were few and far between. Susanna AveryQuash charts the evolution of public art galleries in England between 1780 and 1840, as ‘building for art’ gathered momentum and broad social and political support, culminating in the establishment of London’s National Gallery. The collecting of historical art, previously centred in the private domain of the aristocratic country houses noted by Coutu, reflected a narrowly defined canon that was progressively unsettled by the birth of the public museum, and fuelled by an active exhibition culture. By charting its

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development and growth – from the Royal Academy’s ascendancy in the late 1760s, to the fashion for literary galleries in the 1790s, the initiatives of the British Institution, and shows dedicated to watercolours in the early nineteenth century – Martin Myrone places the display of art at the centre of the social and economic transformations characteristic of modernity, and attends in particular to the changing status of the artist and the conditions in which she or he worked. Ultimately, Myrone argues that the public exhibitions which flourished in Britain between the 1760s and the 1830s helped institute a structurally precarious, highly competitive and individualist artistic field. Nowhere were such tenuous financial, social and professional pressures on artists more apparent than in the field of portraiture, with its close relationship to commerce and celebrity, and its dominant position in the art market of the period. From oil and watercolour portraits, to the miniature, the bust, caricatures and reproductive engravings, Peter Funnell shows how portraits circulated more widely (if still mainly among a metropolitan elite), examining the careers of such dominant practitioners as Beechey, Hoppner and especially Lawrence. As the principal showcase for contemporary British art, portraits were commissioned for both private display and public consumption. With pretensions aligned with history painting, portraits defined networks of support and admiration – whether for politicians such as Charles James Fox, or for literary and theatrical celebrities such as Lord Byron and Sarah Siddons. As Funnell’s chapter shows, the dramatic and visual arts were closely aligned during this period, each contributing to the fame of actors and actresses and subject to similar issues of professional status. The final group of chapters in Part II are closely attuned to questions of theatricality, performance and spectacle. Heather McPherson’s approach to Romantic theatre and the visual arts re-envisages the synergies and tensions between portraiture and theatre as a pargone, or comparative debate, of Romantic-period culture more broadly, grounding them in differing modes of visuality and temporality. As popular modes of cultural consumption and entertainment, they appealed to and were shaped by the public’s growing fascination with visual spectacle, exhibition culture and celebrity, but also diverged in fundamental ways – evident for example in the tensions that animated theatrical criticism between drama as a literary form and as stage spectacle. Stage spectacle is of course multisensory, appealing to the ear as much as to the eye. The next two chapters in this section expand our understanding of the interdependent relationship between visual and print culture, by showing how the visual is inevitably porous, engaging different faculties, registers and audiences. James Grande’s chapter moves us out of the theatre and into the living spectacle of London’s streets by exploring the urban soundscape in the work of William Blake; he demonstrates how works such as Songs of Innocence and Experience both mediate and reflect that soundscape, such as in the rhythms and rhymes of street ballads, lullabies and drinking songs, all of which formed the main elements of non-elite music culture. While music traditionally occupied an elevated position in the hierarchy of the arts due to its transcendent qualities, Grande shows that Blake, through performance of his own songs and in the privileged status of melody and harmony in his later prophetic books, insists that poetry, painting and music all have the potential to become visionary arts. Such an approach to Blake’s works teases out a transformed way of hearing, an auditory mode of visionary experience, that is at work in other contexts that involve the interplay of text and image. Although at first glance the public lecture might seem

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a world apart from Blake’s musical visions, Sarah M. Zimmerman brings out the multisensory nature and inherent theatricality of learning in the lecture room, whether in the moment, or in its depictions in visual and print culture. Regardless of subject matter, whether Humphrey Davy’s live experiments with nitrous oxide, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ruminations on Shakespeare, public lectures in Romantic-period Britain created for their audiences an absorptive experience, transforming the lecture theatre into a highly performative space. Such scenes were vividly conveyed through prints by Gillray and Rowlandson, which both celebrated and satirised the lectures’ very popularity, while highlighting their gendered and political associations. These chapters demonstrate just how deeply visual and print culture might be inter-implicated, and also how multidimensional their manifestations in public cultural life could be. The intertwining of commerce and exhibition culture at the heart of this section of the Companion was greeted with as much suspicion as enthusiasm. Canny observers such as the satirist William Heath explore the extent to which visual technologies, and the illusions they create, might mislead gullible audiences (see fig. I.3). The way the print uses the visual tropes of the magic lantern, and their development in the phantasmagoria shows popularised in the 1790s, to comment on political events (in this case the ill-fated 1809 expedition to Flushing) helps us to gauge the extent to which such visual media had saturated public discourse, and how effectively they could offer a critical lens through which to really ‘see’ power in action. Clever details (the hanging crocodile ‘caught on the Nile by Nelson’, objects of the occult, and the prominence of optical instruments) play on the dangers of curiosity for an undiscerning public, epitomised here in the figure of John Bull, who is duped by projections of ‘reality’ on a flimsy curtain around which a laughing demon pokes its head.1 Bull is so taken in by the spectacle that he claims to smell the gunpowder, but as he gets to the ‘bottom’ of it all, the magician-conjuror holding the projector (whose robes resemble those worn by the Chancellor of the Exchequer), proclaims ‘Stop! Stop! Mr Bull if you have got to the bottom of it I’ll turn the Instrument for that part wont bear Magnyfieing [sic].’ Heath raises questions, all too familiar now in the era of algorithms and click bait, about how people encounter and assimilate the promises of new technologies, with their deft simulations of reality, while also showing how those in power might play a game of smoke and mirrors to conceal the true object of their political endeavours. The boundary between the real and the fictional often blurred as opportunities for immersive visual (and sensory) experiences were expanded by the proliferation of entertainments such as panoramas, dioramas and the phantasmagoria. The multiplication and diversification of such viewing spaces reflects the wider democratisation and commercialisation of spectacle. Peter Otto’s chapter on ‘real’ illusions and their transformative potential offers a detailed account of these developments, and their political and historical stakes in relation to modernity. From the establishment of Robert Barker’s Panorama in 1793 onwards, such entertainments used modern technologies of illusion to create immersive realities (often based on astonishing lifelikeness, and the simulation of movement) that invited audiences to linger, socialise and even inhabit a supplementary ‘second life’. Yet such experiences were made possible through the creation of various machines and viewing devices, themselves part and parcel of the increasing mechanisation of daily life. At issue is more than the rich but disorienting spectacles of urban life. As Otto demonstrates, the ambivalent exchange between the

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Figure I.3  William Heath, ‘The flushing phantasmagoria or Kings conjurors amuseing John Bull’, 1809. Hand-coloured etching. Published by Walker. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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mechanical basis of these developments, and the agency of the audience, create a complex picture of what constitutes the ‘real’, the actual and the ‘imagined’ in modernity, making these spectacles a crucial resource in our understanding of the period’s literature and culture.

III: Circulations: Print Culture and the Arts The chapters in the previous sections of the Companion disrupt the familiar narrative that Romantic literature existed most happily in visionary realms, sealed off from the material, commercial realities of the (visual) culture industry at the turn of the nineteenth century. Part III focuses more closely on the direct impact visual culture had on contemporary print culture. It considers how the material conditions of book production, and indeed a wide range of emergent, print-based media, such as magazines and annuals, lent themselves to an engagement with the visual arts, while creating spaces for those very arts to flourish. Literature – so much in the ascendency in this period as printed material became more available, and rates of literacy increased – offered opportunities for authors to use the visual arts in newly meaningful ways, gesturing towards specific artists and artworks to convey values that readers might (or might come to) share. This dynamic relationship fuelled the increased use of illustration in poetry and prose, transforming the page into a space for visual and formal experimentation, while enhancing the role of the reader. Romantic authors harnessed the power of art in numerous ways – for instance, by translating elements of the picturesque or sublime into narrative techniques, or by engaging imaginatively with specific paintings and sculptures, which offered new pathways of interpretation for both text and image. In her treatment of art and the Romantic novel, Jillian Heydt-Stevenson unsettles the competitive tradition existing between word and image, demonstrating instead how novelists such as Radcliffe, Scott and Phebe Gibbes revitalise, in affective and intellectual terms, the potentially complementary activities of reading and viewing. This self-conscious awareness of the visual arts, when coupled with an understanding of the power of print, both in words and through illustrations, could also be harnessed for authorial self-fashioning, as in the case of Madame de Staël when she sat as her most famous heroine, Corinne (the embodiment of female genius and of Italy, the land of the arts). While writers directly engaged with the arts in their works or might use them for creative self-fashioning, the reverse is also true: contemporary artists played an important role in the veneration of authors through inter-arts collaborations. In particular, such collaborations, best seen in the period’s literary galleries, helped establish a native literary canon and promote contemporary British art. Thomas Macklin Poet’s Gallery and John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery elevated writers into national cultural commodities. Enabling readers, in Henry Fuseli’s terms, to become spectators, the galleries re-mediated literary texts in several ways. They created stand-alone images, often evoking the performances of celebrity actors such as Sarah Siddons and Charles Kemble in Macbeth. These could be surveyed together in the commercial galleries (which thus functioned as exhibition spaces, promoting sales of both prints and illustrated editions) or be reconstituted privately, as extra-illustrations one might bind into the volumes in one’s own library. The aspirational nature of inter-arts collaboration in an enterprise such as Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery is perfectly expressed in the relief

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sculpture designed in 1789 to embellish the front of the building in London’s Pall Mall, Thomas Banks’s ‘Shakespeare Attended by Painting and Poetry’, which celebrates Shakespeare as a native genius equally venerated by both (sister) arts. Inscribed on the pedestal, in a fitting verbal complement, is a quotation from Hamlet (I, ii): ‘He was a Man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again’. Benjamin Smith’s engraving (see figure I.4) transforms the monument into a stand-alone print-object that could be reproduced independently, and thus circulate (indeed, it is now to be found in the garden of New Place, Stratford-on-Avon). Initiatives such as the literary

Figure I.4  Engraving by Benjamin Smith after Thomas Banks, ‘Shakespeare attended by Painting and Poetry’, c. 1789. A Collection of Prints, from Pictures Painted for the Purpose of Illustrating the Dramatic Works of Shakspeare, by the Artists of GreatBritain. London: John and Josiah Boydell, 1805. Plate I: The Alto-relievo in front of the Shakespeare Gallery, Pall-Mall. Public Domain.

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galleries, along with the prints they generated, were an important vehicle for the movement of the arts, creating an expanded viewing public and a site of participation; they were also contested and critiqued for their capacity to debase the literary object upon which they depend – a state of affairs deftly captured (ironically, in a print) by James Gillray’s ‘Shakespeare sacrificed; -or- the offering to avarice’ (1789).2 While we are familiar with portrayals of authors that deploy a heroic iconography, signalled, as Ian Haywood notes, by the carefully placed tools of the trade, a thoughtful expression, and a classical setting, caricatures of the writer undermined the Romantic cult of genius by focusing on the material and practical difficulties, along with the networks of print and patronage, which determined an author’s reputation. Reframing the careers of canonical Romantic authors, including Scott, Byron and Southey, through close readings of caricatures by James Gillray, George and Robert Cruikshank, and Charles Williams, Haywood shows how the power of the print – with its close relationship to the cultural debates and political currents of the day, and its capacity to circulate widely – creates a more dynamic and collective picture of literary print culture in formation. A number of the other chapters in Part III look more closely at the place of literature in this new media ecosystem and its offshoots, taking stock first of all of the power of (the) print, and of the physical space of the print shop. Maureen McCue explores how, at a time when Britain’s art and literary worlds were in flux, and when texts and images were becoming more readily available to an increasingly diverse audience, the print shop – both real and imagined – became a key focal point, a place where the public’s desire for access to visual culture was simultaneously piqued and sated. Wares on offer could range from rare engravings of Old Master art or high-end prints of contemporary history paintings (as in the case of Molteno’s or Colnaghi’s), to satires of the most salacious gossip and political intrigue found in the popular periodicals of the day (as one might find at Hannah Humphrey’s or William Holland’s). Dually coded, therefore, as the pinnacle of refinement and the disgrace of art, prints became powerful markers of one’s taste and social standing. McCue examines the ways in which contemporary periodical essays, poetry, novels and prints constructed the print shop as a site in which reader-viewers might navigate the often-confusing slippages between high and low art in order to fashion themselves into true amateurs of art. If, in a world increasingly animated by prints as purveyors of the visual arts, readers could become spectators, then spectators also became readers who were (equally) hungry for a visually enriched experience of literature. The sociable collaborations between poets and painters, publishers and printmakers, and authors and their audiences that characterise this period manifest themselves in the material production of the printed book, and specifically in the realm of illustration. Susan Matthews traces changes in what the term ‘illustration’ meant in relation to texts of the Romantic period, recovering a nuanced history that tends to be obscured by modern usage (and with it, a more balanced assessment of the work of Thomas Stothard). Her chapter looks more closely at the role of landscape in this process, as illustrated editions for instance of William Cowper became less dependent on allegorical or ideal representations, and more naturalistically detailed. By the time of Turner’s work for Scott, or for Samuel Rogers’s 1820s edition of Italy, the debate about the merits of ‘ideal’ versus ‘real’ illustration gave way to a recognition that technological innovation was rapidly making culture available to a much wider audience, hungry for information of a reliably visual kind.

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While earlier and some contemporary writers sought to distance themselves from the mechanical aspects of print production and authorship, the printed page was now viewed as a space within which to create one’s authorial identity. Much as it offered something for writers, the printed page offered something for artists as well. A deepening relationship between literature and the arts offered new avenues for selfexpression for artists, even while the status and definition of ‘artist’ was under revision. Canonical works of literature created an arena for imaginative self-fashioning, as Laura Engel demonstrates in her treatment of Lady Diana Beauclerk’s large-scale watercolours of Edmund Spenser’s epic, The Faerie Queene. Incorporating a range of techniques and styles popular in the period, Engel shows how Beauclerk’s decision to depict Spenser’s heroine Britomart as a Minevra figure leverages the associations of Minerva as both the goddess of war and wisdom and the metaphysical embodiment of women’s intellectual and artistic accomplishments, in order to define herself as a professional artist in her own right. Furthermore, as text and image become more integrated, the long-standing debate about the comparative value of the sister arts was reframed as a space full of political implications. Thora Brylowe examines these developments by analysing how Angelica Kauffman – one of only two women admitted as founding members of the Royal Academy – experimented with self-portraits (including engraved print versions). Kauffman’s self-styling both as the embodiment of Design, and as hesitating between the sister arts, shows how (like Beauclerk) she used personified allegories to promote and cement her professional reputation. In such instances, we see how women artists responded in the nuances of their practice to dominant ideologies of gender and artistic production, thereby enlivening the staid rhetoric of the conventional sister arts. The intermedial page also promoted active engagement on the part of readers, offering an important space for shaping, in part by mirroring back, potential conceptions of the self. To this end, many illustrated periodicals advocated the individual and cultural benefits of women’s reading and writing. Jennie Batchelor explores the many ways that image and text remediate one another in the influential Lady’s Magazine, showing how although such periodicals sent precise if contradictory messages to their readers (on the one hand encouraging fashionable consumption, while on the other promoting educational content), nuanced interactions between text and image also encouraged readers’ intellectual dexterity. Batchelor uses close readings of a series of frontispieces, some of which also reference the goddess Minerva as visual shorthand for wisdom, to illuminate how the periodical provoked pressing cultural and political questions about women’s lives.

IV: Romanticism Reimagined, the 1830s and Beyond The final section of the Companion examines the ways in which the Romantic period has been and continues to be consumed and understood through visual media. Beginning with the 1820s and 30s, these chapters explore the period’s extensions and afterlives, from scrapbooks and periodicals of the late-Romantic and Victorian eras, to fashion, film and comics in the present day. The fluid intermediality that characterises the period also manifests in modern experimentations with film, print culture and the digital world; these recycle, re-imagine and re-mediate aspects of Romantic sensibility, particularly its fascination with the cultural terrain of the visual and its techniques.

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Reminding us of the physical and economic value of paper, Samantha Matthews’s chapter explores the ‘albo-mania’ of the 1820s and 30s, whereby albums and scrapbooks became participatory spaces for repurposing imagery, melding amateur handiwork and professional art practices in ways reminiscent of extra-illustration (in which readers might insert additional, personalising material into their own bound books). Viewing such sites through the trope of the scrap-beggar – a figure often shown in ragged clothing, which featured prominently in album frontispieces, magazine articles, annuals and original album poems – Samantha Matthews deconstructs the contemporary print industry’s representation of middle-class album-owners as mendicants ‘begging’ for contributions to their albums, ultimately concluding that, despite the industry’s attempts to drive profits through a gendered construction of the practice of creating albums, the ‘scrap’ aesthetic and album arts create an alternative sphere for female-focused artistic and social practices, inflected by charity and inclusivity. Connections between print and image forged over the course of the Romantic period also became embedded in the print productions of the mid- to late Victorian period, as Alison Chapman demonstrates in her chapter on the mise en page of illustrated poetry in serial magazines, such as Once a Week (1859–80) and Good Words (1860–1911). Showing how these texts grew out of Romantic precursors (including illustrated periodicals and poems), Chapman also argues for the cultivation of a savvy readership attuned to the complex visual codes engendered by the varied frequencies of periodical publication (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually), which created palpable visual rhythms to poetry layouts. This ongoing cooperation between visual-print forms, resonating between historical moments, is also apparent in the way Romantic-era caricature contributed to the culture of comics in the twentieth century. While adept satirists such as Gillray and Rowlandson produced their work in the emergent ‘mass media print culture’ of the 1790s onwards, such experimentation laid the groundwork for modern day interactions between text and image, as Jason Whittaker demonstrates. Addressing these fruitful interconnections, Whittaker details how comic books in the period after the Second World War provided a vehicle for the reception of Romantic artists and writers. Blake in particular has been recuperated not only because of the fusion of text and image in his illuminated books (with their suggestive relationship to the sequential art of modern-day comics and graphic novels), but also because of how his revolutionary, visionary universe enables writer-artists (such as Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman) to explore wider questions of system and the imagination. Just as the Romantics themselves conceived and framed the aesthetic imagination by reworking the visual and material culture of their own historical moment, so too have their own works, biographies and ideologies been explored, extended and appropriated from the Victorian period to today. Hila Shachar focuses on how contemporary film – from The Virgin Suicides (1999) to Bright Star (2009) to Emma (2020) – perpetuates this practice. Using films that are centred on narratives of female subjectivity as primary examples, Shachar examines the deep engagement with questions of authorial identity, aesthetic ideology and the formation of individual creativity that shaped Romantic thought, and remain relevant today. For modern audiences, the work of Jane Austen has become almost synonymous with the ‘look’ of the Regency, as filtered through the many film adaptations of her

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novels, and recreated in the proliferation of Regency cosplay balls attended by professional and amateur re-enactors, in numerous ‘prequels’ and ‘sequels’, and in popular serials such as Bridgerton. Here too, the Romantics were there first: Hilary Davidson’s exploration of fashion as a lens through which to review, revive, and re-enact the past begins with a recognition that the rise of historicism in the later eighteenth century was not only apparent in the collecting practices of antiquarians, where this volume begins, but also found expression in fashion and dress. The ‘jumble of styles’ that characterise Romantic fashion drew paradoxically from de-historicised fantasies of the ancient world, and a Gothicised blend of the medieval, Renaissance and baroque periods; moreover, Orientalism and the exotic also make an appearance, as does a ‘picturesque’ reception of the foreign, brought closer, as other essays here make clear, by increased travel, voyages of exploration and geopolitical events such as the Napoleonic Wars. Although a desire for authenticity is often at the heart of historically inspired dress, with its nostalgic framing of other times and places (and indeed of the Other), Davidson argues that any aesthetic expression of the past is inescapably tempered by current tastes, priorities and bodies.

Reflecting Romanticism: The View from ‘Here’ The layers of historical resonance teased apart in the chapters from our final section speak to the myriad ways in which Romanticism, through visual media, continues to shape contemporary conversations about culture and its importance for both public discourse and historical understanding. Recent years have coincided with a number of bicentenaries of significant events and productions of the period, making those historical echoes all the more audible – and indeed visible, mediated (and remediated) as they are through the arts in the present. One such event to celebrate its 200-year anniversary is the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. Some 60,000 people, mainly unarmed working-class families, had gathered peacefully in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, at a demonstration organised in support of parliamentary reform. Local constabulary and military forces were ordered by panicked magistrates to charge and disperse the crowds; at least fifteen people died and hundreds were badly wounded, many by the sabres wielded by the armed cavalry. Outrage at the atrocity spread far and wide (it prompted Percy Shelley, then resident in Italy, to write his biting commentary on tyranny, The Mask of Anarchy), carried on a tide of graphic visual imagery, as well as print eyewitness accounts. Some of this imagery drew directly from art historical tradition, for example in echoing representations of the Massacre of the Innocents. Treatments of the event also crystallised their own iconography, for example in an 1821 woodcut by George Cruikshank that appeared alongside satirical proposals for a monument in the news-sheet, A Slap at Slop and the Bridge-Street Gang, which Cruikshank produced in collaboration with the radical publisher and writer, William Hone (fig. I.5).3 In addition to scholarly commentary, the 2019 anniversary prompted numerous remediations, from an animated reconstruction of the events of the day, to a graphic novel, to Mike Leigh’s feature film Peterloo (2018) that used historical compositions from the visual arts along with the documentary record to inform both the broader framing and details of individual scenes.4

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Figure I.5  George Cruikshank, ‘Victory of Peterloo’. Proof of an illustration for the newspaper A Slap at Slop. 2 August 1821. Wood engraving on India paper. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Peterloo vividly captured the spirit of revolution and political reform central to the Romantic period, and is an index of how, in spite of apparent change, much remains the same. Police brutality in the face of peaceful protest persists; oppressive, authoritarian regimes forcefully repress dissent as we write. Contemporary events continue to put pressure on print and visual culture, as Peterloo did in 1819. However, the means and media through which they do so has evolved, in ways that widen access and shorten both the time and distance between those events and their witnesses. A digital repository such as the British Library’s collection of images and print sources curated as an open access resource on the Peterloo massacre, which includes everything from commemorative handkerchiefs and mugs to the full text of William Hone’s The Political House that Jack Built, is an example of how such archival material may become available and visible to a wider public.5 Digital media offer innumerable ways to revisit and re-imagine the Romantic period. Initiatives such as the Romantic Circles Gallery bring literary and visual material into conversation by offering a platform for contributors to create discrete, themed exhibits that also allow for visual works to be situated simultaneously in other contexts and networks – while a website such as the Blake Archive offers a comprehensive, digitised collection of Blake’s work, from his original artworks and illuminated books, to commercial engravings and book illustrations, offering readily navigable variants, transcriptions and commentary.6 Digital tools also enable the virtual re-creation of specific sites and spaces. In What Jane Saw, Janine Barchas reconstructs two major exhibitions of Georgian London, which occupied the same

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building at different times, and had both been visited by Jane Austen: the British Institution (specifically, the Joshua Reynolds retrospective in 1813), and Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, as it was constituted in 1796. The website uses catalogues, plans, descriptions and extant views (for example fig. 10.6 in this volume) to replicate the arrangement of objects, and recreate the experience of contemporary visitors (through for example an immersive video animation), in order to recover a more nuanced understanding of their impact and significance.7 It is also of course possible to create online galleries that bring objects together in entirely imaginary or hypothetical ways, as RÊVE (Romantic Europe: the Virtual Exhibition) has with its ‘Romanticism in 45 Objects’ project, which transposes objects from its digital collections into ‘framed’ paintings hanging in a ‘physical’ gallery (complete with picturesque views through the windows) that visitors navigate as they might a video game.8 Spaces associated with the Romantic period, such as exhibitions and galleries (real or otherwise), can be re-created and, in the process, re-imagined through such digital projects. Similar creative transformations take place in actual physical spaces – for example, in the blockbuster exhibition devoted to the Gothic at Tate Britain in 2006 (Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination) that recreated a 1790s phantasmagoria show for modern visitors to experience first hand, or in a writer’s house museum such as Keats’s House in Hampstead, London, that uses visual and material artefacts to enable visitors to ‘reinhabit’ the world (both actual and imagined), and to create a more complete ‘picture’, of the writer and his circle. In Keats’s case, this includes displaying evocative objects such as his death mask, or the engagement ring he gave to Fanny Brawne – but also recreating the bedroom he occupied at the time of his tuberculosis diagnosis, or even more pointedly, arranging the chairs in the Wentworth House sitting room exactly as represented in Joseph Severn’s famous portrait of Keats (see fig. 17.1) – with Edmund Dyer’s copy of the portrait itself hanging over the fireplace nearby. In the heritage industry as in art historiography, Romantic preoccupations with imagination and memorialisation (not to mention the trope of re-visiting) are self-evidently in operation. In an effort to compound the meaning of such initiatives for modern audiences, it is not uncommon for museums now to invite contemporary artists to engage creatively with their collections, in the process allowing forgotten or underemphasised stories to be told. For example, Louise Ann Wilson’s ‘Dorothy’s Room’, first installed at Rydal Mount in Ambleside in 2018, uses descriptive passages from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Rydal Journals (embroidered, along with lines of her poetry, onto her bed linen), paintings and objects such as those mentioned in her journal, sound and video projections of the landscapes she recalled and wrote about when bedridden, to recreate an immersive environment intended to recall Dorothy’s own ‘multi-sensory remembering and noticing’ of her natural surroundings.9 Contemporary deployments of techniques and optical devices from the period can also yield provocative results, as with C. S. Matheson and Alex MacKay’s erection of a Claude glass on the hotel across the road from Tintern Abbey, linked to a webcam, set up to stream live online. A set of archived still images from the feed, which perhaps appropriately is no longer maintained, recall the myriad views created with the help of a Claude glass by Wye Valley picturesque tourists, such as those of William Gilpin (see for example fig. 3.4 in this volume).10 A collaboration between a scholar and an artist, the project aimed to recover the ‘visual and physical experience’ of using the device, while problematising assumptions about

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perception and representation in relation to landscape – and revealing the ‘layered, culturally-determined nature of the gaze’, which usefully points us back to where we began. Such engagements, however, are not always celebratory, nor do they necessarily affirm shared values and uncontested relationships to place and history. Increasingly, they make room for more explicit critique in their revisiting and re-imagining of the period. On such grounds, for instance, the replica of Captain Cook’s ship the HMS Endeavour, which was to have docked and taken part in commemorative events to mark the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first landing on New Zealand’s North Island, was prevented from doing so after protests on the part of the local Māori community. A reckoning with the imperial past and its long-term consequences is also behind the National Trust’s ‘Colonial Countryside’ project, which invites primary-school children to participate in community-based efforts to explore, through recovered historical narratives, the many connections with Africa, India and the Caribbean present at its properties. The wider call to acknowledge the source of the wealth that supported many such estates, either directly or indirectly, with their links to the slave trade or the East India Company, has inevitably been met with controversy – as has the toppling of commemorative statues of historical figures such as Edward Colston, a Bristol slave trader with the Royal Africa Company. Yet this is where we must look, unflinchingly, for the material basis of the urban improvements discussed by O’Byrne, as well as the economic drivers for cultural developments in architecture, art and design. Such issues might seem, on the surface, distant from the concerns with which we began, but taken together, the essays in this volume show us how the visual, and its material conditions, have always shaped literary and public culture in intertwined and multilayered ways. In the process, they invite students and scholars to approach the period more synthetically, and to allow overlooked narratives to emerge. Furthermore, we begin to uncover how audiences across the social and political spectrum may have experienced and valued both literature and the visual arts, and how these arts, together, helped them make sense of a world undergoing radical change. Such an approach to the past allows us, in the spirit of Romanticism’s own impulse to know and represent itself in historical terms, to reframe questions of local, national and global importance. Our aim, over the course of this Companion, has been twofold: first, to consolidate the key findings of this emerging scholarly field in its own right, and second, to ask fresh questions of apparently familiar material. The volume has also been designed to facilitate conversations between disciplines at the intersection of the visual and the verbal. In contrast to the idealising and ultimately distorting effects of the Claude glass, the chapters here offer a more dynamic picture of the Romantic period, demonstrating the extent to which writers often worked in dialogue with developments in visual culture, and vice versa. By incorporating different voices, points of view and neglected materials, we may begin to expand our current narrative of the past well beyond the mirror and frame.

Notes   1. For a fuller description of the print, see (last accessed 3 March 2022).  2. Gillray’s print may be consulted on the British Library website, as part of a feature on the Shakespeare Gallery, at

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 4.

 5.  6.  7.  8.  9. 10.

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(last accessed 3 March 2022). See also the Folger Library’s ‘Folgerpedia’ article, at (last accessed 3 March 2022). See also Cruikshank’s design for a Peterloo medal at (last accessed 3 March 2022), with its explicit allusion to the medallion ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother’ (1787), mass produced by Josiah Wedgwood, which had circulated extensively in support of the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade. The reconstruction, made in consultation with Robert Poole, may be viewed at (last accessed 3 March 2022); Peterloo: Witnesses to a Massacre, by Polyp, Eva Schlunke, and Robert Poole, was published in 2019 by the New Internationalist. See (last accessed 3 March 2022). See ; (last accessed 3 March 2022). See (last accessed 3 March 2022). See (last accessed 3 March 2022). See (last accessed 3 March 2022). The Transient Glance: the Claude Mirror and the Picturesque, at (last accessed 3 March 2022). The still images can also be played as a slideshow. For a more recent project that combines aspects of both the examples discussed in this paragraph, see NEON’s 2016 installation at Wimpole Estate, in celebration of the landscape designer Capability Brown’s 300th anniversary, part of the National Trust’s ‘Trust New Art’ programme that aims to connect people to historical places through the arts. Available at (last accessed 3 March 2022).

Suggestions for Further Reading and Digital Resources Altick, Richard. 1978. The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP. ———. 1985. Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760–1900. Columbus: Ohio State UP. Barrell, John. 1992. The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. Bermingham, Ann. 2000. Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art. New Haven, CT: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale UP. Bond, Geoffrey, and Christine Kenyon Jones. 2021. Dangerous to Show: Byron and His Portraits. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brylowe, Thora. 2019. Romantic Art in Practice: Cultural Work and the Sister Arts, 1760–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Calè, Luisa. 2006. Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: ‘Turning Readers into Spectators’. Oxford: Oxford UP. Cheeke, Stephen. 2008. Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP. De Bolla, Peter. 2003. The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. Elliott, Kamilla. 2012. Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction: The Rise of Picture Identification, 1764–1835. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Galperin, William H. 1993. The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.

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Haywood, I., S. Matthews and M. L. Shannon, eds. 2019. Romanticism and Illustration. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Heffernan, James. 1993. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Labbe, Jacqueline. 1998. Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender, and Romanticism. Basingstoke: Macmillan. McCue, Maureen. 2014. British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793–1840. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Otto, Peter. 2011. Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality. Oxford: Oxford UP. Pointon, Marcia R. 1993. Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in EighteenthCentury England. New Haven, CT: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale UP. Rovee, Christopher. 2006. Imagining the Gallery: The Social Body of British Romanticism. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. Sha, Richard. 1998. Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Solkin, David, ed. 2001. Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780–1836. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Thomas, Sophie. 2008. Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle. New York: Routledge. ———. 2018. ‘Word and Image’. In The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism, edited by David Duff, 625–42. Oxford: Oxford UP. Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. 2001. The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2009. ‘Visual Pleasures, Visionary States: Art, Entertainment, and the Nation’. In A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age, edited by Jon Klancher, 232–56. Oxford: Blackwell.

Selected Digital Resources RÊVE (Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibition), European Romanticisms in Association, (last accessed 3 March 2022). Romantic Circles Gallery, (last accessed 3 March 2022). Romantic Illustration Network (RIN), (last accessed 3 March 2022). Romantic London: A Research Project Exploring Life and Culture in London in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, (last accessed 3 March 2022). The Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, (last accessed 3 March 2022). What Jane Saw, (last accessed 3 March 2022).

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Part I Perspectives

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1 ‘The happiest vehicles of antiquarian knowledge’: The Visual Arts and Romantic Antiquarianism Katharina Boehm

‘

T

he arts of design, ever cultivated by civilized nations’, observed the eminent antiquary Richard Gough in the preface to his British Topography (1780), ‘are the happiest vehicles of antiquarian knowledge’ (Gough 1780, xxxviii). At the time of writing, Gough was halfway through his twenty-year-long tenure as director of the Society of Antiquaries of London (SAL), and his comment was inspired by exasperation rather than celebration. Gough admonished his countrymen for ‘penetrat[ing] the wilds of Europe, and the desarts [sic] of Asia and Africa, for the remains of Grecian, Roman, and earlier architecture, yet no artist offers himself a candidate for fame in preserving those of our forefathers in their own country’ (xxiv). Surveying the scattered attempts of British antiquaries to put together a visual record of native antiquities, Gough noted that roughly half a century after the publication of Bernard de Montfaucon’s monumental Les monumens de la monarchie françoise (1729–33), Britain still lacked a similar ‘system of [. . .] antiquities’ that was ‘illustrated with representations from original monuments’ (xli) and manuscripts. Just as irksome to Gough was the SAL’s recent swerve towards financing extravagantly costly prints that tapped into the contemporary vogue for history painting. The SAL’s decision to publish large-scale prints of grand historical scenes from the reign of Henry VIII, taken from wall paintings at Windsor and Cowdray, had ‘give[n] the public two or three pieces of English history’, Gough grumbled, ‘while such a work as Montfaucon’s might have been carried on at an easier expence and greater advantage in every respect’ (xli). Gough’s comments are not just a symptom of internal institutional wrangling: they also raise wider questions pertinent to the relationship between antiquarian research and the visual arts that I explore in this chapter. Gough’s concerns preoccupied many other antiquaries of this period: which modes of visual mediation are most conducive to the generation of antiquarian knowledge? What kind of information about the past is encoded in historical paintings, visual documents and monuments – and how can it be unlocked? Can, and should, the imperatives of empirical documentation be reconciled with matters of aesthetic taste? What role have the arts to play in the communication of antiquarian information to the wider public? Romantic antiquarianism was a highly heterogeneous field of knowledge that encompassed proto-archaeological approaches to classical antiquity and to the material traces of the British (Roman, Anglo-Saxon, medieval) past, as well as research into philology, genealogy, heraldry, oral tradition and Britain’s native literary heritage, the

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study of manners and customs, and some branches of natural history (Sweet 2004; Heringman 2013; Heringman and Lake 2014; Pearce 2007). The thematic breadth and popular appeal of many Romantic-era antiquarian endeavours have often been obscured by the vibrancy of caricatures from the same period that render antiquaries as fusty pedants and bumbling fools. Satirical renditions of English antiquaries date back to Robert Burton’s and John Earle’s irreverent treatment of the early flowering of this field in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Burton 2001, 113; Earle 1897, 57–8). By the turn of the nineteenth century, the old cliché of the antiquary as credulous eccentric received a new lease of life through Walter Scott’s portrayal of Jonathan Oldbuck, the eponymous protagonist of The Antiquary (1816), and through Thomas Rowlandson’s famous satirical prints and his illustrations for William Combe’s The English Dance of Death (1815–16). Rowlandson features antiquaries as lecherous old dupes or hopelessly naïve dunces prone to confusing modern chamber pots with ancient urns (fig. 1.1); he lampoons the antiquaries’ amassing of disorderly collections of worthless trinkets and paints their penchant for opening graves and barrows as a morbid and morally dubious obsession (Scalia 2005; Thom 2015). However, as Ina Ferris, Mike Goode and others have argued, the popularity of such comic takedowns had less to do with actual or alleged deficiencies of antiquarian research and was instead born out of trenchant cultural debates about patriotism, masculinity and the rise of disciplinarity in different fields of historical inquiry (Ferris 2002; Goode 2003). In the past, scholars interested in interfaces between the arts and antiquarianism have given particular attention to the activities of classically interested antiquaries, such as the members of the Society of Dilettanti and eminent collectors like Sir William Hamilton and Charles Townley, whose work contributed to the spread of neoclassical taste in Britain (Coltman 2006; Kelly 2009). In what follows, I take up Gough’s notion of the arts as ‘vehicles of antiquarian knowledge’ and focus on three less well-explored contexts in which the role of visual media as generator, conduit and repository of antiquarian knowledge was negotiated in the Romantic period. The first part of the chapter turns to an influential print series published by the fellows of the SAL, which exemplifies some of the epistemological and aesthetic concerns that fed into debates about the visual representation of antiquities. The publication ventures of the SAL participated in the burgeoning print market of the turn of the nineteenth century, and I subsequently explore how the absorption of antiquarian information into a range of popularising visual media began to democratise access to antiquarian knowledge while also turning the past into a marketable commodity. The final part of the chapter briefly reflects on art and design as objects of antiquarian inquiry. Here, I survey some of the ways in which antiquarian research widened the historical and geographical horizons that framed understandings of the origins and development of art. Throughout, this chapter asks how the convergence of the visual arts and antiquarian studies changed how people knew the past and engaged with the arts in the Romantic period.

Picturing the Past: Vetusta Monumenta Gough’s displeasure about the SAL’s sponsorship of the aforementioned prints of historical scenes was compounded by the fact that this expenditure depleted the resources for the society’s long-running print series Vetusta Monumenta. Begun in

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Figure 1.1  Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Veneration’ from the series Le Brun Travested, or Caricatures of the Passions, 1800. The print is lettered: ‘This passion is represented by an Antiquary, contemplating an Unique’. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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1718, when the SAL was re-established, prints belonging to the series were not only distributed to fellows of the society; from 1756, they were also released to John Boydell’s successful print shop in Cheapside. Individual plates were collected into volumes by the SAL, the first four of which appeared in 1747, 1789, 1795 and 1815. From the second volume onwards, Vetusta Monumenta also included letterpress essays offering further information on the objects represented on the plates. Vetusta Monumenta featured an extremely diverse set of objects, ranging from architectural monuments to medieval coins, and from portraits to the funerary monuments of Westminster Abbey. The great majority of these objects were from Britain and dated roughly from the third century to the seventeenth century (Heringman 2019). The print series opens a window onto an emerging public discourse about antiquities and about the aims of antiquarian research. Members voted on each object to be included in the series. In this sense, Vetusta Monumenta can be seen to reflect a democratic consensus (reached, of course, among relatively privileged and exclusively male individuals elected by ballot) on which antiquities were particularly relevant to national history. A closer look at two plates that were included in the second volume of Vetusta Monumenta (1789) will show how aesthetic concerns and trends fed into the manner in which antiquaries used the ostensibly ‘transparent’ medium of engraving as a tool in their research. As Sam Smiles has shown, the Romantic period coincided with ‘increasing recognition of the particular needs of illustration in contradistinction to “polite” art’ (2000, 7). Diverse fields, including natural history, antiquarianism and medicine, understood precise observation ‘not only [as] the foundation of knowledge, but [as] a form of knowledge itself, a mode of cognition’ (Smiles 2000, 5). The precision that could be achieved in engraving turned it into a pre-eminent research tool for the production of accurate, quasi-objective visual data that facilitated typological and comparative projects. Gough had this property of engraving in mind when he noted in British Topography that ‘the pencil is as essential as the pen to illustrate antiquities’ (1789, xxxix). James Basire’s copperplate engraving of a group of seven objects from the Bronze Age and late medieval period (fig. 1.2) illustrates what Smiles describes as the ability of antiquarian images to display disparate data sets, allowing for a more comprehensive understanding of an item than could be achieved by studying the material object alone. Basire, who served as engraver to the SAL (1759–96) as well as to the Royal Society, worked around the problem of combining objects of varying size on the same plate by providing exact measurements for the different parts of individual objects. Section drawings allow viewers to peer inside the interior of two of the objects and elucidate the composite parts out of which they have been constructed. The section drawing of the small shield, for instance, makes visible the various parts and materials (wood, iron, leather, brass) used in the making of the shield and deploys a sophisticated system of identifying letters, keyed to the accompanying essay, to point the viewer to further information about individual parts of the object. However, Basire did not use the graphic medium merely to present data efficiently. He also assembled the various objects with their rounded shapes into a pleasing, harmonious arrangement. Even more importantly, Basire’s aesthetic composition of the plate commemorates research practices and forms of sociability that shaped the SAL’s institutional life, for instance by vividly evoking the pleasures of examining and handling miscellaneous objects during society meetings.

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Figure 1.2  James Basire, Bronze Age Horns with Medieval Brooch, Arm-Rings and Shield. Plate 20 in vol. 2 of Vetusta Monumenta, 1789. Copper-plate engraving. © Vetusta Monumenta: A Digital Edition. Courtesy of the Division of Special Collections, Archives and Rare Books, Ellis Library, University of Missouri.

The seemingly haphazard grouping of seven disparate objects – a small shield from the fifteenth or sixteenth century found in Wales, a Viking-age Scandinavian brooch found on the Western Isles of Scotland, Bronze Age horns from Ireland and Viking-age arm-rings from Ireland – translates into the medium of print the society’s exhibition practices: during meetings, fellows showcased and discussed whatever objects of interest had recently come into their hands. The objects gathered together in Basire’s plate were presented by two eminent fellows of the society, Richard Pococke and Charles Lyttelton, during a session in January 1761. Basire’s careful gradations of shading

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achieve considerable range in rendering the texture and tone of surfaces, while also imbuing the objects with depth and plasticity rarely found, for instance, in Montfaucon’s plates. This mode of representation invites viewers to imagine that they are looking at these objects as if they are spread out on a table and waiting to be picked up and inspected (Basire includes, for instance, both a front and a back view of the small shield). Basire also went to great lengths to render the damage which some of these objects had sustained, highlighting the uniqueness and age of these pieces. As a result, they are not reduced to mere sources of raw information that can be processed into antiquarian typologies: instead, the plate prompts us to relate to these archaeological finds as singular things and nods emphatically to the wonder and haptic pleasure that these objects are likely to have inspired during society meetings. The visual language of the plate thus combines two different sensibilities that oftentimes coexisted in antiquarian activities at the turn of the nineteenth century. It honours the empirical tenets and systematic collection of information that underpinned many knowledge projects of the Enlightenment, while also portraying these archaeological finds as auratic objects which solicit the viewer’s imaginative engagement. Antiquarian engraving was often described – by Gough and other eminent antiquaries, notably William Stukeley – as a means of ‘preserving’ fragile antiquities (Gough 1780, xxxviii; Stukeley 1724, [i]). However, in other cases, the members of the SAL relied on engraving to visually reconstruct long-vanished monuments. Basire’s engravings of Richmond Palace, the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich and Hampton Court for the second volume of Vetusta Monumenta – all of which had been destroyed or, in the case of Hampton Court, significantly altered by the eighteenth century – were based on early modern drawings and paintings. Basire was not the first engraver to the SAL to use visual sources in this manner: George Vertue, who had engraved all but one plate for the first volume of Vetusta Monument and seventeen plates which appeared in the second volume, worked from sixteenth-century visual records when he produced a series of remarkable engravings featuring long-destroyed castles from the Duchy of Lancaster. A plate showing Sandal Castle in West Yorkshire (fig. 1.3), included in the second volume of Vetusta Monumenta, illustrates how this method cast into sharp relief the limitations of engraving – and visual representation in general – as a quasi-transparent medium that communicates antiquarian information without calling attention to itself. The line drawing that served as Vertue’s sole source had supplemented an Elizabethan survey documenting the state of repairs of properties in the Duchy of Lancaster. Given this utilitarian purpose, it is unsurprising that while the drawing shows the different parts of the castle, including keep, curtain wall, gatehouse and domestic buildings, it is relatively unadorned and makes no attempt to avoid errors in perspective (Sandal Magna 1561). Vertue’s engraving reproduces these Escheresque perspectival oddities (note, for instance, the awkward angle at which the curtain wall meets the tower furthermost to the left). Vertue’s preparatory drawings were approved by the SAL, but not all fellows applauded Vertue’s work. Thomas Wilson, who had been elected to the SAL in 1751, complained in a letter: ‘I hear Mr. Vertue is now engraving Sandal Castle, [. . .]. I wish they would employ Vivares in perspective and landscape’ (Nichols 1818, 371). Francis Vivares was a well-regarded, London-based engraver of picturesque landscape subjects. The SAL’s minute books offer no clues to conversations the fellows may have had about Vertue’s approach to his source material. However, the scarcity of other visual sources on the former

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Figure 1.3  George Vertue, ‘Sandal Castle in Yorkshire’. Plate 11 in Vol. 2 of Vetusta Monumenta, 1789. Copper-plate engraving. © Vetusta Monumenta: A Digital Edition. Courtesy of the Division of Special Collections, Archives and Rare Books, Ellis Library, University of Missouri.

appearance of Sandal Castle may well have contributed to the SAL’s desire to preserve the entirety of the archaeological information provided by the surviving drawing, even if this information was presented in a manner that violated the rules of perspective. Vertue’s handling of perspective and scale also intriguingly suggests that the fellows of the SAL understood this fairly unsophisticated Elizabethan drawing, produced by an unknown artist, not just as neutral medium providing information about the duchy castle but as artefact in its own right. Martin Myrone has argued that ‘[i]t was precisely this, Vertue’s robust refusal to make the way he laboured correspond to [. . .] aesthetic values, which helped secure his position as the pre-eminent antiquarian engraver of his age’ (2007, 108). However, it is evident from the changes that Vertue introduced when he engraved the drawing of Sandal Castle that even this famously restrained antiquarian engraver was partly guided by aesthetic concerns. Vertue increased the symmetry of the composition by adding a partly clouded sky which balances out the ridge on which the castle sits. He also inserted picturesque details, adding the grassy slopes and shrubbery as well as replacing the symmetrical, smooth tree trunks and overly large, ornamental leaves of the original drawing with more weather-beaten oak trees. The friction between the somewhat crude rendition of the castle, imported from the sixteenth-century drawing, and the picturesque environs, comprehensively adapted to the aesthetic conventions of eighteenth-century

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topographical prints, reminds viewers that what they are looking at is not an architectural antiquity that has endured through time. Instead, we are gazing at a fanciful paper castle brought into being by antiquarian research into Elizabethan sources and Vertue’s remediation of the original drawings. The text printed on the plate confirms the destruction of the castle in the preceding century, while also advertising the antiquaries’ efforts to recover, engrave and publish surviving visual records of the duchy castles. That the production of antiquarian knowledge here merges smoothly with the resurrective powers of the imagination is also suggested by Vertue’s inclusion of a great number of staffage figures. Paying tribute to the aesthetic convention of landscape painting and topographical prints, Vertue frequently populated his antiquarian engravings with a range of human figures and animals. However, the plate of Sandal Castle features an almost excessive amount of staffage, and the arrangement of the largest group in a long row indicates that Vertue did not incorporate them merely to indicate scale. Instead, these figures, whose dress evokes different historical periods ranging from the classical past to the eighteenth-century present, look like they have been assembled to inspire fancies relating to the many famous historical events that took place at Sandal Castle. Embodying manifold narrative possibilities, these figures also connect the engraving to an intermedial web of imaginative responses to Sandal Castle. For instance, the two figures, a boy and his guardian, who are placed conspicuously in the centre of the row of staffage may have reminded viewers of an event commemorated in the text provided on the plate and famously dramatised in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 3: the murder of the Duke of York’s son at the hands of the Lancastrian forces of Margaret Anjou and King Henry VI. Meanwhile, readers of Jane West’s historical romance Alicia de Lacy; An Historical Romance (1814), which takes Sandal Castle as its Gothic setting, may have interpreted the female rider at the head of the row as a visual reference to the abduction of Alicia, wife of Thomas of Lancaster, which sparked the earliest documented military conflict relating to the castle. Instead of pointing to antiquarian engraving’s ability to document what can be empirically observed, the medieval dreamscape shown on the plate celebrates engraving as an indispensable aid in the imaginative restoration of vanished monuments in print. Vertue’s and Basire’s work for Vetusta Monumenta indicates that engravers and antiquaries were aware that the fragmentary record they were working with often required visual representation to move beyond documenting the empirically observable: Basire’s section drawings and Vertue’s remediation of the Elizabethan drawings produce antiquarian objects of inquiry rather than merely recording information gleaned from close inspection. Their plates suggest that despite the widening gulf which public conversations identified between fine arts and more utilitarian genres of engraving, antiquarian illustration continued to combine aspects associated with both realms: its ability to produce and communicate antiquarian knowledge was rooted both in its capacity for precise documentation and in its potential for imaginative reconstruction and aesthetic innovation.

Popular Antiquarianism and Romantic Media Ecologies Visual arts played a key role in the popularisation of antiquarian approaches to the past in the Romantic period. A case in point would be the prolific publishing activities of Francis Grose, who saw well over a thousand antiquarian plates into print over his

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long career. Between 1772 and 1787, Grose issued, in more than a hundred parts, an account of The Antiquities of England and Wales, which paired views of picturesque ruins, most of them based on Grose’s own drawings, with short explanatory essays (see fig. 1.4). The series was not intended, Grose explained, for the ‘veteran antiquary’ but for readers ‘who had not made the antiquities of this country their immediate study’ (Grose 1773, iv, iii). Grose also contributed to the Antiquarian Repertory, an illustrated periodical published by the engraver Richard Godfrey between 1775 and 1786 (and reissued from 1807 onwards). The Antiquarian Repertory made it its mission to disseminate antiquarian knowledge to the broadest possible audience. As the introduction to the first volume declared, ‘every man is naturally an antiquary’ (Anonymous, ‘Introduction’ 1775, iv). Alexander Hogg, who embarked on an energetic publishing venture based almost entirely on plagiarising antiquarian works such as the Antiquarian Repertory and Grose’s The Antiquities of England and Wales, advertised his Historical Description of New and Elegant Picturesque Views of the Antiquities of England and Wales, published in more than a hundred parts from the mid-1780s, in even more starkly egalitarian terms. Highlighting the ‘cheapness’ of his ‘Grand Copper-Plate Repository’, he argued that ‘without a sufficient Share of

Figure 1.4  Richard Bernard Godrey, ‘Queen’s Cross’. Plate included in Francis Grose, The Antiquities of England and Wales, 1772–87. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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this Knowledge, no Person can make a respectable Figure in Life, either as Divine, a Lawyer, Statesman, Soldier, private Gentleman, Tradesman or Mechanic’ (Hogg 1785, iii). Antiquarian subject matter made an excellent fit with serial publication: instead of composing narrative historiographies in the vein of Enlightenment luminaries or conjectural historians, most antiquaries amassed information relating to local antiquities and monuments, manuscripts, collections and oral traditions. Much of this material could easily be divided into relatively autonomous parts and published separately. At the same time, antiquaries – much more so than historians – were experts in working with many different visual media, such as maps, ichnographic drawings, prints and drawings of antiquities, and illuminated manuscripts. As a result, they had at their disposal a large range of visual resources that could be published individually or combined in flexible ways with written accounts of antiquities. The popularity of illustrated antiquarian publications during the Romantic era had a lasting impact. As Richard Maxwell has shown, the ‘long and distinguished tradition of antiquarian illustration was redirected to the illustration of novels and poems’ in the Victorian period, turning the printed image into an integral part of literary publishing (2002). However, popularising publishing schemes were only one of several conduits through which antiquarian information circulated at the turn of the nineteenth century. London’s theatres and burgeoning scene of visual entertainments also offered their audiences vivid recreations of the past that were grounded in the research of antiquaries. Under the actor-manager John Kemble, Shakespearian productions at Drury Lane made use of spectacularly detailed sets featuring Gothic architecture and interiors. Many of these designs were produced by William Capon, who was also an enthusiastic antiquary and a close friend of John Carter, the official draughtsman to the SAL. Capon and Carter spent much time researching Gothic architecture together, and this research fed directly into the stage sets that Capon produced around the turn of the nineteenth century. For instance, Capon recreated the Tower of London in its fourteenth-century incarnation for Shakespeare’s Richard III, he built a Tudor hall for use in a production of James Hook’s opera Jack of Newberry, and a Gothic library, based on studies taken in St Stephen’s chapel, Westminster, for a production of Ireland’s Shakespeare forgery Vortigern (Allen 1971, 29). Meanwhile, the immersive experiences offered by London’s mushrooming panoramas and dioramas allowed their audiences to explore remote sites of antiquarian interest or spirited them into the past. ‘[N]ow Pompeii, reposing in its slumber of two thousand years’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine enthused, can be seen ‘in the very buzz of the Strand’: ‘The Panorama gives a striking coup-d’oeil of one of two great excavations of Pompeii. The Forum, the narrow streets, the little Greek houses, with their remnants of ornamental painting, their corridors and their tessellated floors, are seen as they might have been seen the day before the eruption’ (Anonymous, ‘Pompeii’ 1824, 473, 475). A diorama at Regent’s Park invited visitors to explore the ‘highly picturesque’ ruins of the St. Wandrille Abbey in Normandy, ‘represented exactly in its present state of mouldering’ (Anonymous, ‘Fine Arts’ 1828, 453). Enterprising antiquaries, who witnessed how quickly their research was converted into commercial visual spectacles, contemplated breaking into the same market. John Britton, the editor of popularising antiquarian series such as The Beauties of England and Wales (1801–18) and Architectural Antiquities of Great Britain (1807–26), published his ‘novel plan for exhibiting models, pictures to be elucidated by lectures’ in 1825:

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‘This plan would combine something of the principles of the Cosmorama, Diorama, Panorama, and Eidophusikon; and I am persuaded that a very interesting exhibition might be formed of Celtic or Druidical Antiquities, whereby amusement and instruction might be united’ (Britton 1825, 511). The visual entertainments on which Britton’s projected exhibition was supposed to be modelled formed part of the rise of ‘hyper-realistic’ optical media which Peter Otto and Gillen D’Arcy Wood date to the Romantic period (Otto 2011; Wood 2001). The increasing availability and circulation of antiquarian information allowed showmen, stage designers and artists to create immersive environments that promised audiences ‘authentic’ views of the past. For instance, contemporary commentators described ‘[t]he scene’ of the aforementioned panorama of Pompeii as ‘absolutely alive, vivid, and true; we feel all but the breeze, and hear all but the dashing of the wave’ (‘Pompeii’ 1824, 473), and they found the cloisters of Wandrille Abbey as ‘reflections of their originals, as in a glass’ (‘Fine Arts’ 1828, 453). In the commercial context of inexpensive antiquarian serials, metropolitan theatre productions and visual entertainments, information about the past was increasingly accessible to the many rather than only the select few. However, the popularity of innovative verisimilar technologies meant that ‘knowing’ the past was now often short-circuited with the illusion of seeing the past ‘as it was really like’ and gaining experiential access to it. It is possible to detect in the proliferation of these new visual entertainments and in the increasing popularisation of antiquarianism the first stirrings of the modern heritage industry – an industry that puts non-specialist audiences in touch with the (national) past, that emphasises entertainment, and that responds to patriotic sentiments (and to market forces) more directly than scholarly fields such as antiquarianism, archaeology and history (Lowenthal 1996, x). Realism’s ascendancy as the dominant mode of historical representation in the commerce-driven environment of metropolitan visual media also caught the attention of other (literary) participants in the market for history-themed commodities. Authors of historical romances such as Ann Radcliffe and Walter Scott – well-versed in antiquarian research and familiar with London’s shows – offered sustained meditations on the feverish medial transmission of the past at the turn of the nineteenth century. Radcliffe’s Gaston de Blondeville (1802; publ. 1826) – just like The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), The Monastery (1820) and many other works by Scott – engages with a prodigious range of (audio)visual media. These works explore the processing of antiquarian information into hyper-realistic historical environs with a mixture of wariness and fascination. The frame narrative of Gaston de Blondeville, for instance, gently mocks the disappointment of two inexperienced antiquaries who visit Kenilworth Castle and find the ‘plain reality’ of the ruin sorely lacking in comparison to the mediated version they have seen in London: ‘[T]he enchanting vision is no more found’, one of them complains, ‘except in the very heart of a populous city [. . .] by the paltry light of stage-lamps. Yet there, surrounded by a noisy multitude, [. . .] I have found myself transported into the wildest region of poetry and solitude’ (Radcliffe 2006, 4). Radcliffe’s and Scott’s keen awareness of London’s shows and visual entertainments provides an apt reminder that the popularisation of antiquarianism and the emergence of new aesthetic registers in the representation of the past were intermedial phenomena. As prints, illustrated serial publications and visual entertainments proliferated towards the end of the century, antiquarian information reached increasingly diverse audiences

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through a wide range of communication channels. At the same time, this vogue for visual recreations of the past also influenced the imagery and representational strategies of other media, including historical fiction.

Antiquarian Perspectives on the History of Art The visual arts played a key role in facilitating the generation and dissemination of antiquarian knowledge. However, understandings of domestic and foreign art were themselves caught up in a process of transformation in the Romantic period – a process powered at least in part by the research of antiquaries. Prior to the publication of Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting (1762–4), accounts of the progress of the visual arts in Britain had been patchy and scattered. Walpole’s complex relationship to antiquarianism – his energetic rhetorical attempts to disassociate himself from research practices that he in fact often followed quite closely – is well established (Calè 2017; Lewis 1956). In any case, Walpole built Anecdotes of Painting on a substantial fundament of antiquarian research. After the death of George Vertue, the aforementioned engraver to the SAL, Walpole bought forty volumes of notebooks and manuscripts which carried material relating to Vertue’s unfinished long-term project: a comprehensive history of the arts, artists, art institutions, and related practices of collecting and patronage in Britain, which Vertue had intended to title Museum Pictoris Anglicanum (Bignamini 1988). Vertue’s and Walpole’s approaches differed considerably. With the benefit of hindsight, the comprehensive cultural history of art production in Britain that Vertue was hoping to construct out of his prolix antiquarian notes anticipates modern perspectives on the evolution of artistic trends. By contrast, Walpole’s biographical approach – although considerably more fashionable in the eighteenth century – remained tied to more traditional celebrations of outstanding individuals, already familiar to British connoisseurs from the many histories of Continental art that followed this pattern (Junod 2011, 54–5). With its sprawling footnotes and voluminous appendices of historical documents, such as indentures and letters patent, Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting nevertheless carries the imprint both of its antiquarian genealogy and of Walpole’s participation in antiquarian practices. In Anecdotes of Painting, Walpole was reluctant to rank the achievement of British artists with those of their Continental colleagues. Meanwhile, antiquaries such as Gough, Carter, Henry Englefield and Jacob Schnebbelie – who, like Walpole, were important figures in the Gothic revival – sought to erode the widely accepted hierarchy between classical antiquity and British medieval art and architecture (Heringman 2013, 231–80). Throughout the eighteenth century, there existed competing evaluations of the aesthetic and cultural heritage embodied by the architectural remains of the Middle Ages. While a number of antiquaries were keen to restore to view national achievements in art and architecture from the medieval period, other commentators continued to associate ‘Gothic’ antiquities with crude forms and a barbarous, superstitious and Catholic past (Townshend 2019, 35–9). Central to antiquarian attempts to push back against prejudices against native Gothic architecture was the detailed visual record of medieval antiquities produced by skilled draughtsmen like Carter and Schnebbelie. Their efforts were premised on the idea that ‘proper visual documentation of medieval architecture would not only provide a secure basis for scholarly investigation, as had happened with classical antiquities, but would also bring the

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medieval architectural legacy up to some sort of parity with classical remains’ (Smiles 2002, 511). Such endeavours, focused on British medieval art, coexisted with many other branches of Romantic antiquarianism, some of which continued to be centred on research into classical antiquity while others dealt with non-classical antiquities in foreign regions. While the scope of this chapter does not allow me to survey this large and heterogeneous field, I want to end by briefly turning to the proto-ethnographic inquiries that formed part of antiquarian research. These perspectives left a strong mark on Romantic-era conceptions of the visual arts and their history, at home and abroad. Eminent seventeenth-century antiquaries, such as Robert Plot and John Aubrey, had established customs, rituals and manners as worthwhile objects of antiquarian inquiry. As the eighteenth century progressed, antiquaries in Britain as well as expatriate antiquaries active in Italy, India and other parts of the world began to explore art as ethnographic source material. Gough viewed medieval sepulchral monuments as ‘faithful representations of the habits of their contemporaries’ (Gough 1780, xlii). In a similar vein, Joseph Strutt – who made his name as the author of popularising, richly illustrated antiquarian volumes – contended that the visual arts served as a largely untapped repository of former manners and customs. His works, including Horda Angel-Cynnan, or, A Compleat View of the Manners, Customs, Arms, Habits, & c. of the Inhabitants of England (1774–6), A Complete View of the Dress and Habits of the People of England (1796–9), and Glig-Ceman Angel Deod, or, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), offered large numbers of engraved illuminations from manuscripts. Strutt used these illuminations to deduce information about practices of everyday life in the past. His approach bears an affinity to the work of Edward Moor, who combined his military career in the East India Company with antiquarian research that was nourished by his membership in the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the SAL. Moor’s groundbreaking and compendiously illustrated The Hindu Pantheon (1810) used Indian sculpture, drawings, coins and medals to examine aspects of Hindu faith and religious rituals (fig. 1.5). Like Strutt, Moor was primarily interested in art as a means of generating antiquarian and ethnographic knowledge. Moor’s research was steeped in the scholarship and syncretism of an earlier generation of British expatriate Orientalists in India, including William Jones, Charles Wilkins, Henry Thomas Colebrook and other early members of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Building on this heritage, Moor’s sympathetic approach to Hinduism was starkly at odds with the views of influential evangelicals such as Charles Buchanan and William Ward. In the years leading up to the renewal of the East India Company charter in 1813, these and other evangelical authors sought to drive home the benefits of missionary activities in India. They did so partly by presenting Hindu sculptures and architecture as ‘evidence’ of allegedly depraved and superstitious religious practices that were supposedly loath to an enlightened, Protestant nation (Oddie 2011). By contrast, Moor worked patiently to decode the information on myths, rituals and customs that he believed to be contained in specimens of Indian art and sculpture, turning his Hindu Pantheon into a comprehensive account of religious life in India. However, The Hindu Pantheon also played a pivotal role in familiarising British audiences with antiquities from India, and it began to draw these objects into the fold of (non-classical) art. Moor hired the miniaturist Moses Haughton, who also worked as Henry Fuseli’s resident engraver, to produce line drawings for the 105 plates gathered in the book. Moor insisted on the ethnographic as well as aesthetic value of Hindu antiquities, noting in the preface that

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Figure 1.5  [John Dadley?], ‘Pārvatī or some holy female at the ceremony of linga pūjā in honour of mahādēva’. Plate 22 in Edward Moor, The Hindu Pantheon, 1810. Engraving after line-drawing by Moses Haughton. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. while ‘Hindu artists [are] more skillful in metallurgy than in perspective’, it will be difficult for ‘even the amateur or artist of Europe [to] easily find more graceful models of outline than some of my plates will afford him’ (Moor 1810, x). The ethnographic interests of antiquaries expanded not only the geographical remit but also the timescale on which the history of art was traced during the Romantic era. This becomes evident, for instance, when we turn to the work of Pierre-François Hugues, the self-styled Baron d’Hancarville, who was part of Sir William Hamilton’s extended network of expatriate and Italian antiquaries in Naples. D’Hancarville and Hamilton collaborated in researching classical antiquities, particularly those made available by ongoing excavations in Herculaneum and Pompeii, which began in 1739 and 1755 respectively. D’Hancarville had initially intended his Collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities (1766–76) to be a catalogue of Sir William Hamilton’s collection of ancient vases, but he considerably expanded his work in

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later volumes. Hamilton and d’Hancarville studied the rituals and customs of modern Neapolitan peasants in order to decode the meaning of ancient vase paintings and other archaeological artefacts – a method which Noah Heringman describes as ‘ethnographic actualism’ (2013, 158). D’Hancarville’s ethnographic understanding of art led him to conclude that primitive religious ritual and artistic expression had evolved in tandem. This perspective allowed him to propose a much earlier, prehistoric date for the origins of sculpture and painting in pre-Hellenic culture, predating by roughly half a millennium the date which Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764) postulates for the emergence of the arts (c. 750 bce). In different ways, the projects of d’Hancarville, Vertue, Strutt and Moor conceived of art as a lived practice that is deeply enmeshed in, and expressive of, a society’s wider social and cultural system. These antiquarian reconfigurations of art and its history have received far less attention than Romantic-era debates about aesthetic taste, the relationship between aesthetics and epistemology and the subjectivity of aesthetic experience. They deserve a more prominent place in conversations about Romanticism and the arts – not least because they anticipate many contemporary scholars’ commitment to thinking about the production of art as a cultural (rather than a narrowly aesthetic) practice.

Bibliography Allen, Ralph G. 1971. ‘Kemble and Capon at Drury Lane, 1794–1802’. Educational Theatre Journal 23 (1): 22–35. Anonymous. [Francis Grose?]. 1775. ‘Introduction’. The Antiquarian Repertory: A Miscellany, Intended to Preserve and Illustrate Several Valuable Remains of Old Times, vol. 1, [iii]–viii. London: printed for Francis Blyth. Anonymous. 1824. ‘Pompeii’. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 15 (87): 472–75. Anonymous. 1828. ‘Fine Arts’. Examiner (13 July 1828): 453. Bignamini, Ilaria. 1988. ‘George Vertue, Art Historian; and, Art Institutions in London, 1689–1768: A Study of Clubs and Academies’. The Volume of the Walpole Society 54: 1–148. Britton, John. 1825. ‘Letter’. The Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. XCV, II part: 510–11. Burton, Robert. 2001. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Edited by William H. Gass. New York: New York Review Books Classics. Calè, Luisa. 2017. ‘Historic Doubts, Conjectures, and the Wanderings of a Principal Curiosity: Henry VII in the Fabric of Strawberry Hill’. In Mediating the Materiality of the Past, 1700–1930, edited by Katharina Boehm and Victoria Mills (Special Issue of Word & Image 33 (3)), 279–91. Coltman, Vicci. 2006. Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760–1800. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. Earle, John. 1897. ‘The Antiquary’. In Microcosmography, edited by Alfred S. West, 57–8. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Ferris, Ina. 2002. ‘Pedantry and the Question of the Enlightenment History: The Figure of the Antiquary in Scott’. European Romantic Review 13 (3): 273–83. Goode, Mike. 2003. ‘“Dryasdust Antiquarianism and Soppy Masculinity”: The Waverley Novels and the Gender of History’. Representations 82 (1): 52–86. Gough, Richard. 1780. British Topography: Or, An Historical Account of What Has Been Done for Illustrating the Topographical Antiquities of Great Britain and Ireland. London: Payne & Son and Nichols.

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Grose, Francis. 1773. Introduction to The Antiquities of England and Wales, vol. 1, [iii]–iv. London: printed for Hooper and Wigstead. Heringman, Noah. 2013. Sciences of Antiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work. Oxford: Oxford UP. ———. 2019. ‘Vetusta Monumenta: An Introduction’. Vetusta Monumenta: Ancient Monuments. A Digital Edition. Edited by Noah Heringman, Crystal B. Lake and Katharina Boehm. (last accessed 10 November 2021). Heringman, Noah and Crystal B. Lake. 2014. ‘Romantic Antiquarianism: Introduction’. Romantic Circles Praxis Series. (last accessed 10 November 2021). Heringman, Noah, Crystal B. Lake and Katharina Boehm. 2019. Vetusta Monumenta: Ancient Monuments. A Digital Edition. (last accessed 10 November 2021). Hogg, Alexander. 1785. Preface to Historical Description of New and Elegant Picturesque Views of the Antiquities of England and Scotland, [iii]–iv. London: printed for the author. Junod, Karen. 2011. ‘Writing the Lives of Painters’: Biography and Artistic Identity in Britain 1760–1810. Oxford: Oxford UP. Kelly, Jason M. 2009. The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Lewis, Wilmarth S. 1956. ‘Horace Walpole, Antiquary’. In Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier, edited by Richard Pares and A. J. P. Taylor, 178–203. London: Macmillan. Lowenthal, David. 1996. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. New York: Cambridge UP. Maxwell, Richard. 2002. ‘Walter Scott, Historical Fiction, and the Genesis of the Victorian Illustrated Book’. In The Victorian Illustrated Book, edited by Richard Maxwell, 1–51. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Moor, Edward. 1810. The Hindu Pantheon. London: Johnson. Myrone, Martin. 2007. ‘The Society of Antiquaries and the Graphic Arts: George Vertue and His Legacy’. In Visions of Antiquity, edited by Susan Pearce, 99–119. London: The Society of Antiquaries. Nichols, John. 1818. Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century: Volume 3. London: Nichols, Son, and Bentley. Oddie, Geoffrey. 2011. ‘Missions and Museums: Hindu Gods and Other “Abominations,” 1820–1860’. In Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Institutions in Colonial India, edited by Indra Sengupta and Daud Ali, 59–74. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Otto, Peter. 2011. Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of the Virtual. Oxford: Oxford UP. Pearce, Susan. 2007. ‘Antiquaries and the Interpretation of Ancient Objects, 1770–1820’. In Visions of Antiquity: The Society of Antiquaries of London, 1707–2007, edited by Susan Pearce, 147–72. London: Society of Antiquaries. Radcliffe, Ann. 2006. Gaston de Blondeville, or, The Court of Henry III Keeping Festival in Ardenne. Edited by Frances Chiu. Chicago: Valancourt. ‘Sandal Magna, Yorkshire: Perspective View of Sandal Castle’. 1561. The National Archives, Kew. MPC 1/97. Scalia, Christopher. 2005. ‘The Grave Scholarship of Antiquaries’. Literature Compass 2: 1–13. Smiles, Sam. 2000. Eye Witness: Artists and Visual Documentation in Britain, 1770–1830. Burlington: Ashgate. ———. 2002. ‘Data, Documentation and Display in Eighteenth-Century Investigations of Exeter Cathedral’. Art History 25 (4): 500–19. Stukeley, William. 1724. Preface to Itinerarium Curiosum. London: printed for the author.

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Sweet, Rosemary. 2004. Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain. London: Hambledon. Thom, Danielle. 2015. ‘Amorous Antiquaries: Sculpture and Seduction in Rowlandson’s Erotica’. In Burning Bright: Essays in Honour of David Bindman, edited by Diana Dethloff et al., 207–14. London: UCL Press. Townshend, Dale. 2019. Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760–1840. Oxford: Oxford UP. Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. 2001. The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

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2 The Gothic Aesthetic: Word and Image Katie Garner

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n his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke concludes that paintings rarely succeed in producing terror: When painters have attempted to give us clear representations of these very fanciful and terrible ideas, they have I think almost always failed; insomuch that I have been at a loss, in all the pictures I have seen of hell, whether the painter did not intend something ludicrous. Several painters have handled a subject of this kind, with a view of assembling as many horrid phantoms as their imagination could suggest; but all the designs I have chanced to meet of the temptations of St. Anthony, were rather a sort of odd wild grotesques, than any thing capable of producing a serious passion. (1997, 235) For Burke the often ‘very fanciful and terrible ideas’ in the Bible and in Milton’s Paradise Lost are sublime ‘principally due to the terrible uncertainty of the thing described’, so that ‘[t]he mind is hurried out of itself, by a croud [sic] of great and confused images’ (234–5). Similar scenes in painting, on the other hand, are devoid of ‘serious passion’ as they involve ‘clear representations’ that ‘can only affect simply’ (234–5). In selecting St Anthony’s temptation by the devils in the Egyptian desert as his chief example of such failure, Burke may have any number of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury paintings in mind, by artists as varied as Martin Schöngauer, Hieronymus Bosch, Lucas Cranach, Matthias Grünewald, Jan Brueghel or Salvator Rosa. David Teniers the Younger produced at least eleven treatments of the subject, most of which feature a motley group of grotesque figures of the kind that Burke describes, as well as the now-familiar Gothic triptych of a skull, hourglass and bat, and which were reproduced in a variety of media in the eighteenth century (see Smith 1831, 414; see fig. 2.1).1 The physician and collector Dr Richard Mead, one of Burke’s contemporaries, owned a copper engraving of St Anthony’s trials by Teniers (Anonymous, ‘A Compleat Catalogue’ 1754), and stained-glass copies were made by the artists James and Elizabeth Pearson, active from the 1770s to the 1790s (Altick 1978, 111). While Teniers clearly had some Romantic admirers, Burke’s opinion that pictorial depictions of hell were ‘odd wild grotesques’ continued to hold sway well into the nineteenth century and St Anthony’s hellish ordeals remained a touchstone for critics. In 1821, a fine arts reviewer for the New Monthly Magazine proclaimed that ‘Dragons, gorgons, and chimeras, are a perversion of taste, and fit only for those who relish the temptation of St. Anthony in a monkish daub, but feel no regard for the beautiful forms of nature

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Figure 2.1  David Teniers the Younger, The Temptation of St Anthony, Seventeenth century. Oil on panel. Minneapolis Institute of Art. and antiquity’ (Anonymous, New Monthly Magazine 1821, 281). Teniers’s painting continued to be employed to draw a boundary between positive terror and that which is repulsive, grotesque, and undesirable. Burke’s open privileging of word over image and his insistence that almost all paintings fail to produce a positive form of terror might seem to indicate that there was little traffic between the late eighteenth-century fashion for Gothic tales of terror and the visual arts. The same conclusion might be drawn from pioneering early twentiethcentury studies of Gothic fiction, which tended to concentrate exclusively on the novel to the effect of establishing clean boundaries for a relatively short period of intense ‘terrorist writing’ in Britain in vogue from the 1790s to the 1820s.2 The intense popularity of the form made it a popular subject for satire, and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (published in 1818, but begun in 1798), and Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818) were taken to signify the end of the public’s appetite. As Burke restricted the sublime to ‘affecting pieces of poetry or rhetoric’ (1997, 233), so early critics of the Gothic kept a hygienic view of terrorist fiction as a generically identifiable set of fashionable modern romances, whose predictable titles usually pointed towards a mystery, a castle, an abbey, a monk, a foreign European setting, or a combination of several. Critical observations on the influence of the fine arts on the Gothic novel extend at least as far back as 1975, when Gerhard Joseph first noted the allusion to Fuseli’s The Nightmare in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). But evidence of influence in the other direction, of the Gothic novel providing inspirational material for painters, is relatively limited, kept to a minimum, as Martin Myrone argues, by the

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low cultural value of Gothic fiction in comparison to the ‘high’ fine arts (2013, 326). Confirmation of Gothic fiction’s perceived ‘low’ status can be found in the preface to Frankenstein, in which Percy Shelley carefully elevates the novel above other ‘mere tales of spectres and enchantment’, as well as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s review of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), in which he accuses the Gothic novel of pandering to cheap thrills that only those with ‘the torpor of an unawakened, or the languor of an exhausted, appetite’ could enjoy (1797, 194). Coleridge’s Gothic novel reader, eager for the drug-like ‘stimulants’ of the form, may well have been a source for James Gillray’s 1802 satirical cartoon ‘Tales of Wonder!’, showing a group of women engrossed in reading The Monk, their faces frozen with looks of enthrallment and repulsion (fig. 2.2). Here, Gothic fiction is consumed in an upper-class drawing room stuffed with similarly terrifying decor, to the point that Gothic word and image seem equally under fire. A painting of a woman in white being ravished by a large and looming figure in black hangs on the wall, while the mantelpiece houses a quivering dragon, skeleton and bust. The fire surround features a careening stagecoach carrying a skeleton and a scantily clad woman that seems to nod towards Gottfried August Bürger’s German ballad ‘Lenore’, popularised by William Taylor’s 1790s translation, in which the dead bridegroom returns to abduct his living wife and takes her on a wild midnight ride to her grave. The excessive decoration of the drawing room reflects the inability of the reader of the Gothic novel to reign in her consumption: terrifying images occupy all aspects of the room. Like Coleridge’s derogatory view of the Gothic reader with which it has much in common, the print situates women as the sole consumers of Gothic novels, a myth that Jane Austen counters in Northanger

Figure 2.2  James Gillray, ‘Tales of Wonder!’ 1802. The Art Institute of Chicago.

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Abbey by making John Thorpe and Henry Tilney speak openly of their enjoyment of Lewis and Ann Radcliffe.3 Gillray’s cartoon is a visual contribution to a large body of cultural propaganda that sought to distinguish the Gothic romance from other forms of ‘high’ literary production, as well as regulate women’s reading. Things quickly become more complex, then, once we begin to interrogate the existence of a straightforward binary opposition between ‘high’ art and ‘low’ Gothic fiction. The satirical status of Gillray’s cartoon notwithstanding, the coexistence of volumes of The Monk, the skeleton on the mantelpiece and the ‘Lenore’-inspired decoration in Gillray’s print suggests that all three signified a recognisable aspect of ‘the Sublime and Wonderful’ for contemporary viewers. As Michael Gamer notes, ‘gothic’s readers in the 1790s considered it neither exclusively a type of fiction nor even necessarily a narrative mode’ (2000, 3), and while there is no direct evidence that William Taylor’s ‘Lenore’ influenced fireplace design, the ballad inspired a number of artistic responses by William Blake (1796), Lady Diana Beauclerk (1796) and Johann David Schubert (c. 1800). The portrait that walks out of its frame in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the wax memento mori that hides behind the mysterious black veil in Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and the portrait of the Madonna that Ambrosio worships in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) offer three prominent examples of the crucial role played by art objects in the Gothic novel. On the basis of Ann B. Tracy’s index in The Gothic Novel, 1790–1830 (1981), Kamilla Elliott notes that portraits and miniatures appear in the Gothic novel with greater frequency than ‘monasteries, convents, secret passageways, orphans, ghosts, libertines, banditti, seduction, rape, shipwrecks, dreams, cross dressing, letters, and the discovery of lost relatives’ (6). The Gothic’s links to the theatrical arts, most notably Shakespeare, are similarly recognised as central to the Gothic tradition from Walpole onwards, lending it a close relationship with spectacle and melodrama; as E. J. Clery notes, ‘scratch the surface of any Gothic fiction and the debt to Shakespeare will be there’ (2002, 30). Further lines of connection between the Gothic and opera have been explored by Anne Williams (2000, 2019) and Diane Long Hoeveler (2010). Gillray’s print may be a mocking fantasy, but it nonetheless reflects some of the complex ways that Gothic fiction bled into its visual surroundings, and how works of visual art could have a terrifying effect on readers. A clear dialogue also exists between Gothic literature and the Gothic Revival period in architecture, from which the twentieth-century critical coinage of the Gothic novel took inspiration and its ‘most obvious justification’ (Clery 2002, 21). Dale Townshend’s Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance and the Architectural Imagination, 1740– 1840 (2019) reflects upon the general tendency among critics to treat the castles, ruins and labyrinthine spaces in the Gothic novel as psychological projections of the mind, calling instead for a more historicised reading of the Gothic’s architectural representations attuned to ‘literature’s close and sometimes complex relations to the surviving and revived architectural style with which it came to share its name’ (xv). In its bid to immerse readers in the medieval past, the Gothic novel introduced readers to precise architectural terms. One contemporary reviewer of The Mysteries of Udolpho was flummoxed by the reference to an ‘oriel’ (‘a large polygonal recess with a window, projecting from a building, usually at an upper storey, and supported from the ground or on corbels’ [OED]; see Anonymous, British Critic 1794). An ‘oriel window’ also appears in The Castle of Otranto, where it provides a convenient space for Manfred to

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interrogate the servant, Bianca, by ‘calling her aside into the recess’, but the term was clearly still considered obscure in the 1790s (Walpole 2008, 100). While sometimes seen as ‘sham’ medievalism or mere window dressing, the rise of the Gothic novel popularised architectural and artistic terminology (Radcliffe is also credited with the first recorded use of ‘stained glass’ [see OED]), at the same time as it emphasised murky atmospheres of gloom, mist, and shadow. Myrone has argued that Gothic art needs to be examined in ‘the larger history of Gothic visuality’ (2013, 325) and increasing attention has been given to the Gothic’s ability to draw on and influence all aspects of the Romantic arts in recent years. The Gothic novel is now recognised as one particularly vibrant manifestation of ‘a secularising mode that shaped a number of art forms and had multiple points of presence in popular European culture’ (Hoeveler 2010, xiv). The earlier lack of interest in drawing Gothic connections across the literary arts is an instance of an all too easy internalisation of Romanticism’s cultural hierarchies, including a willingness, following Burke, to place poetry above the novel, and literature above painting. Decentralising Burke as the chief aesthetician of the Gothic, or simply putting his views in context, can also reveal how the Romantics interpreted the rise of interest in the supernatural as a broad cultural event. In 1798 the physician and critic Nathan Drake provided an assessment of the Gothic mode that was more sympathetic to painting than Burke’s earlier Enquiry. In his essay ‘On Terror’, Drake placed poems, novels and paintings on equal footing by arguing that ‘notwithstanding its accurate imitation of nature and beauty of execution’, each could equally fail to achieve the sublime by overstepping the delicate balance required, meaning ‘that the art of the painter or the poet is unable to render it communicative of the smallest pleasureable emotion’ (1798, 246). Although Drake cites James Beattie’s earlier proto-Burkean view that ‘pictures . . . may yet be too horrid to contemplate with pleasure’ (from his Essays on Poetry and Music), Drake refuses to endorse Beattie’s artistic hierarchies and treats poetry and painting as identical in their ability to tread the fine line between terror and horror: no efforts of genius . . . are so truly great as those which approaching the brink of horror, have yet, by the art of the poet or painter, by adjunctive and pictoresque [sic] embellishment, by pathetic or sublime emotion, been rendered powerful in creating the most delightful and fascinating sensations. (247) While Drake praises the familiar figures of Shakespeare and Dante for their ability to conjure the sublime, he also singles out Joshua Reynolds’s Count Ugolino and his Children (1773; fig. 2.3) as a work of ‘exalted genius’ and as proof that Dante’s description of a ‘whole family perishing from hunger in a gloomy dungeon’, which would otherwise ‘seem to partake in too much of the terrible for poetry or painting’, can be ‘striking, original and affecting’ (247). Sculpture, for Drake, is also capable of reaching the same sublime heights, as in the case of Pierino da Vinci’s bas-relief of the same subject (The Death of Count Ugolino della Gherardesca and his Sons [1748–9]), misattributed to Michelangelo in the eighteenth century. As Reynolds’s and da Vinci’s works derive their subject matter from poetry, in one sense Drake continues to endorse Burke’s view that poetry is the ultimate medium for terror, yet his essay otherwise differs sharply from the Enquiry in registering the capacity for cross-medial diffusion

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Figure 2.3  Joshua Reynolds, Count Ugolino and his Children in the Dungeon, 1773. © National Trust Images / Brian Tremain. of Gothic influence between word and image. Such a view has more in common with Robert Miles’s call for the Gothic to be more capaciously defined as ‘a discursive site crossing the genres’ (2002, 176), later taken up and extended by Michael Gamer to emphasise the Gothic’s ‘ability to transplant itself across forms and media: from narrative into dramatic and poetic modes, and from textual into visual and aural media’ (2000, 4). As Clery has argued, the resurgence of the Gothic in the eighteenth century might be most usefully defined as a broad ‘impatience with the limitations of neoclassical taste and an investment in alternative theories about art and its reception, human nature, and the workings of the mind’ (2002, 27). The recent critical shift towards a ‘Gothic aesthetic’ recognises the mode’s generic border-crossing, but in another sense our new multi-media version of Gothic remains deeply Romantic. Tom Duggett’s reading of Coleridge’s lectures collected in his posthumous Literary Remains (1836–9) – including one entitled ‘Gothic Literature and Art’ – emphasises Coleridge’s view of the Gothic as an ‘assemblage’, and therefore, in Duggett’s words, ‘not so much a tree with different branches as what the fined and refined Gothicism of Gilles Deleuze would call a “rhizome”’ (2019, 20). Where Coleridge forges an impression of various elements of medieval society coming together to form a whole, so word and image might be said to enter and exit the Gothic aesthetic at multiple non-hierarchical points without beginning and end. Duggett’s rhizomatic model might also serve as a theoretical starting point for broadening our view of ‘Gothic visuality’, as Myrone suggests, to include discussion of the textual designs and imperfections of the kinds that feature in eighteenth-century evaluations of medieval

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texts, and thereby enable the ‘Gothic’ past to become a new location for the actions of the sentimental novel. Re-evaluating word and image in the Gothic means moving away from the cruder model of looking for evidence of the influence of ‘high’ fine art on ‘low’ literature and vice versa; instead, in Gamer’s formulation, ‘the gothic perpetually haunts, as an aesthetic to be rejected, romanticism’s construction of high literary culture’ (2000, 7). If we know anything at all about the Gothic, it is that is does not respect rules and boundaries. The remainder of this chapter suggests some of the ways that questions of design, unity and artistic metaphors underpin aspects of the Gothic revival usually thought to be purely literary, and how visual representations, whether in the form of paintings, illustrations, physical ruins or tattered documents, were a vital part of how the Gothic established itself as a cultural movement. The reassessment of Britain’s medieval literature that took place in the latter half of the eighteenth century is crucial to how the word ‘Gothic’ was ‘revised and transformed from a term connoting the unfavourable, unhappy and ruined, to a more positive and confident understanding’ (see Ellis 2000, 23; also Botting 21–43). Richard Hurd’s opening questions in his Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) were therefore deliberately provocative: ‘What, for instance, is more remarkable than the Gothic CHIVALRY? or than the spirit of ROMANCE, which took its rise from that singular institution?’ (1). In twelve letters, Hurd emphasises how Spenser, Milton, Ariosto and Tasso ‘were seduced by the barbarities of their forefathers; were even charmed by the Gothic romances’. ‘Was this caprice and absurdity in them?’ asks Hurd, ‘[o]r, may there not be something in the Gothic romance peculiarly suited to the views of a genius, and to the ends of poetry? And may not the philosophic moderns have gone too far, in their perpetual ridicule and contempt of it?’ (4). Here Hurd was broadly following Thomas Warton’s earlier groundbreaking reading of The Faerie Queene, in which he had revealed that ‘the adventures of Spenser’s knights are a more exact and immediate copy of those which we meet with in old romances, or books of chivalry’ (1754, 13). Where Warton offers a closely detailed reading of Spenser and his sources, Hurd deals with larger ideas, always in firm and open opposition to the dominant Enlightenment view of the medieval past. For Hurd ‘[c]hivalry was no absurd and freakish institution, but the natural and even sober effect of feudal policy’ (10). Not only did he conclude that ‘the resemblance between the heroic and Gothic ages is very great’ (38) but that ‘the circumstances, in which they differ, are clearly to the advantage of the Gothic designers’ (44). The re-evaluation of chivalry, romance and feudalism pivoted on aesthetic questions of design. Hurd explains that he believes that ‘the gallantry, which inspirited the feudal times, was of a nature to furnish the poet with finer scenes and subjects of description in every view, than the simple and uncontrolled barbarity of the Grecian’ (46). From this point onwards, Hurd provocatively labels the Classics as ‘barbarous’, profiling ‘the exercise of the boisterous passions, which are provoked and kept alive from one end of the Iliad to the other, by every imaginable scene of rage, revenge, and slaughter’ (47). While medieval romances share that same predilection for violence, they are able to raise ‘gentler and more human affections [. . .] by the most interesting displays of love and friendship; of love elevated to its noblest heights; and of friendship, operating on the purest motives’ (47). On the matter of the supernatural, the ‘horrors of the Gothic’ are again pronounced superior: ‘the mummeries of the pagan priests were childish, but the Gothic Enchanters alarmed all nature’ (49). Overall, declares Hurd, ‘you will find that the manners they paint, and the superstitions they adopt, are the more poetical

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for being Gothic’ (55). Hurd uses such artistic metaphors repeatedly in the Letters to describe the methods of Milton, Homer and Spenser: all are considered ‘painters’. Hurd and Warton both embraced the structural imperfections of older, ‘Gothic’ literature, effectively proposing a new and more capacious definition of artistic unity. Warton had argued that although Spenser’s use of Prince Arthur as The Faerie Queene’s unifying ‘brave knight, perfected in the twelve moral virtues’ searching after Gloriana, proved that he ‘had the practice of Homer and Virgil in his eye’, Spenser also ‘does not, at the same time, seem convinced of the necessity of that unity of action, by which this design must be accomplished’ (1754, 4). In other words, Spenser’s epic was a mixture of the classical and the Gothic, but with a ‘natural bias’ towards the latter which ‘would admit of the most extensive range for [Spenser’s] unbounded imagination’ (Warton 1754, 4). While Spenser’s earlier readers, including Dryden, had argued that the character of Prince Arthur successfully ‘shone through’ to unite the books focusing on the adventures of different, individual knights, Warton warmly disagreed, concluding that ‘Spenser’s adventures, which are the subject of each single book, have no mutual dependence upon each other, and subsequently do not contribute to constitute one legitimate poem.’ Rather, Warton saw ‘many distinct, however imperfect, unities’ in each of book (1754, 10). Rehabilitating chivalric romance meant rethinking the nature of (literary) design: overall imperfection could legitimately house multiple instances of perfection. In Letters on Chivalry and Romance, Hurd uses the analogy of the design of the Gothic garden to illustrate the same point: This Gothic method of design in poetry may be, in some sort, illustrated by what is called the Gothic method of design in Gardening. A wood or grove cut out into many separate avenues or glades was amongst the most favourite of the works of art, which our fathers attempted in this species of cultivation. These walks were distinct from each other, had, each, their several destination, and terminated on their own proper objects. Yet the whole was brought together and considered under one view by the relation which these various openings had, not to each other, but to their common and concurrent centre. (38–9) Hurd’s image is another example, along with Drake and Coleridge, of the crossmedial or rhizomatic conception of the Gothic aesthetic, which operates a design that subsumes individual disorder under ‘one view’ and ‘the common and concurrent centre’. Linda Bayer-Berenbaum offers a modern version of the same argument when she traces parallels between the ‘asymmetrical’ plots of Gothic novels, where ‘it is often difficult to locate the climax toward which the action builds and from which it declines’, and the asymmetry of Gothic architecture (1982, 71). Hurd is similarly fond of artistic analogies, proposing that ‘[w]hen an architect examines a Gothic structure by Grecian rules, he finds nothing but deformity. But the Gothic architecture has its own rules, by which when it comes to be examined, it is seen to have its merit, as well as the Grecian’ (71). More wary of metaphor, for Warton the pleasures of Gothic or medieval literary design remain difficult to articulate: Though The Faerie Queene does not exhibit that economy of plan, and exact arrangement of parts which Epic severity requires, yet we scarcely regret the loss of these, while their place is so amply supplied, by something which more powerfully

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Despite all his careful argumentation and source-hunting, reading Spenser takes Warton dangerously towards the irrational sublime: for although ‘we are not satisfied as critics, yet we are transported as readers’ (13). By the end of the 1760s, Spenser’s new position as a ‘Gothic’ poet had inspired new gloomy and macabre depictions of Redcrosse’s experience in the Cave of Despair, from Book 1, in an early pen-and-ink by the young Henry Fuseli (The Cave of Despair, c. 1769) and in oil by Benjamin West (fig. 2.4). West places the corpse of Sir Terwin in the foreground, while Despair sits with an owl, three spectres and an armoured skeleton for company. If the reassessment of Spenser’s poem as a unified design opened the door for the supposed rambling incoherence of prose romance to become the basis for modern fiction, the publication of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765 offered new access to supposedly medieval verse texts, framed by a found manuscript story that did much to authenticate his otherwise ‘barbarous’ materials. Like Warton, Percy encouraged his readers to see the pleasures of his otherwise ‘artless’ materials in terms of their effect on the heart: In a polished age, like the present, I am sensible that many of these reliques of antiquity will require great allowances to be made for them. Yet have they, for the most part, a pleasing simplicity, and many artless graces, which . . . compensate for the want of higher beauties, and if they do not dazzle the imagination, are frequently found to interest the heart. (Percy 1765, 1: x)

Figure 2.4  Benjamin West, The Cave of Despair, 1772. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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Some of the oldest material, Percy argued, was the most poetically ‘incorrect’ and full of ‘antique words and phrases’, but nevertheless exhibited a ‘romantic wildness’ that he aligned with ‘the true spirit of chivalry’ (1765, 1: xxii). By the 1780s, praise for the same ‘romantic wildness’ had spread to art criticism more widely. Joseph Holden Pott’s anonymously published Essay on Landscape Painting, with remarks General and Critical on the different Schools and Masters, Ancient and Modern (1782) praises the ‘awful romantic wildness in the Gothic remains, that moves the mind very powerfully’ (59). As with Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the incompleteness of the Gothic structure was now its greatest virtue. Pitting the Gothic structure against the Grecian, Potts explained: ‘In surveying the remains of Grecian or Roman art, we instantly lament the loss of corresponding beauties, we deplore the ravage of time; but in beholding the Gothic ruin, every idea of this kind is lost in the first impression, in the sentiments of awe and enthusiasm’ (60–1). As a different kind of ruin, Percy’s edited ‘fragments’ from his folio frequently used asterisks to show the missing lines, yet were still capable of ‘interest[ing] the heart’. The Reliques contained over 200 ballads and poems, the ‘greater part of which’, Percy claimed in his preface, were ‘extracted from an ancient folio manuscript . . . written about the middle of the last century’ and serendipitously rescued by him when he found it being used as kindling to light the fire in the home of one of his friends (1765, 1: ix). Much of the Reliques is typically Gothic, containing ballads that tell of child murder, ghostly hauntings and curious grave sites, as well as six poems about King Arthur and his knights featuring bloody battles, magical objects and mysterious deaths. As Nick Groom has summarised so well, the Reliques ‘welters in gore: the bloodiness of death and dismemberment incarnadines the entire three volumes, and if occasionally watered by humour or levity, it is more often deepened by a colossal amorality’ (1999, 45). In ‘Fair Margaret and Sweet William’, the ghost of the jilted Margaret appears at the foot of her lover William’s bed, following his wedding to another: When the day was gone, and night was come,     And all men fast asleep, Then came the spirit of fair Marg’ret,     And stood at Williams feet. God give you joy, you lovers true,     In bride-bed fast asleep; Lo! I am going to my green-grass grave     And I’m in my winding-sheet. (Percy 1765, 3: 122, ll.17–24) In 1783 Joseph Wright of Derby painted this haunting scene, setting the ghostly encounter in a bedroom with a burning blue lamp, a leaded arched window, and waning crescent moon illuminating a church outside (fig. 2.5). The sparse ballad offers no concrete interior or architectural details, but Wright needed only to look to the title page of the Reliques for inspiration: at Percy’s request, the vignette by Samuel Wale and engraved by Charles Grignion depicts the folio manuscript and other loose pages scattered at the base of a minstrel’s harp, with the remains of an arched window, other ruined towers and arches, and a sparse blasted tree in the background (see fig. 2.6).

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Figure 2.5  Joseph Wright of Derby, William and Margaret from Percy’s ‘Reliques of Ancient English Poetry’, c.1783. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Figure 2.6  Frontispiece and title page for Thomas Percy, ed., Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3 vols, vol. 1, 1765. By permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge.

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As Townshend has summarised, in the Reliques Percy collected ‘the literary vestiges – ballads, songs, sonnets, and romances – of “Gothic antiquity” in the fashion that other antiquarians collected and studied architectural fragments’ (2019, 23). The title page illustration indicates to the reader that the folio and Gothic architecture are one and the same: fragmented relics of an earlier ‘English’ history. But not all of Percy’s materials were, in fact, legitimised by his folio manuscript. Despite his claim that ‘the greater part’ of the three-volume Reliques were sourced from it, in reality only a quarter of the 200 poems in the Reliques came from the folio. In order to account for the older, more fragmentary and often lewd material, Percy mixed in more recent folk ballads from existing collections, most notably A Collection of Old Ballads (1723–5). This includes ‘Fair Margaret and Sweet William’, an earlier version of which had appeared in Allan Ramsay’s The Tea-Table Miscellany (1740), under the title ‘Sweet William’s Ghost’. In Percy’s collection, published only twenty-five years later, the same ballad was now rebranded as a chivalric ‘relic’. Although Percy told readers in a headnote that he had printed the poem ‘from a modern printed copy picked up on a stall’ (1765, 3:121), its housing in the Reliques remained a sanitising and historicising move for the ballad as a ‘literary’ form, as Groom describes: Only once the ballad had been firmly resituated in the past could it be safely considered as a proper mode for the polite poet. This removal was a form of incarceration. The body of popular tradition that was being historically interred had first to be fabricated, and Percy fabricated this body from relics. (26) Although a number of Percy’s texts were authenticated by a real folio (now at the British Library, MS Additional 27879), for his readers that folio was necessarily spectral, an imagined object which appeared to ground the Reliques in the historical past. Percy’s greatest critic, the antiquarian Joseph Ritson, openly cast doubt upon whether the manuscript existed at all. On the page, Percy’s claims look very similar to Walpole’s claim, one year earlier, that The Castle of Otranto (1764) was ‘found in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England . . . printed at Naples in the black letter, 1529’ (2008, 5) and in the following decades similar claims to textual authenticity would be made by writers as diverse as James MacPherson, Iolo Morganwg and Sir Walter Scott. Readers were asked to imagine the ‘real’ manuscript object in Gothic type, as well as the ‘undoubtably . . . real castle’ it described (2008, 8). The second edition a few months later revealed the hoax: Walpole himself was the author, who had appeared under the ‘borrowed personage of a translator’ due to anxieties about how the work would be received as ‘a new species of romance’ (2008, 9, 14). The Gothic is therefore forged in debates about the nature of authenticity, and the extent to which textual and visual artefacts can act as reliable forms of evidence. Joe Bray has noted that painted portraits in Gothic fiction can ‘complicate, rather than verify, notions of identity’, and are ‘often a cause of uncertainty and doubt’ (2014, 35). Drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra, particularly his pinpointing of the Renaissance period as the moment at which the concept of ‘the counterfeit’ is first formed, Jerrold E. Hogle has argued that The Castle of Otranto (a text in close dialogue with Shakespeare), foregrounds moments of similar fakery that signal a linguistic ‘divorce between sign and substance’ (1994, 24). Such counterfeits are typically

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works of art and include a moving portrait, bleeding statue and giant suit of armour, which combine to suggest that Manfred, the current ruler of Otranto, is not the true heir. As Kamilla Elliott explains: [t]he terror of the animated portrait in The Castle of Otranto [. . .] is not solely that an inanimate object moves, or that the boundaries between the inanimate and animate have been violated; it is also that an image, thrice removed from the soul in portraiture’s traditional chain of imaged identity, presents as and conflicts with the soul. [. . .] The reciprocal inversion of soul as image and image as soul raises the fear that the soul may be only an image produced by representation rather than the origin of representation. (2012, 265–6) Elliott’s focus on the ‘reciprocal’ representation of ‘soul as image and image as soul’ is also suggestive of a rhizomatically modelled Gothic aesthetic, which by refusing to grant precedence to one form of representation over another also refuses a point of origin. A telling example of the artistic interplay between body and soul of the kind that Elliott describes, and its response from readers, can be seen in the lavishly illustrated edition of Robert Blair’s 800-line poem The Grave produced by Robert Cromek in 1808. First published in 1743, Blair’s poem had passed through no fewer than thirty-seven editions by 1800, but Cromek’s, dedicated to Princess Charlotte and printed in imposing folio size with full-page illustrations designed by William Blake and engraved by Louis (Luigi) Schiavonetti, celebrated the poem on a new scale. For Eric Parisot, instilling a sense of the ‘close proximity of the dead’ is the driving force behind much graveyard poetry (2013, 3), and such a closeness was newly visualised on the title page of the 1808 edition, showing a reclining skeleton and a rising soul (fig. 2.7). In the poem itself, Blair sets out to ‘paint the gloomy horrors of the tomb’ in vivid detail and takes the reader through a succession of dark, damp and slimy underground spaces, lit by a single ‘sickly taper’: how dark Thy long-extended realms, and rueful wastes! Where nought but silence reigns, and night, dark night, Dark as was Chaos ’ere the infant sun Was roll’d together or had try’d his beams Athwart the gloom profound! The sickly taper, By glimmering thro’ thy low-brow’d misty vaults (Furr’d round with mouldy damps, and ropy slime,) Lets fall a supernumerary horror, And only serves to make thy night more irksome. (2015, ll. 11–20) Blair’s poem, as well as other examples of ‘Graveyard poetry’, including Thomas Parnell’s ‘A Night-Piece on Death’, and Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–5), is a widely acknowledged influence on Gothic fiction. As well as giving the grave a proto-Gothic gloominess and Miltonic grandeur, Blair’s graveyards are unquiet places,

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Figure 2.7  William Blake, engraved by Louis (Luigi) Schiavonetti. Title page [‘The Skeleton Reanimated’] for Robert Blair, The Grave, 1808. Courtesy of the University of St Andrews Special Collections. full of ‘light-heel’d ghosts’, ‘grizly spectres’, dead men walking, and bells that ring of their own accord (2015, ll. 24, 40, 52–3). Reviewers described Blair’s poem in sublime terms, as ‘awful, yet attractive’ and ‘one in which all must feel a deep interest’ on account of a melancholy inherent in the human condition (Anonymous, Scots Magazine 1808, 839) but remained unimpressed with the new artwork, declaring the very idea of the illustrated edition ill-conceived on the basis that ‘these are images, or conceptions rather, that admit of no just graphic representations’ (Anonymous,

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Monthly Magazine December 1808, 458). The Scots Magazine took issue with Blake’s depiction of souls as ‘round, entire and thriving figures’, denounced as ‘bulky and corpulent’ and lacking ‘a certain degree of faintness and exility . . . approaching to our idea of an incorporeal substance’ (Anonymous, Scots Magazine 1808, 840). The Examiner put it more bluntly: ‘But how are we to find out that the figure in the shape of a body is a soul?’ (Anonymous, Examiner 1808, 509). Troubled by the lack of a distinction between the corporeal and spiritual, and exhibiting a Protestant resistance to Catholic transubstantiation, the reviewers’ assessments align with Burke’s view that the visual arts, in offering ‘clear representations’ of terrifying images, fail to achieve the sublime effects of poetry (1997, 235). For the Examiner, the work exemplified ‘the vain effort of painting to unite to the eye the contrary natures of spirit and body’ (Anonymous, Examiner 1808, 509). But Blake’s illustrations may have nevertheless influenced the shape of the Gothic novel yet to come. David Groves has argued that James Hogg’s inclusion of a ‘fine old shepherd’ referred to as ‘W---m B---e’, ‘a great original, and a very obliging and civil man’, who assists the editor in the search for the murderer and Calvinist enthusiast Robert Wrigham’s grave in the Scottish borders at the conclusion of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), may well signal Hogg’s admiration for Blake, and his knowledge of the illustrations to The Grave (2010, 184). Upon the discovery of Robert’s grave in a rural field and the thorough examination of the mouldering skeleton and remains of his clothing, the editor records the discovery of ‘a printed pamphlet . . . wrapped so close together, and so damp, rotten and yellow that it seemed one solid piece’ (Hogg, 187). Partly printed, ‘the rest is in a fine old hand, extremely small and close’ (Hogg, 188). Shortly before the publication of Confessions, Hogg approached the Edinburgh-based engraver Robert Scott to ask him to produce a facsimile of seventeenth-century handwriting; this facsimile was printed as the frontispiece to the novel, so as to continue the fiction that the Confessions tells a historical story, and offer the reader of the anonymously published Confessions material evidence for the supposed existence of Robert Wringham’s private memoir (fig. 2.8). As Groves points out, Robert Scott was one of the original subscribers to Cromek’s edition of The Grave, and a fervent admirer of Blake’s illustrations (30). Whether ‘W---m B---e’ is William Blake or not, the complex interplay between word and image is signalled by the inclusion of the false page of seventeenth-century handwriting in one of the last works of the first wave of Gothic fiction. Gothic writing therefore counters Burke’s insistence that paintings are ‘clear representations’, viewed with ‘coolness enough’ in comparison to the ‘warmth with which they are animated by pieces of poetry or rhetoric’ (1997, 56). Rather, Gothic works in poetry, prose, drama, or the visual arts demonstrate the instability of the sign and signifier, and in doing so present a world in which identity is threatened and fear is produced through interaction with a variety of visual and textual signs, often in combination as mixed media productions. In the final volume of Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), the heroine Emily St Aubert is led to the bedchamber of the deceased lady of the Chateau-le-Blanc by Radcliffe’s loquacious servant, Dorothée. Devoted to preserving the memory of her long dead mistress to the point of obsession, Dorothée takes Emily through a succession of abandoned dusty rooms, left exactly as they were since the Marchioness’s death

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Figure 2.8  Robert Scott, frontispiece engraving for James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. London, 1824. British Library. twenty years before. As they reach the bedroom, Dorothée points out a ‘faded’ tapestry on the wall: ‘That tapestry used to be greatly admired at, it tells the stories out of some famous book, or other, but I have forgot the name.’ Emily now rose to examine the figures it exhibited, and discovered by verses in the Provencal tongue, wrought beneath each scene, that it exhibited stories from some of the most celebrated ancient romances. (Radcliffe 1998, 532) What is the ‘famous book’ that Dorothée cannot recall? Which ‘celebrated ancient romances’ does Emily discover in the tapestry threads? Radcliffe does not offer any answers, but suggests some stories will remain hidden, felt only in the present as traces. Emily’s analysis of the Provencal tapestry precedes her terrifying encounter with the dead Marchioness’s clothes, hung over the back of a chair ‘as if they had just been thrown off’ but also ‘dropping to pieces with age’ (Radcliffe, 533). In both the faded tapestry and the fragile clothes Radcliffe assembles a vision of material signs as decaying but persistent. Like the ghosts that raise the Gothic heroine’s curiosity, in Gothic both word and image refuse to stay dead.

Notes   1. Burke’s art collection at his death did not include such a ‘design’, nor any work by Teniers (see Cone, ‘Edmund Burke’s Art Collection’), but Burke was familiar with his work, making

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reference to the ‘rustic revels of Teniers’ in his Third Letter on a Regicide Peace ([1797] 1991, 313).   2. See, for example, Tompkins, Summers and Varma.   3. As E. J. Clery notes, the hard evidence for women’s supposed domination of the novelreading market has been debated since the late eighteenth century (1995, 96–9).

Bibliography Anonymous. 1754. ‘A Compleat Catalogue of the Pictures of the late Dr. Richard Mead’. London Magazine 23 (March): 130–1. Anonymous. 1794. Review of The Mysteries of Udolpho. British Critic 4 (August): 110–21. Anonymous. 1808. Review of The Grave. Examiner (August): 509–10. Anonymous.1808. Review of The Grave. Scots Magazine and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany (November): 839–40. Anonymous. 1808. Review of The Grave. Monthly Magazine (December): 458. Anonymous. 1821. ‘British Sculpture. – On the Proposed Monument to the Memory of George III’. New Monthly Magazine (June): 278–83. Altick, Richard. 1978. The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda. 1982. The Gothic Imagination: Expression in Gothic Literature and Art. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP. Blair, Robert. The Grave. 2015. In The Graveyard School: An Anthology, edited by Jack G. Voller, 44–69. Richmond, VA: Valancourt Books. Botting, Fred. 1996. Gothic. London: Routledge. Bray, Joe. 2014. ‘Ann Radcliffe, Precursors and Portraits’. In Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, edited by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, 33–48. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Burke, Edmund. 1991. Third Letter on a Regicide Peace. In The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Gen. ed. Paul Langford, vol. IX, edited by R. B. McDowell, 296–386. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1997. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. In The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Gen. ed. Paul Langford, vol. I, edited by T. O. McLoughlin and James T. Boulton, 185–320. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Clery, E. J. 1995. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ———. 2002. ‘The Genesis of “Gothic” Fiction’. In The Cambridge Companion to the Gothic, edited by Jerrold Hogle, 21–39. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1797. Review of The Monk: A Romance. Critical Review 19 (February): 194–200. Cone, Carl B. 1947. ‘Edmund Burke’s Art Collection’. The Art Bulletin 29 (2): 126–31. Drake, Nathan. 1798. Literary Hours; or, Sketches Critical and Narrative. London: Cadell and Davies. Duggett, Tom. 2019. ‘Gothic and Architecture: Morris, Ruskin, Carlyle, and the Gothic Legacies of the Lake Poets’. In The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts, edited by David Punter, 15–35. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Elliott, Kamilla. 2012. Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction: The Rise of Picture Identification, 1764–1835. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Ellis, Markman. 2000. The History of Gothic Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Gamer, Michael. 2000. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Groom, Nick. 1999. The Making of Percy’s Reliques. Oxford: Clarendon. Groves, David. 1991. ‘“W–––m B–––e, a great original”: Blake, The Grave, and Hogg’s Confessions’. Scottish Literary Journal 18 (2): 27–45.

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Hoeveler, Diane Long. 2010. Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imagination, 1780–1820. Columbus: Ohio State UP. Hogg, James. 2010. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Edited by Ian Duncan. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Hogle, Jerrold E. 1994. ‘The Ghost of the Counterfeit in the Genesis of Gothic’. In Gothick Origins and Innovations, edited by Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage, 23–33. New York: Rodopi. Hurd, Richard. 1762. Letters on Chivalry and Romance. London: Millar. Joseph, Gerhard. 1975. ‘Frankenstein’s Dream: The Child in the Father of the Monster’. Hartford Studies in Literature 7: 97–115. Miles, Robert. 2002. Gothic Writing: A Genealogy, 1750–1820. 2nd ed. Manchester: Manchester UP. Myrone, Martin. 2013. ‘Gothic and Eighteenth-Century Visual Art’. In The Gothic World, edited by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, 323–40. London and New York: Routledge. Parisot, Eric. 2013. Graveyard Poetry: Religion, Aesthetics and the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Poetic Condition. Abingdon and New York: Ashgate. Percy, Thomas, ed. 1765. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of our Earlier Poets (Chiefly of the Lyric Kind). Together with some of few of a later date. 3 vols. London: Dodsley. Pott, Joseph Holden. 1782. Essay on Landscape Painting, with remarks General and Critical on the different Schools and Masters, Ancient and Modern. London: J. Johnson. Radcliffe, Ann. 1998. The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance. Edited by Terry Castle. Oxford: Oxford UP. Smith, John. 1831. A catalogue raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters. Part the Third, containing the Lives and Works of Anthony Van Dyke and David Teniers. London: Smith and Son. Summers, Montague. 1938. The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel. London: Fortune Press. Townshend, Dale. 2019. Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760–1840. Oxford: Oxford UP. Tompkins, J. M. S. 1932. The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800. London: Constable. Tracy, Ann B. 1981. The Gothic Novel, 1790–1830: Plot Summaries and Index to Motifs. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Varma, Devendra P. 1957. The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England. London: Arthur Baker. Walpole, Horace. 2008. The Castle of Otranto. Edited by E. J. Clery. Oxford: Oxford UP. Warton, Thomas. 1754. Observations on the Fairie Queene of Spenser. London: Dodsley. Williams, Anne. 2000. ‘Monstrous Pleasures: Horace Walpole, Opera, and the Conception of Gothic’. Gothic Studies 2 (1): 104–18. ———. 2019. ‘Gothic and Opera: Overwhelming Passions and Irrational Dreams’. The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts, edited by David Punter. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.

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3 Aesthetic Landscapes: Travel and Tourism Mary-Ann Constantine

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he connections between Romantic-period travel, travel writing and the visual arts are deep and intricate, and have afforded a rich field for research across a range of disciplines. At the most instrumental level, ‘Art’ provided a major impetus for British travellers to the Continent. The appreciation of Old Masters and the ability to sketch and interpret classical ruins formed an important educational strand of the aristocratic Grand Tour, as did the acquisition of paintings and antiquities to grace newly designed estates back home (Buzard 1993; Chard 1999; McCue 2014). Artists such as Richard Wilson or Thomas Jones, who spent time in places such as Rome and Naples, brought a similar classicising perspective to their treatment of British landscapes, often infusing them (as Wilson does in fig. 3.1) with a Mediterranean light (Postle and Simon, 2014; Solkin 1982). This in turn encouraged domestic tourists to adopt and develop an aesthetics of place which referenced foreign travel: Edinburgh as the Paris of the North; Snowdonia as the British Alps (Piozzi 1789; Cramsie 2015). Yet there was, throughout the eighteenth century, a parallel strand of thought which stressed the importance of appreciating the landscapes and antiquities of Britain on their own terms (Sweet 2004). As the president of the Society of Antiquaries, Richard Gough, put it: ‘Temples and palaces of the polite nations of antiquity engross our attention, while the works and memorials of our own priests and heroes have no effect on our curiosity’ (Gough 1768, xxi). Gough was a driving force behind an antiquarian movement which aimed to make accurate visual records of neglected ancient monuments. Travel was fundamental to his project, and he urged friends and colleagues to follow his example and ‘ramble about and to examine every remnant of antiquity’; employing a good draughtsman was crucial (xxii). In this respect, antiquarian travel was not dissimilar to the work of topographers and natural historians, all working more or less to the Enlightenment imperatives of the Royal Society, which urged empirical, first-hand observation of natural phenomena, backed up with sketches and detailed notes (Smethurst 2012; Thompson 2011, 77–9). The published Tours in Scotland and Wales of the naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant brought this observational style of writing to audiences well beyond scientific or scholarly communities, and encouraged many domestic travellers to make their own journeys. His Scottish tours in particular, undertaken with his own artist, Moses Griffith, emulated the contemporaneous explorations of the southern hemisphere by James Cook and Joseph Banks, and included engravings of historical monuments and landscapes ‘as little known’ to the reading public ‘as Kamschatka’ (Pennant 1793, x; Constantine and

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Figure 3.1  Richard Wilson, ‘Snowdon from Llyn Nantlle’, c. 1765. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Leask 2017). Visualisations such as these played an important part in representing the constituent parts of the relatively recent political entity of ‘Britain’ to its citizens. The focus of this chapter on Wales and Scotland reflects the period’s growing interest in the different cultures and languages of the British Isles.1 Classicising and scientific modes of observation remain important, but throughout the Romantic period they are complemented and enriched by new ways of writing about the experience of travel. These include a greater emphasis on the travelling ‘self’, on bodily and emotional responses to events and scenes, often in the context of pedestrian travel, which became increasingly popular from the 1790s (Thompson 2011; Jarvis 1997). The expanding demographic of tourists in this period dramatically opens up the quantity, range and nature of written tours, both published and unpublished: women, family groups, solitary walkers, artists, scientists, and members of the middling and business classes all produce diaries, notebooks, sketchbooks and letters in which the aesthetic codes of the sublime and picturesque are deployed and adapted (and occasionally parodied) with varying levels of self-awareness. While the sublime was often experienced in bodily terms (a frisson of fear, a gasp of wonder), the picturesque mode, promoted in the writings of William Gilpin and enthusiastically emulated by many travellers, entailed the appreciation of landscape in a ‘painterly’ fashion, and

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brought an enhanced, and sometimes exaggerated, visuality to the experience of travel around Britain. Romantic-era travel writing thus reflects and participates in Romanticism’s complex engagement with notions of the self, society and the natural world. Actual journeys at home and abroad inform and inspire many of the period’s key literary texts, from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and Wordsworth’s The Prelude to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Byron’s Don Juan. Journeys to Italy, the Alps and Revolutionary France produced some powerful writing (Gilroy 2000), but many poems, letters, essays and fiction also came out of writers’ accounts of travels in Britain – Coleridge and the Wordsworths in Scotland, Wordsworth at Tintern or climbing Snowdon, Keats’s Highland tour, the Shelleys in Cwm Elan and Tremadoc, Coleridge and Joseph Hucks on their pedestrian tour of Wales (Leask 2020; Davies and Pratt 2007). Tourism, then as now, is a practice steeped in the language of sight. Because the representation of an intensely visual experience in words and/or images is both highly individualised and subject to the prevailing discourses outlined above, the permutations are far too many, and too complex, to accurately summarise or explore in detail here. The aim of this chapter, then, is to examine three examples of visuality in Romanticera tour writing, each inhabiting a distinct mode of perception (empirical, picturesque, affective) while showing how those broad categories might be nuanced, undermined or challenged by individual responses. For the purposes of this discussion, tour ‘writing’ will occasionally be used to represent the whole package of representation, since several of the journeys in question also produced visual records of the sights and sites they describe.

‘He Observes More Things Than Anyone Else Does’: Thomas Pennant and the Visual Legacies of Empiricism In 1769 the naturalist Thomas Pennant of Downing in north-east Wales set out on a tour of Scotland. His motivation was scientific curiosity, a desire to fill in gaps in his knowledge: after publishing three volumes of the Zoology of GREAT BRITAIN, [I] found out that to be able to speak with more precision of the subjects I treated of, it was far more prudent to visit the whole than part of my country: Struck therefore with the reflection of having never seen SCOTLAND, I instantly ordered my baggage to be got ready, and in a reasonable time found myself on the banks of the Tweed. (Pennant, 1793, x) Prior to this expedition Pennant had travelled in Cornwall, Ireland and most recently on the Continent, as well as making frequent trips to London and exploring North Wales. These journeys had all resulted in new contacts, exchanges of specimens or new items for his various collections, which were originally focused on mineralogy and fossils, but turned increasingly to other branches of the natural sciences, particularly ornithology. By the time of his Scottish expedition Pennant was well known as the author of British Zoology, published in separate volumes throughout the 1760s; his Synopsis of Quadrupeds (1771) would follow soon after. These were all works which

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relied on accurate observation, and where possible, visual depiction, of the creatures they described. Pennant worked with a range of illustrators and artists specialising in natural history, and his letters document the complexities of obtaining reliable images to accompany his text. To ‘speak with more precision’, then, required first-hand observations in the field; although, as his work developed and he made more contacts on the ground, it became clear that those observations need not always come from the author himself (Evans 2017). Shortly before this first journey to Scotland, a young man called Moses Griffith joined the Pennant household as a servant. Originally from Penllŷn, Griffith seems to have been in the service of Lady Bulkeley of Baron Hill on Anglesey, and was possibly already employed by her to draw specimens. Griffith would become part of the Pennant household and worked as Pennant’s artist for decades: many of the intricate images of shells, crustaceans and reptiles engraved and printed in British Zoology and the later Tours bear his name (the vivid ‘Hoopoe’ in fig. 3.2 was one of the rarer specimens he recorded). While he did not accompany the small group who travelled mainly up the east coast of Scotland in 1769, he was included in a more scientifically focused expedition that set off to explore the Highlands and Islands in the summer of 1772. His role on that occasion extended well beyond the illustration and recording of natural specimens, and reflected Pennant’s own broadening interest in antiquities, landscapes, estate planning and the economy (Evans 2017; Moore 1979).

Figure 3.2  Moses Griffith, ‘An image [of a Hoopoe bird]’, from a unique set of eight extra-illustrated volumes of Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Wales, 1778. National Library of Wales.

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Figure 3.3  Moses Griffith, engraved by C. Grignion, ‘Women at the Quern and Luaghad with a view of Talyskir, on the Isle of Skye’, from Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides MDCCLXXII. Chester, 1774. The first part of A Journey to Scotland and Voyage to the Western Isles was published two years later, with plates by Griffith depicting views of settlements, monuments, mountains, cottages, and in one case a group of women engaged in the traditional practice of ‘waulking’ or treading cloth (see fig. 3.3). During the 1770s and 1780s, a similar series of shorter explorations of his native North Wales resulted in Pennant’s three-volume Tours in Wales (1778–83), again illustrated with engravings based on work by Griffith and other artists, including Paul Sandby. Set alongside Pennant’s finely cadenced, equitable prose. Encompassing a wide range of topics from mining calamine to the history of Owen Glyndŵr, these Tours reached a wide audience, and were pioneering texts in a culture of touring and sightseeing within the British Isles (Evans 1987). These highly influential published images were only a fraction of the many watercolours, sketches and vignettes which ended up interleaved in Pennant’s own bespoke illustrated volumes of the tours: a rich visual record, often the first or only surviving representation of certain sites.2 As a travel writer, then, Pennant was guided by an Enlightenment imperative to observe, capture and record, operating in self-conscious parallel to the further-flung expeditions of contemporaries, friends and correspondents voyaging in the southern hemisphere and further east, such as Joseph Banks in Australasia, and Peter Simon Pallas in Siberia (Rose 2019; Urness 1967). For Samuel Johnson, whose own tour of Scotland came hard on Pennant’s heels, he was the ‘best writer of travels I ever read: he observes more things than anyone else does’ (Boswell 1791, II:216). By making visual

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images available as printed engravings within the comparatively affordable format of the published tour, Pennant also helped to shift landscape-art appreciation beyond the narrow circles of the moneyed and the cognoscenti (Richard Wilson’s beautifully lit Welsh mountain landscapes, for example, would have been seen by relatively few people). The advent of cheaper print, and the increasing recognition by publishers of a growing market for travel literature (in part stimulated by exotic accounts of travel overseas), helped the Home Tour to develop as a genre which mixed the written and the visual. The ‘Pennant-effect’ had some intriguing results. Not only do later tour writers have a tendency to revert to Pennant’s prose when describing certain key sites (Holywell fountain, Parys copper mines, the view from the top of Snowdon), but, as Peter Bishop has shown, many visual artists chose to sketch and paint his published views – thereby effectively helping to create a ‘canon’ of classic viewpoints, many of them the direct precursors of today’s media-saturated tourist views (Constantine 2014; Bishop 2015 and 2019). Writing in the early 1800s, the artist Edward Pugh of Ruthin in Denbighshire drew attention to what had become a surprisingly narrow range of depictions of views in North Wales, views largely restricted to well-travelled tourist routes. A pedestrian, and a Welsh speaker, he moved more confidently and with greater curiosity through these landscapes. He designed his own tour, Cambria Depicta (1816), to take in a variety of new and out-of-the-way scenes, encouraging others to follow (Barrell 2013). Pennant’s Tours had their origin in scientific curiosity, but expanded in their published forms to encompass a range of other discourses, including the aesthetic appreciation of landscape. Their success as texts to be read, consulted and cited by generations of later tourists, particularly those travelling in Wales and Scotland, meant that a considerable number of ‘sights’ became ‘sites’ – places of enhanced significance, to be visited, appreciated and consumed in the light of Pennant’s descriptions. At around the same time, a number of other important publications contributed to the process of ‘packaging’ landscape for a rapidly developing tourist market.

‘[A]bsolute Command of Light and Shade’: Travel, Variety and the Picturesque Among these publications was a series of engravings published by the artist Paul Sandby under the title The Virtuosi’s Museum, Containing Select Views of England, Scotland and Ireland (1778–81). These presented over 100 plates with short written descriptions: many of the captions to the Scottish views came directly from Thomas Pennant’s Tours in Scotland of 1769 and 1772. Nearly a score of these images were actually from Wales, and recycled from Sandby’s earlier tours of the country; the views of Ireland (a place which Sandby had never actually visited) were all engraved from drawings taken by other people. As Finola O’Kane has observed, one effect of this visual sampling was a conceptual homogenisation of the British Isles ‘by stealth’, its constituent parts seemingly united in a taste for the picturesque (O’Kane 2013, 134). Sandby’s own images were, as he himself put it, ‘calculated to improve the taste and polish of the manners of [Britain’s] subjects without corrupting their hearts’ (1778, 1–2). William Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye and Several Parts of South Wales, relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty which had its origins in a journey down the

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River Wye in 1770, although it did not appear in print until 1783, was as influential as Pennant’s work, but very different in style and intent.3 It is in some ways ironic that ‘the picturesque’ has come to be so strongly associated with the Romantic-era tour. Gilpin’s texts are in fact unusual, as Stephen Copley has noted, both in their ‘pursuit of aesthetic pleasure’, and their ‘repudiation of the characteristic encyclopedism of the tour form’ (1997, 134). Indeed, while Observations set out deliberately to introduce its readers to the notion of movement through landscape as a series of pictures bound by certain aesthetic rules, Gilpin is clear from the outset that this is far from the only way of travelling, or of responding to places: We travel for various purposes; to explore the culture of soils; to view the curiosities of art; to survey the beauties of nature; to search for her productions; and to learn the manners of men; their different polities, and modes of life. The following little work proposes a new object of pursuit; that of not barely examining the face of a country; but of examining it by the rules of picturesque beauty. (1782, 1–2) A manuscript version of the Observations had circulated amongst friends for many years before it was published. In 1779 the Reverend Michael Tyson praised Gilpin’s drawings, but noted how little they evoked the actual locality: He has the absolute command of Light and Shade; they are gems in the Collection of a Landscape Painter; but a Topographer, or Antiquary, would throw them away as dirty pebbles. I have rowed up the Wye, and I have venerated Tintern Abbey; yet these Drawings did not in the least refresh my remembrance of either scene. Indeed, I recollect enough of the places, to remember the Drawings have very little resemblance—indeed they do not even agree with his own descriptions. (quoted in Nichols 1814, 657–8) Gilpin was caricatured even at the time for his wilfully restricted vision and for his propensity to codification (he was notably parodied in Thomas Rowlandson’s creation, the myopic Dr Syntax). Yet the work undoubtedly gave readers new ways of appreciating scenery as a theatrical, shifting interplay of light and shade, with views (as can be seen in fig. 3.4) shaped by ‘screens’ in the fore- and middle-ground composed of rocks and trees (Andrews 1989, 29–31). The Observations contains various notorious pronouncements on which views could be judged ‘genuinely’ picturesque, but most writers of later tours seem to have been content to absorb Gilpinesque vocabulary and ideas without adhering too closely to the ‘rules’. Hannah More strikes a typically amused note in 1789, when she writes of ‘sailing down the beautiful Wye [. . .] with Mr Gilpin in my hand, to teach me to criticise, and talk of foregrounds, and distances, and perspectives, and prominences, with all the cant of connoisseurship’ (Stott 2003, 107); Jane Austen would have equal fun with such language in Northanger Abbey, first drafted in the 1790s. The principal features of the Wye Valley described by Gilpin swiftly became the sites checked off by tourists following his route: many of them would encounter his descriptions only through extracts in the guidebooks of Charles Heath (Matheson 2012). As with Pennant’s sites in North Wales, certain scenes here and elsewhere gained an enhanced significance,

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Figure 3.4  ‘Tintern Abbey’, aquatint from William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, 1782. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. and even responses as complex as Wordsworth’s ‘Lines written above Tintern Abbey’ trail echoes of Gilpin’s Observations (Andrews 1989, 85). In the Lake District, such picturesque viewpoints were consciously developed for the tourist trail by Thomas West as viewing ‘Stations’ (158). Aesthetic appreciation (and, in effect, commodification) of landscape also informed the material culture of picturesque tourism. Among the many ‘knick-knacks’ carried by travellers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a range of instruments designed for viewing: ‘prospects’ were admired through spyglasses, graceful vignettes were captured in Claude glasses (named for the French painter, Claude Lorraine), tinted spectacles gave the world a green glow, and even simple empty frames could help to transform places into pictures (Coltman 2020; Andrews 1989, 67–82). In a similar vein the picturesque was also closely associated with the design and landscaping of country estates, as aristocratic and gentry owners strove to emphasise or replicate the variety and ‘surprise’ of nature. Planting trees, making walks, diverting streams and creating waterfalls became a passion for many, from the Duke of Atholl at Dunkeld to Thomas Johnes at Hafod (see fig. 3.5). Landowner and landscape designer Uvedale Price, in an Essay on the Picturesque, as compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (1794) set out some of the underlying principles which he had put into practice at Foxley in Herefordshire. He declares from the beginning that ‘taste’ in landscape gardening must come from both a committed study of paintings by great masters, and from the natural world: ‘for as he who studies art only will have a confined taste, so he who looks at nature only, will have a vague and unsettled one’ (Price 1794, 4; Andrews 1989). Indeed, for two or three decades after Gilpin, and

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Figure 3.5  John Warwick Smith, ‘Hafod: Upper Part of Cascade’. Watercolour over graphite, 1793. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Figure 3.6  J. M. W. Turner, ‘Nant Peris, looking towards Snowdon or possibly Nant Ffrancon from Llanllechyd’, c.1799–1800. Tate. Photo: Tate.

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most notably in the debates of the 1790s, ‘picturesque’ became a term used with such frequency and such ubiquity that it becomes almost impossible to define. It continues to be much debated. Modern critiques of the concept explore it from a fascinating range of angles, with many noting the moral implications of focusing on landscape purely as ‘picture’– at best, ignoring the lives of those for whom the land surveyed is a source of livelihood; at worst (and situating the picturesque firmly within the colonial or imperial gaze) appearing to evict or erase them (Barrell 1972, 1983; Pratt 2008). Countering this, Elizabeth Bohls uncovers in authors such as Dorothy Wordsworth, Helen Maria Williams and Mary Wollstonecraft strategies which actively disrupt that ‘universal’ gaze – engaging with the lives of inhabitants of ‘scenic’ landscapes, or using traditionally conservative landscape tropes as metaphors for revolutionary change (Bohls 1995; Kinsley 2008).

‘It Shook My Whole Frame’: Affective Landscapes, Visions of Self On a walk to Caernarfon one day in 1825, the governess Ellen Weeton, staying in Wales by herself, was suddenly overwhelmed by a view of Snowdon wrapped in clouds ‘like one visited with some aweful calamity’, with: the neighbouring mountains, as if gathered round in commiseration, weeping for pity’s sake: they sometimes unveiled their heads, but again they inclosed them in clouds because they had no comfort to offer; while Snowdon never appeared, but sunk as it were in despair, was only marked by ‘darkness visible’. The very imagination made my heart ache, I hung my head and wept too; while Anglesea and the shores of the Menai, like the unfeeling world, shone bright, enjoying a full tide of prosperity. Thus have I suffered; thus have I been pitied; and thus have I been forgotten! Snowdon! What aileth thee? (cited in McHugh 2021, 246) Ellen Weeton’s memoir of a holiday in Wales as a single woman, separated from an abusive husband and denied contact with her child, is not, as Kirsty McHugh has argued, a typical tourist account (2021, 228–48). It does, however, offer a remarkable example of how writers increasingly interpreted their visual responses to landscape in relation to their own emotional states. The question underlying such writings becomes not ‘What do I see?’ but rather ‘How does what I see make me feel, and how do my feelings affect my way of looking at it?’ A visual equivalent can be found in artists such as J. M. W. Turner, whose North Wales sketchbooks, compiled in the course of several pedestrian tours in the late 1790s, testify to his powerful responses to these dramatic mountainous landscapes (fig. 3.6). The locus classicus of such questions in Romantic-era literature is William Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem, The Prelude, a text which revisits a number of formative journeys made in Britain and abroad, and explores the relationship between the visual and the visionary. In his discussion of Wordsworth’s famously anticlimactic account of crossing the Alps on foot, David Miall has noted how this section of the poem involves a cluster of related ‘disappointments’, where the anticipation of a heightened visual experience was not matched by the reality.

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Reflecting on the effects of such disjunctures, he argues, leads Wordsworth towards a rejection of the picturesque mode of apprehending landscape, one which for him is subservient to the ‘despotism of the eye’: The state to which I now allude was one In which the eye was master of the heart, When that which is in every stage of life The most despotic of our senses gained Such strength in me as often held my mind In absolute dominion. (Wordsworth 1805, xi. 170–5) Wordsworth here begins to articulate a crucial phase in his understanding of the mind’s responses to nature, from picture to process, from the visual ‘consumption’ of landscape to a more fully internalised ‘participation in the energies he observes’ (Miall 1998, 96). What Wordsworth identifies as a perilous investment of the beholder/ tourist in significant places, particular sights/sites, yields many possibilities for such a failure of response: weather, accident, the wrong state of mind, an underwhelming landscape can all cause disappointment. On the shores of the Menai on Anglesey in 1795, Joseph Hucks, his imagination fired by vivid images of Britain’s last Druids making their final stand, looked around ‘in vain for those awe-inspiring shades and venerable temples where the druids used to perform their mysterious rites’. What he actually saw amounted to ‘little more than a few shapeless stones’ (Hucks 1975, 38; Edwards 2016). A different nexus of ideas concerning vision and the visionary comes out of the travel writings of Birmingham-based novelist Catherine Hutton, who with her father, the historian William Hutton, made several visits to North Wales in the late 1790s and documented her journeys in a series of letters to her brother (Constantine 2017). ‘We have all a certain portion of curiosity’, she wrote in 1799, after visiting the lakes and mountains of Llanberis: that of many persons lies in their ears, and inclines them to listen to small matters of fact regarding their neighbours. Mine is seated in my eyes, and Wales is the place to gratify it. (Hutton 1799, Letter 20) Hutton’s social curiosity (an impulse which energises her novels) makes her writing about the people she encounters in Wales unusually thoughtful and informative; her visual curiosity produces some fascinating descriptions, not only of the mountainous landscapes which thrill her, but of the act of looking itself. Having, not unlike Wordsworth in the Alps, missed a particular view of Snowdon for which she had prepared herself by closely reading Pennant, she ‘made amends’ on the return journey, when ‘every atom of his vast surface was visible, and [. . .] I looked at him as if I would get acquainted with every atom’ (Hutton 1797, Letter 13). The intensity of her gaze on this occasion is matched by similar visual encounters across wider distances: from the hills of Meirionnydd she had ‘contemplated [Snowdon] four days together’; and from across the Menai she had traced the line and recited the names of every peak in the range. As she acknowledges in several places, Hutton’s visual ‘contemplation’ of these

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mountain landscapes often borders on the religious. Their effect on her is physical and profound: she found the view from above Harlech across to the Snowdon range ‘so stupendous it shook my whole frame’ (1796, Letter 5). Her responses were undoubtedly intensified by the fact that she suffered from vertigo. To actually climb or walk in the heights was, for her, impossible: You know I do not hope to climb mountains; for high places are as much forbidden to me now, as they were to the children of Israel of old. I look at those which form a chain near this place with awe, almost with reverence. (Hutton 1797, Letter 12) In one of the last letters in the series, she includes a rough sketch map and an extraordinary description which envisages Snowdonia as ‘a city not made with hands, whose Builder and Maker is God’ (fig. 3.7). It is intersected by huge ‘streets’ (the deep valleys between the ranges) and has Snowdon as its ‘temple’ (Hutton 1800, Letter 28). Hutton enjoyed studying maps, and would gain a reputation as a geographer for her Tour of Africa (1819–21), a compilation of travel narratives by other writers. This unusually personal piece of cartography, though, is a striking visual representation of both the spatial and the spiritual dimensions of landscape travelled on foot and on horseback over four successive summers.

Figure 3.7  ‘A city not made with hands’, Catherine Hutton’s map of Snowdonia, c.1800. National Library of Wales MS 19079C.

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Hutton’s writing also demonstrates another link between travel and visual experience. Unlike her father, who not long after his Welsh tours would walk the length of Hadrian’s Wall, Hutton is not, by her own confession, a particularly avid walker when at home. Yet in North Wales she finds herself out of doors for hours, and is often exhausted by her excursions: this physical effort may well have heightened her responses to the landscapes around her. Refuting the notion that ‘Romantic’ descriptions of mountains are essentially ethereal products of the imagination, Simon Bainbridge sees the period as full of descriptions of embodied and hands-on movement through dangerous territory, raising questions about the relationship between the body and what are often presented as the key Romantic experiences of vision, transcendence, and the imagination. Much of this literature celebrates an embodied knowledge of the self and the world achieved through the engagement of all the senses. (Bainbridge 2020, 130) In this reading, therefore, the ‘despotic’ eye becomes just one of many senses fully involved in the process of feeling and understanding place, and the body itself contributes to an enhanced visual experience.

Conclusions: Travel and the Unseen It is possible to trace a neat chronological arc in the traveller’s ‘gaze’, from naturalistic observation to picturesque commodification and on to the internalised ‘Romantic’ response. The earliest accounts of travel in this period tend, after all, to be those of explorers and observers of the natural world; explorations of self mostly come later. And yet time again these different discourses overlap, collide or combine, as when a breathless Elizabeth Smith reaches for her sketchbook to capture the arrival of dawn at the top of Snowdon, but also ponders the geological composition and Alpine flora of the rocks on which, rather precariously, she stands (Bowdler 1809, 100–8); or when the artist and maker of telescopic lenses, Cornelius Varley, uses evocative greywash watercolours to explore meteorological conditions (Varley n.d.; Edwards, forthcoming*). The dramatic images of mountains made by Turner in the 1790s (see above, fig. 3.6) are strikingly different in feel from the sharp topographical depictions of some of his contemporaries; both styles, nonetheless, are fully of their time, and represent parallel, rather than exclusive, ways of representing landscape.4 In a similar way, the Continental Grand Tour continued to shape aspects of the Home Tour, most obviously by importing classical artefacts and artworks to grace the halls and gardens of estates which were visited by increasing numbers of people, and more subtly, by altering ‘taste’ and creating new frames of aesthetic reference (Turner 2001; Harden 2017). Elements of visual culture derived from privileged Continental travel seeped, in various ways, into other spheres. When Catherine Hutton, looking at gravestones in a churchyard in Bangor, notes that ‘they are black stone of a remarkably fine texture, resembling Wedgwood’s tea-pots’, she is distantly referencing the black ‘Etruscan’ vases collected by Sir William Hamilton during his time as ambassador in Naples, which in turn had inspired Josiah Wedgwood’s experiments in his hugely successful Staffordshire ‘black basalt ware’ (Coltman 2001).5 As the poet Anna Letitia Barbauld wrote in a piece for children on Britain’s manufacturing industries,

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Wedgwood had ‘made every saloon and every dining-room schools of taste’ (Barbauld 1793, cited in Davies 2022, 204). In such a visually saturated genre as the tour, it is perhaps salutary to conclude with some thoughts on the unseen. What, in travel writing from this period, is hidden from the tourist’s eye? In 1808 the north Welsh poet and schoolmaster David Thomas (Dafydd Ddu Eryri) greeted visitors at the top of the Snowdon with a request: Ye men who climb Snowdonia’s craggy brow Think of the miners in their cell below We feel it hard to climb the mountain steep Danger awaits us in the caverned deep; The sweets of life we hardly ever taste. Through storms we traverse Snowdon’s dreary waste. (Thomas 1808) Thomas’s ‘Address to the Visitors of Snowdon, to be presented by the miners, 1808’ contrasts the exertions of miners and tourists, who toil up the slopes for quite different reasons (Thomas 1808). It is a reminder (albeit, since the poem asks visitors to make a contribution to the miners’ welfare, a thoroughly respectful one) of the superficiality of the detached tourist gaze, which, sweeping distant horizons, literally overlooks the complex ecologies of industry and nature below. With tactful awareness of the necessary visual components of a successful visit to the summit, the poem urges visitors to enjoy the view (‘Strangers behold from Wyddfa’s shaggy side/The landscape various and the prospect wide’); but it also asks them to be aware that others see this landscape differently. The complex geological underscapes of Britain are perhaps the most obvious ‘hidden’ world in tourist literature, although as the period progressed and the extractive industries expanded, more and more people became aware of them. Readers of Pennant’s tours of Wales and Scotland, or of a later tour in North Wales by the mineralogist Arthur Aiken, could learn of the location of seams of coal or lead, and of the rock types underlying the places they visited (Aiken 1797). After 1815, when William Smith published the first recension of his extraordinary Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales with Part of Scotland (fig. 3.8), these underworlds became considerably easier to visualise (Edwards 2018). Mines and factories processing these products also became the objects of tourist curiosity in this period, and many accounts describe dramatic scenes at slate-quarries, tin-mines and clay-works. What often remains occluded, however, is the labour required to put all this industry in motion; not only the labour of those hidden underground or working in the mills and factories, but the enormous displaced slave labour in colonies overseas. It has recently been argued that Britain’s green and pleasant vistas, the richly wooded and pastoral scenes, literally depended on the existence of ‘sacrifice zones’ out of sight and largely out of mind in other parts of the world. ‘Landscape’ as Jeremy Davies has put it, ‘is entangled with imperial coercion’ (2022, 223). And as travel itself has speeded up, intensified and globalised, the complex questions of how landscape was ‘consumed’ in the Romantic period – as worked environment, as tourist destination and as visual or literary representation – remain highly pertinent today. Our responses to some of Britain’s best-loved scenes are part of a long history of looking, although not always of seeing.

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Figure 3.8  William Smith, A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales with Part of Scotland, 1815. © The British Library Board, c13167-29.

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Notes   1. Much of this chapter derives from work undertaken as part of an AHRC-funded project, Curious Travellers: Thomas Pennant and the Welsh and Scottish Tour 1760–1820. Editions of texts and details of books, articles exhibitions and events (many involving visual elements) can be found at (last accessed 16 May 2022). Most of the topics discussed here are explored further in my forthcoming monograph Curious Travellers: Writing the Welsh Tour (Oxford UP). The reader is also directed to the useful volume of Keywords for Travel Writing Studies (Forsdick, Kinsley and Walchester 2019) for entries on ‘Vision’, ‘Picturesque’, ‘Aesthetic’ and so on; and to Michael Freeman’s excellent and richly illustrated website ‘Early Tourists in Wales’, at (last accessed 16 May 2022).  2. These graingerised editions of Pennant’s Tours of Wales and Scotland are held at the National Library of Wales and can be viewed through the catalogue and NLW’s Digital Mirror. Available at (last accessed 16 May 2022).   3. The publication date on the title page is 1782, but it was not actually available until 1783.   4. Compare, for example Turner’s Dolbadarn Castle (1799) with that of Nicholas Pocock (1797), at (last accessed 16 May 2022).   5. See, for example, the black basalt teapot at (last accessed 16 May 2022).

Bibliography Aikin, Arthur. 1797. Journal of a Tour through North Wales and part of Shropshire. London: Joseph Johnson. Andrews, Malcolm. 1989. The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. Bainbridge, Simon. 2020. Mountaineering and British Romanticism: The Literary Cultures of Climbing, 1770–1836. Oxford: Oxford UP. Barbauld, Anna Letitia. 1793. ‘On Manufactures’. In Evenings at Home; or, The Juvenile Budget Opened, vol. 2, 103–17. London: Johnson, 1793. Barrell, John. 1972. The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ———. 1983. The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840. 2nd ed. pbk. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ———. 2013. Edward Pugh of Ruthin 1763–1813: A Native Artist. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Bishop, Peter. 2015. The Mountains of Snowdonia in Art: The Visualisation of Mountain Scenery from the Mid-Eighteenth Century to the Present Day. Llanrwst: Gwasg Carreg Gwalch. ———. 2019. ‘Thomas Pennant (1726–98): The Journey to Snowdon and its influence on artists visiting North Wales’. The British Art Journal XIX, 3 (March): 87–95. Bohls, Elizabeth. 1995. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics 1716–1818. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Boswell, James. 1791. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. 2 vols. London: Henry Baldwin. Bowdler, Henrietta, ed. 1809. Fragments, in Prose and Verse, by Miss Elizabeth Smith, lately deceased. 2nd ed. London: Cadell and Davies. Buzard, James. 1993. The Beaten Track: European tourism, literature, and the ways to culture, 1800–1918. Oxford: Oxford UP.

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Chard, Chloe. 1999. Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830. Manchester: Manchester UP. Coltman, Viccy. 2001. ‘Sir William Hamilton’s Vase Publications (1766–1776): A Case Study in the Reproduction and Dissemination of Antiquity’. Journal of Design History 14 (1): 1–16. ———. 2020. ‘Portable Knick-knacks or the Material Culture of Travel’. In Old Ways and New Roads: Travels in Scotland, 1720–1830, edited by John Bonehill, Anne Dulau Beveridge and Nigel Leask, 166–79. Edinburgh: Birlinn. Constantine, Mary-Ann. 2014. ‘“To trace thy country’s glories to their source”: Dangerous History in Thomas Pennant’s Tour in Wales’. In Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770–1845, edited by Porscha Fermanis and John Regan, 121–43. Oxford: Oxford UP. ———. 2017.‘“The bounds of female reach”: Catherine Hutton’s fiction and her Tours in Wales’. Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840 22 (Spring 2017): 92–105. Special issue on ‘Four Nations Fiction by Women, 1789–1830’, edited by Elizabeth Edwards. Constantine, Mary-Ann and Nigel Leask, eds. 2017. Enlightenment Travel and British Identities: Thomas Pennant’s Tours of Scotland and Wales. London and New York: Anthem Press. Copley, Stephen. 1997. ‘Gilpin on the Wye: Tourists, Tintern Abbey, and the Picturesque’. In Prospects for the Nation: Recent Essays in British Landscape, 1750–1880, edited by Michael Rosenthal, Christiana Payne and Scott Wilcox, 133–56. New Haven, CT: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art [and] the Yale Center for British Art, Yale UP. Cramsie, John. 2015. British Travellers and the Encounter with Britain 1450–1700. Woodbridge: Boydell. Davies, Damian Walford and Lynda Pratt, eds. 2007. Wales and the Romantic Imagination. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Davies, Jeremy. 2018. ‘Romantic Ecocriticism: History and Prospects’. Literature Compass 15 (9). Davies, Jeremy. 2022. ‘Romantic “Ghost Acres” and Environmental Modernity’. In An Inventive Age: Writing of the Industrial Revolution, 1770–1830. Special issue of Studies in Romanticism 61 (2): 203–27. Edwards, Elizabeth. 2016. ‘Archipelagic Anglesey: coastal contexts for Romantic-period poetry and travel writing’. In Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society and Field Club 2015–16, 100–13. ———. 2018. ‘“A kind of geological novel”: Wales and travel writing, 1783–1819’. Romanticism 24 (2): 134–47. ———. [Forthcoming*]. ‘Watercolour, extreme weather, electricity: Cornelius Varley in north Wales’. In Discovering Britain and Ireland in the Romantic Period: Grand Tours, edited by James Watt and Alison O’Byrne. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Evans, R. Paul. 1987. ‘Thomas Pennant (1726–1798): The Father of Cambrian Tourists’. Cylchgrawn Hanes Cymru / The Welsh History Review 13 (4): 395–417. ———. 2017. ‘“A Round Jump from Ornithology to Antiquity”: The Development of Thomas Pennant’s Tours’. In Enlightenment Travel and British Identities: Thomas Pennant’s Tours of Scotland and Wales, edited by Mary-Ann Constantine and Nigel Leask, 15–37. London and New York: Anthem Press. Forsdick, Charles, Zoë Kinsley and Kathryn Walchester, eds. 2019. Keywords for Travel Writing Studies: A Critical Glossary. London and New York: Anthem Press. Gilpin, William. [in fact 1783] 1782. Observations on the River Wye and Several Parts of South Wales, relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the summer of 1770. London: R. Blamire. Gilroy, Amanda, ed. 2000. Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel, 1775–1844. Manchester: Manchester UP.

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Gough, Richard. 1768. Anecdotes of British topography. Or, an historical account of what has been done for illustrating the topographical antiquities of Great Britain and Ireland. London: W. Richardson and S. Clark. Harden, Bettina. 2017. The Most Glorious Prospect: Garden Visiting in Wales 1639–1900. Llanelli: Graffeg. Hucks, Joseph J. [1795] 1975. A Pedestrian Tour through North Wales in a Series of Letters (1795). Edited by Alun R. Jones and William Tydeman. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Hutton, Catherine. [1796–1800]. ‘Catherine Hutton’s Tours of Wales: 1796, 1797, 1799 and 1800’. In Curious Travellers Digital Editions, edited with an introduction by Mary-Ann Constantine. (last accessed 16 May 2022). Jarvis, Robin. 1997. Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Kinsley, Zoë. 2008. Women Writing the Home Tour 1682–1812. Aldershot: Ashgate. Leask, Nigel. 2002. Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing 1770–1840. Oxford: Oxford UP. ———. 2020. Stepping Westward: Writing the Highland Tour c. 1720–1830. Oxford: Oxford UP. McCue, Maureen. 2014. British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793–1840. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. McHugh, Kirsty. 2021. ‘Northern English Travellers to Wales and Scotland 1760–1840: A Study of Manuscript Travel Accounts from Yorkshire and Lancashire’. PhD Dissertation, University of Wales. Matheson, C. S. 2012. ‘“Ancient and Present”: Charles Heath of Monmouth and the Historical and Descriptive Accounts of Tintern Abbey 1793–1828’. In Travel Writing and Tourism in Britain and Ireland, edited by Benjamin Colbert, 50–67. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Miall, David S. 1998. ‘The Alps deferred: Wordsworth at the Simplon Pass’. European Romantic Review 9 (1): 87–102. Moore, Donald. 1979. Moses Griffith 1747–1819: Artist and Illustrator in the Service of Thomas Pennant. Cardiff: Welsh Arts Council. Nichols, John. 1814. Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century. Volume 8. London: Nichols, Son and Bentley. O’Kane, Finola. 2013. Ireland and the Picturesque: Design, Landscape Painting and Tourism 1700–1840. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. Pennant, Thomas. 1771. A Tour in Scotland 1769. Chester: John Monk. ———. 1774. A Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to the Hebrides MDCCLXXII. Part I. Chester: John Monk. ———. 1776. A Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to the Hebrides MDCCLXXII. Part II. London: Benjamin White. ———. 1768–70. The British Zoology. Revised ed. 4 vols. London: Benjamin White. ———. 1784. A Tour in Wales. 2 vols. London: Benjamin White [combines three separate Tours first published in 1778, 1781 and 1783]. ———. 1793. The Literary Life of the Late Thomas Pennant Esq., by HIMSELF. London: Benjamin and John White. Piozzi, Hester. 1789. ‘Journey through the North of England & Part of Scotland Wales &c.’. In Curious Travellers Digital Editions, edited with an introduction by Elizabeth Edwards. (last accessed 16 May 2022). Postle, Martin and Robin Simon. 2014. Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Pratt M. L. 2008. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Price, Uvedale. 1794. Essay on the Picturesque, as compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful. London: J. Robson.

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Pugh, Edward. 1816. Cambria Depicta: A Tour through North Wales Illustrated with Picturesque Views. London: E. Williams. Rose, Edwin. 2019. ‘From the South Seas to Soho Square: Joseph Banks’s Library, Collection and Kingdom of Natural History’. Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science 73 (4): 499–526. Sandby, Paul. 1778–81. The Virtuosi’s Museum, Containing Select Views of England, Scotland and Ireland. London: Printed for G. Kearsly. The images can be viewed at: (last accessed 16 May 2022). Smethurst, Paul. 2012. Travel Writing and the Natural World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Solkin, David. 1982. Richard Wilson: The Landscape of Reaction. London: Tate Gallery. Stott, Anne. 2003. Hannah More: The First Victorian. Oxford: Oxford UP. Sweet, Rosemary. 2004. Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain. London and New York: Hambledon. Thomas, David (Dafydd Ddu Eryri). 1808. ‘An Address to the Visitors of Snowdon’. National Library of Wales MS 10869B, 94. Thompson, Carl. 2011. Travel Writing. The New Critical Idiom. Abingdon: Routledge. Turner, Katherine. 2001. British Travel Writers in Europe 1750–1800: Authorship, Gender and National Identity. Aldershot: Ashgate. Urness, Carol. 1967. A Naturalist in Russia: Letters from Peter Simon Pallas to Thomas Pennant. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Varley, Cornelius. [n.d.]. ‘Cornelius Varley’s Narrative written by himself’. In Curious Travellers Digital Editions, edited with an introduction by Elizabeth Edwards. (last accessed 16 May 2022). Wordsworth, William. 2016. The Prelude: 1805. Edited by James Engell and Michael D. Raymond. Oxford: Oxford UP.

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4 Visualising the Indigenous Pacific Kacie L. Wills

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n about 1725 a man named Tupaia was born on the island of Ra‘iatea. Tupaia was educated as a high priest of the god of war, Oro, and as such, was knowledgeable in areas that included astronomy, medicine and navigation (Salmond 2009). Roughly thirty years later, in about 1753, a man named Mai was also born in Ra‘iatea to a family of middling rank. In the early 1760s Ra‘iatea was invaded by the Bora Borans, resulting in the exile of both these men to the island of Tahiti (Fullagar 2018, 249).1 This event set the stage for the encounters between Mai and Tupaia and the individuals associated with the Cook voyages. The three voyages of Captain James Cook to the Pacific, taking place between 1768 and 1780, were made for the purposes of scientific discovery, as well as for establishing a relationship with this part of the globe that was so littleknown to Europeans.2 The voyages made a distinct mark on the global imagination and popular culture through the groundbreaking length of their stay in the Pacific islands and their extended contact with Pacific peoples. The visual representations afforded by these encounters continue to shape Western understanding of the Pacific and the known histories of these and other ‘Indigenous envoys’ (Fullagar 2018).3 In this chapter, I will examine the ways English society re-created Mai (also known as Ma’i or Omai) visually, in mediated forms, on stage and in paint, in order to fit in with the popular imaginings of the Pacific following the Cook voyages. These visual representations exist within the larger cultural practice of mediating scientific knowledge of people and places through print illustration.4 For many Europeans, the printed illustrations in voyage and exploration accounts were their only context for understanding the shifts in science and knowledge that resulted from contact in the Pacific, and, indeed, around the globe. These illustrations would have been encountered in books, periodicals and other circulated print materials. Keeping in mind the influence these illustrations had on the public, I will examine other selected European visual representations of the Pacific, specifically the famous painting, Portrait of Omai, by Joshua Reynolds (reproduced as an engraving in fig. 4.1), and the costuming design for the popular pantomime, Omai; or a trip around the world. While the portrait by Reynolds has been much studied, the similarities between that portrait and the illustration for the character Omai’s costuming in the pantomime have yet to be explored. Through studying these mediated visual representations together, I will demonstrate how Europeans used visual arts and symbolic objects to attempt to assimilate aspects of Pacific culture, and how that same culture can be seen through such representations to resist assimilation. Finally, I will turn to the illustrations Tupaia created while accompanying James Cook on the first of the Pacific voyages. These illustrations, initially attributed to Sir Joseph Banks, botanist on the first of the

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voyages and later president of the Royal Society, have only recently been attributed to Tupaia. They, thus, demonstrate the wider issue of Eurocentric understandings of Pacific encounter that fail to account for Indigenous experiences. Additionally, they illustrate an Indigenous perspective on encounter and cross-cultural exchange. Tupaia’s drawings reveal the practice of mediating knowledge through visual culture to be a complex process which is often occluded or simplified, as a result of the collection, dissemination and promotion of visual and written accounts by Europeans. Such accounts are enmeshed in European frameworks and agendas, and often fail to encompass the experiences of instrumental historical figures such as Tupaia and Mai. Through fully recognising the shortcomings of such renderings of Pacific encounter, and by recentring the narrative around Indigenous experiences, we can create a more complete picture of this historical exchange.

Pacific Exploration and its Cultural Productions The Cook voyages and the visual productions they generated contributed to a vision of the Pacific as a paradise, an Eden before the Fall, and to the construction of the ‘noble savage’.5 These voyages were consumed at home by the public in accounts such as those of John Hawkesworth, who compiled a wildly popular narrative of Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific, which was published in 1773.6 Additionally, abridged accounts of the voyages and illustrations by shipboard artists such as Sydney Parkinson appeared in popular magazines, such as The London Magazine, The Gentleman’s Magazine and The Lady’s Magazine, which published twenty illustrations of the Pacific between 1784 and 1787 (Anderson 2017). The consumption of these visual productions created a lasting impression of the Pacific; however, this Edenic vision of both the Pacific and its people blinded the public to the destructive colonial forces at work. John Gascoigne claims that ‘One of the most characteristic features of European exploration of the Pacific was the extent to which it was linked with the Enlightenment-linked goals of promoting the acquisition of knowledge’ (2015, 131). All of the knowledge accumulated through contact and the interaction of Indigenous and European knowledge systems, as Gascoigne terms them, in the Pacific on the Cook voyages was mediated for the European public.7 As David Turnbull points out, in encounters between different knowledge traditions, such as those of Europe and the Pacific, ‘claims about what is to count as knowledge or truth are both representations and performances’ (2000, 55). Visual representation in painting, illustration and performance mediated knowledge gained through contact in the Pacific, and these forms became the popularly recognised ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’. All of these forms of mediation ultimately imposed systems of classification that were suited to the needs of Europeans but were ‘well removed from the way in which Indigenous people made sense of the world around them’ (Gascoigne 2015, 139). Print illustrations such as those of Sydney Parkinson are key examples of the way scientific knowledge of people and places gleaned on the Cook voyages was mediated for public consumption.8 Ian Haywood, Susan Matthews and Mary L. Shannon, in their interrogation of the terminology surrounding and significance of ‘illustration’ to the Romantic period, contend that ‘it is not an exaggeration to state that books were both seen and read’ (2019, 6). The visual mediation of knowledge involved what Rüdiger Joppien and Bernard Smith have claimed to be scientific modes of drawing (1985). Illustrations from the Endeavour voyages, for instance, were thought to be accurate depictions of the environs of the Pacific and its people. And, as Jocelyn Anderson argues, the

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circulation of images from the Cook voyages, not just in books and paintings, but even in magazines, provides evidence of the wide-ranging public awareness of the Pacific (2017). Sydney Parkinson and artist William Hodges were commissioned on the first and second voyages respectively to visually document all aspects of Cook’s Pacific encounters. Parkinson’s illustrations were circulated in print, and Hodges displayed several of his paintings of the second voyage at the Royal Academy. However, Anderson points out that one of the key issues with the popularity of such circulated and displayed visual representations was the manner in which they claimed to offer ‘truthful’ visions of the Pacific, while simultaneously promoting the imperial agenda. Parkinson, for instance, was hired by Joseph Banks, whose life’s work was to promote the value of science in the service of empire.9 Visual depictions of the Pacific, then, can be understood as mediators between the voyages, their political and scientific aims, and the public. One watercolour illustration by Parkinson highlights the breadfruit tree, which was seen as an exciting potential substitute for bread and labour, further contributing to the European perception of Tahiti as an Eden (Smith 2006).10 William Hodges furthers this perception with his painting, A View taken in the bay of Oaite Peha Otaheite. Hodges paints rosy hues, palms blowing in the breeze and tattooed bathing women in the foreground, a visual depiction of an earthly paradise.11 The original version of this painting was displayed at the Royal Academy in 1776, and Hodges made several subsequent versions of the painting, the most well known of which was for the Admiralty and is now commonly referred to as ‘Tahiti revisited’. A number of Hodges’s illustrations show the artist mingling ‘the memories of his feelings on location’ with ‘his empirical vision’ (Smith 1992, 72). Though Hodges attempted to create a tropical paradise, the shrouded corpse apparent in the background of this particular painting expresses the corruption and death present in this paradise and subtly presents Tahiti as a space representative of temptation. These very ‘imaginative recastings’ of the Pacific were ultimately attacked for their inaccuracy (Smith 1992, 72). Nevertheless, Hodges’s illustrations contributed to the visions of the public imagination already fuelled by sensational depictions of Pacific sexuality in the 1773 account of John Hawkesworth.12 In July 1774, as many of these images of the Pacific were circulating among curious Europeans, James Cook’s second voyage returned to London with Mai.13 The voyage had brought a representative of Pacific life and culture, whose identity, in the imaginations of the public, was an amalgamation of his flesh and blood experiences and the popular ideas about the Pacific found in paintings and print illustrations, such as those discussed above. Aspects of Mai’s Indigenous identity, like the depiction of Tahiti itself, were mediated for public consumption through visual representations. The increasing mediation demonstrated by the following works highlights the scholarly importance of seeking out visual representations composed by Indigenous persons, such as those by Tupaia himself.

Mai: Portraiture and Pantomime The Reynolds Portrait In the Portrait of Omai by Joshua Reynolds (fig. 4.1), one of the most well known and valuable portraits in history, both Mai’s skin and the tapa draped over his body become sites of spectacle associated with global exploration and curiosity (Fullagar 2010, 191–212). Exhibited at the Royal Academy in May 1776, the painting participates in the tradition of classicising the native subject. Mai’s pose in the

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Figure 4.1  Engraved by John Jacobi after Sir Joshua Reynolds, Omai, a native of the island of Utietea, 1777. Mezzotint. Dixon Library, State Library of New South Wales, DL Pf 75. painting emulates the Apollo Belvedere, which was the standard for classicised ideal beauty and masculinity. The early eighteenth-century portraits by John Verelst of the four Native American leaders who visited the court of Queen Anne, for example, similarly place Indigeneity on display in a manner that is both regal and aesthetically familiar to the European public.14 Like the Reynolds painting of Mai, Verelst’s representations of the Indigenous visitors from North America were popular and were reproduced and circulated in print form. All four paintings show the leaders (three Mohawk men from the Haudenosaunee alliance and one Mohican from the Algonquin nations) draped in a red cape and posed powerfully with a hand to the hip. As with various representations of Mai, the men are portrayed holding objects that indicate their status in their own culture and in ways familiar to the European audience. Three of the portraits exhibit the men’s tattoos, while the painting, Tee Yee Neen Ho Ga Row, Emperor of the Six Nations c. 1680–1755, is the only one that depicts the figure in English dress (fig. 4.2). Tee Yee Neen Ho Ga Row displays a wampum belt

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Figure 4.2  John Verelst, Tee Yee Neen Ho Ga Row ‘Emperor of the Six Nations’, c. 1710. Oil on Canvas. Library and Archives Canada / acc. no. 1977-35-4 / e011179910, C-092415. Acquired with a special grant from the Canadian Government in 1977.

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that is symbolic of his meeting with the queen and of their alliance, much as the tapa draping Mai’s body comes to represent his role as envoy to Europe.15 Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee and Peter J. Kitson state that the portrait presents Mai as a ‘figure of dignity to be admired rather than a native to be condescended to’ (2004, 53). This portrait illustrates the Enlightenment concept of the ‘noble savage’, which presents the Indigenous person as exotic Other and an ideal form from which to critique society.16 This simultaneous display and critique serves to frame the ambivalent portrayal of Mai that is foundational to understanding his later visual and verbal depictions in the pantomime. The tapa, worn by Mai in the painting, is significant on both a material and spiritual level. There are a number of historians who deem Mai’s garments to be comparable to normal Tahitian dress, and being clothed with tapa in the portrait shows that Mai was depicted, in part, as a high-ranking individual (Turner 2001, 27 and note 14). Tapa was associated with spirituality and with the priestly class, but it also held a material, social significance connected with ceremony, especially Tahitian rituals of mourning (Lum 2017, Kaeppler 2015, 5). While tapa resonates most deeply with Polynesian culture, the dissemination of information from the Cook voyages in regard to tapa ensured that its significance was also accessible, particularly on a material and visual level, to the British imagination. Tapa had become a visual marker of both Indigeneity and the sort of amicable relationship to the ‘noble savage’ that English culture sought to foster. Beyond this, however, the tapa signifies the relationship to a noble and priestly class that Mai sought to promote for himself. It was through the promotion of this noble identity that Mai hoped to achieve his goal: to acquire weapons and firepower in order to return to his home and defeat the Bora Borans (Fullagar 2018, 248).

Omai; or a Trip Around the World First performed at Covent Garden on 20 December 1785, Omai; or a Trip Around the World was a ‘celebrated’ pantomime (The London Stage 1960–8, 1049). According to Daniel O’Quinn, with its scope and visual spectacle, Omai ‘needs above all to be considered as a visual experience perhaps unrivaled on the eighteenth-century stage’ (2005, 90). It was also a production that both reflected and continued to shape the public’s ideas of the Pacific, for which Mai stood in as a representative and envoy. On the day following its first performance, the pantomime was lauded as an ‘illustration of facts’ of the voyages of Captain Cook (Public Advertiser 1785). As an elaborately embellished production, however, it integrated fancy into the popular understanding of Pacific exploration through its mythically proportioned depiction of Mai, alongside well-researched set and costume design that drew much from the illustrations of the Cook voyages, as well as museum collections such as those of Sir Ashton Lever (O’Quinn 2005, 92).17 The pantomime, thus, continued to build upon the tension that existed in such popular depictions of the Pacific between the claim that the work was communicating an accurate idea of the Pacific and the reality that all such depictions were both fuelling and responding to an imaginative vision of Pacific life and culture. The pantomime, the painting and the print illustrations I’ve discussed were all integral aspects of popular culture responsible for mediating and disseminating ideas about the Pacific to the public. Beyond setting the pantomime in locations familiar to English audiences from the print accounts of Cook’s voyages, the pantomime

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illustrates the slippery nature of Mai’s place and the place of Indigeneity in British society’s conceptions of the exotic. O’Quinn notes that Omai’s success was very much influenced by its visual depiction of Indigenous people (2005, 98). Spectators of the scenes set in the Pacific could readily construct the representation of Indigeneity in Omai as part of the visual spectacle of the exotic. According to O’Quinn, this visual spectacle presented the Indigenous people as passive parts of the overall setting and, in this way, prevented the activation of cultural difference through performance (2005, 99). Beyond the alterations to Mai’s story, elevating his rank to the son of a chief, this process involved smoothing over the discomforting aspects of Mai’s ‘nativeness’ through his costuming. This illustration of the character Omai’s costuming for the pantomime, clearly modelled on the portrait by Reynolds, depicts Mai’s nativeness and Indigenous identity in an increasingly mediated form that highlights what was deemed acceptable and assimilable to the audience (fig. 4.3). Though still represented as exotic, the orientalised and classicised depiction of Indigeneity was more familiar to Europeans than that of the newly encountered Pacific. This illustration is especially significant, since no contemporary illustrations of the Omai character’s costuming were thought to exist. Even Mathew Norman’s 2019 article claims that no contemporary descriptions or illustrations of the costuming for the character of Omai could be found (44). This may have been in part because it is not with the other pantomime costuming illustrations

Figure 4.3  Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (attr.), Omiah. A Native of the Sandwich Islands, c. 1785. Watercolour and ink. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, SSV/142.

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at the National Library of Australia, Canberra or at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington.18 Rather, this illustration, held in a private collection until 2015, is now at the Mitchell Library of the State Library of New South Wales. This drawing’s style is different from the illustrations in the aforementioned collections, and it includes sketching of the set and other characters in the background. The other illustrations are of individual costumed characters (fig. 4.4), which suggests that the Omai illustration may have been an early design for the character’s costuming, made prior to the more aesthetically pleasing and delicate costume designs housed at Canberra and Te Papa. The fact that this illustration, in the hand of de Loutherbourg or another artist, shows the costuming to be clearly modelled after the Reynolds portrait (though the Omai character is inaccurately labelled as a ‘Native of the Sandwich Islands’) supports previous claims about the liberty taken in representing the dress and setting of the Pacific islands, even as they were mediated in the accounts and illustrations offered by the Cook voyages.19 While the costuming of other figures associated with the voyages bears some resemblance to the sartorial practices of the Pacific, the

Figure 4.4  Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, A man of New Zealand, 1785. Watercolour and ink. National Library of Australia, PIC Solander Box A68 #R150.

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drive to present Mai’s nobility and status through the excesses of barkcloth and the classical styling of his garments overrides accuracy.20 The character’s clothing, tapa fashioned in a European (albeit orientalised) style, complete with a cloak, reflects not his own culture but the hybrid, classicised vision of Pacific Indigeneity that Enlightened England had deemed more appropriate in its degree of otherness. The Omai character’s garments stand in sharp contrast to the costuming of the figure from New Zealand visible in figure 4.4. As the envoy charged with bringing European culture and civilisation back to the Pacific, Mai must be presented in the pantomime in such a way as to set him apart from others who did not make the journey to England. Since pantomimes were exceedingly topical and ‘drew on events of very recent public interest in ways that other forms of musical theatre were incapable, or perhaps, disinclined’, such a performance was the perfect setting for both illustrating popular ideas about the Pacific and establishing Mai as its representative (Semmens 2016, 149). According to Nicholas Thomas, ‘nativeness’, as European culture appropriates aspects of Indigenous culture, becomes an idea signified by objects external to the body, rather than the body itself (1991, 176). We see this depiction of nativeness in the illustration for Omai’s costuming, from the hints at his tattoos, represented by small dots on his hands, to the wooden headrest he carries in his arm, the ceremonial paddle he holds with his other hand, and what appears to be a Māori hand club hanging by his side. Interestingly, none of the objects Mai carries in this illustration are significant to the plot of the pantomime. These are, however, objects through which the public would have recognised Mai’s identity and status in the Pacific, especially since a number of the props for the pantomime were drawn from illustrations and objects in British collections (Norman 2019, 46). The wooden headrest the character holds is similar to the one depicted in the popular engraving, Omai, a Native of Ulaietea, by Francesco Bartolozzi from 1774.21 Drawings of hand clubs and oars were circulated with voyage accounts such as that of John Hawkesworth.22 The items the Omai character carries appear to represent various Pacific peoples, including the Māori. These objects, then, further emphasise Mai’s role as envoy to, as well as from, the Pacific islands. The Omai character’s footwear is especially striking in this illustration (fig. 4.3). His stockings and shoes stand in contrast to the other characters’ bare feet and to his own bare legs and feet in the Reynolds portrait and are reminiscent of the European dress in the Verelst portrait of Tee Yee Neen Ho Ga Row. Both shoes and stockings serve to hide the tattoos that mark Mai’s skin, leaving only a very discrete indication of his tattoos on his left hand. Mai’s tattoos and skin are particularly problematic visual aspects of the Indigenous performance ascribed by the imperial imagination. Tattoos are not only connected to the ambivalence towards ornament and the luxury debates, but also to visual spectacle and the developing scientific inquiry into cultural variations and the human condition.23 Mai became for British society a site of cultural and scientific inquiry and visual spectacle. Visitors like Mai both built the reputation of the centre of calculation established by Joseph Banks but also destabilised it, ‘putting Britons’ assumptions of centrality and superiority in doubt’ (Fulford et al. 2004, 14). As we have seen with the visual aspects of the production of the pantomime, Mai was a figure who embodied the convergence of public interest in global contact with spectacle and performance. In this way, he was associated not only with pantomime, but also with other popular forms of public display, such as portraiture.

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Tupaia and His Illustrations As Fullagar points out, British commentators rarely thought about what Indigenous practices might mean for visitors such as Mai and how the encounters represented in these aspects of English visual culture make the encounter between Mai and Europeans central to his history (2018, 240). In thinking about this encounter from a broader context of Mai’s history, however, it is clear that this was no more consequential than encounters with enemy tribes that shaped his life path prior to meeting Cook (Fullagar 2018, 241). As Jennifer Newell states, ‘Histories written from Indigenous perspectives are inherently powerful for overturning assumptions about agents and authority’ (2018, 91). Building on this idea, I now turn to how an Indigenous artist, Tupaia, visually constructed moments of encounter between Cook’s men and Pacific peoples in his illustrations.24 According to Harriet Parsons, it is ‘the development of Tupaia’s artistic practice that becomes the instrument through which the British perception of the Pacific is mediated’ (2015, 148). These illustrations, thus, serve to broaden our perspective on how knowledge was visually mediated in this period beyond the work of English and European artists. In their renderings of aspects of Pacific culture and encounter, Tupaia’s drawings suggest a more encompassing Romantic visual culture emerging out of contact in the Pacific. Specifically, they offer a view into the interactions, exchanges and experiences surrounding Cook’s voyages that is less concerned with assimilation and familiarity than it is with communication. Tupaia, who was known for his cleverness and his knowledge of the islands surrounding Ra‘iatea, joined the voyage as a navigator and translator; he worked with Cook to chart the islands around Tahiti. Praised also for his skills in diplomacy, particularly in the exchanges with the Māori, he has only recently been acknowledged for his accomplishments as an artist.25 According to Anne Salmond, Tupaia most likely learned to paint in the European style from Parkinson and from Banks’s secretary and draughtsman, Herman Diedrich Spöring (2003, 75). Moreover, according to Keith Vincent Smith, others on board the Endeavour described Tupaia’s skill as an artist (Marra 1775, 219, and Smith 2005, 5). Glyndwr Williams points out that it is especially impressive that Tupaia’s drawings seem to have been made from life and were not mere copies of the work of Parkinson (2003, 47). In terms of the colours chosen from Tupaia’s paintbox, Salmond contends that the chief colours of red, brown and black were also colours used in barkcloth painting, a skill Tupaia would have had as a member of the Arioi (2009, 176). Additionally, Tupaia’s paintings may have been inspired by motifs found in Tahitian tattooing (Salmond 2009, 176). This forges another link, then, between the visual culture of the tattoo surrounding Mai, the difficulty Europeans seem to have in assimilating the tattoos into their culture, and the perspectives offered by Tupaia through these paintings. The following paintings depict Tupaia’s artistic renderings of an exchange between Banks and the Māori and the traditional Otaheite costuming of a dancing girl. The first image, Maori trading a crayfish with Joseph Banks, captures a moment of physical exchange between Banks and the Māori (fig. 4.5). This painting gestures towards Tupaia’s relationship with the Māori and his legacy in New Zealand.26 In the painting, the crayfish dominates the image, while the white handkerchief Banks is giving in exchange fades into the background.27 Upon close examination, it is clear that the Māori individual also has tattooing on his face, the tā moko. The swirling lines are

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Figure 4.5  Tupaia, Maori trading a crayfish with Joseph Banks, 1769. Watercolour on paper. © The British Library Board, Add MS 15508, f 11 a.

subtle in contrast to the tattooed illustration of the man from New Zealand created for the Omai pantomime (fig. 4.4). In fact, this depiction of the Māori by Tupaia is strikingly different, which may further suggest, as Salmond points out, that Tupaia was an expert in tattoo (2009, 176). Thinking about the ideas of assimilation, civilisation and humanity that circulated around tattooing, however, there may be even more important factors that we should pay attention to here. Tupaia’s illustration is subtle and merges the tattoo with the skin. The differences between the depiction of the Māori tattoos in the work of Parkinson and Hodges lay in the ways the lines were either integrated into the face or served to disguise expression (Guest 2000, 95). Though there has been much speculation about Parkinson’s role in Tupaia’s artistic instruction, it is interesting to note that Tupaia’s illustrations of Māori tattoos show a middle ground between the soft lines of Hodges’ Old Maori man with a grey beard and Head of a New Zealander (fig. 4.6) and Parkinson’s famous ‘Head of a New Zealander’.28 Marguerite Johnson also notes that the physical markers of race are often sacrificed to the classicism of the composition in the European depiction of Aboriginal Australians and Māori, transforming the Indigenous body into an ‘uninterpretable other’ (2019, 26). Johnson argues that the bodies are dehumanised into works of art, rather than presented as ‘site(s) of dignified racial difference’, as we see, for instance, with the Reynolds portrait of Mai. In this portrait, Mai’s body is both made representative of Pacific culture through the tapa and assimilable to European culture through the familiar adornment of his body as an orientalised or exotic other. Tupaia’s depiction of the Māori individual here, however,

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Figure 4.6  William Hodges, Old Maori man with a grey beard / Old Man of New Zealand, 1773. Chalk. National Library of Australia, PIC Drawer 11 #R749. does not conform to either of these processes. The Māori figure is neither uninterpretable and dehumanised nor the dignified, noble savage. In spite of the illustration’s move away from the European ideals of line and perspective, Tupaia’s depiction of the Māori individual in the exchange is more accurate than a classical portrait in its ability to depict and communicate without assignation of type or role. Tupaia’s interaction with and depiction of the Māori in this painting offer a perspective on contact in the Pacific that is beyond the visual and written narratives constructed by Europeans, teasing out new possibilities for alternative Indigenous narratives of ‘Pacific exploration’. The second image from Tupaia’s collection is of an ‘Arioi dancer in Ra‘iatea’ (fig. 4.7). This illustration refers to a particular instance of dancing witnessed by Cook and his men in Ra‘iatea (Cook 1999, 4 August 1769). In his account of the experience, Cook emphasises the comparative modesty of the women’s attire and its similarity to European dress, yet notes the ‘unpleasing’ and erotic movements of their bodies (Salmond 2009, 217). Tupaia’s illustration, unlike that of Parkinson on the same subject, emphasises the contortions and asymmetries of the performance. Parkinson’s dancing women make seemingly balletic gestures, with the main female dancer’s arms in a first position.29 As Johnson has pointed out, Parkinson’s drawings, while in an ethnographic style, owe a debt to the classical in their composition (2019, 24). While Tupaia focuses on the individual dancer, Parkinson’s illustration captures the observers,

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Figure 4.7  Tupaia, Otaheite: Dancing Girl and Chief Mourner [pictured here: Dancing Girl], 1769. Pencil and watercolour on paper. © The British Library Board, Add MS 15508, f 9. the musicians and the other dancers. Parkinson erases the contorted facial expressions, while Tupaia makes the dancer’s expression central to the illustration. Tupaia’s work is a significant and oft-overlooked example of the diversity of visual culture in this period. His illustration highlights the importance of not only considering material visual culture and its role in shaping aesthetics but also the imperative to question those aesthetic traditions that have influenced our conceptions of beauty. Tupaia’s drawings make an interesting comparative study with those of Parkinson because Parkinson’s main task ‘was precisely to record that which was exotic and strange – especially flora and fauna – in order to convey to a public at home where the Endeavour had been and what its crew had seen’, but unlike Parkinson, Tupaia was drawing ‘behaviors and attitudes’ (Williams 2003, 49). The comparative study of these illustrations further emphasises the ways that the Cook voyages were being

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mediated and adapted for European audiences. The knowledge acquired through the experience of contact in the Pacific is presented through a cultural lens that makes it decipherable: the dancer’s movements and the overall scene translated into a language of movement the public could easily understand. Tupaia’s illustration, however, communicates, rather than assimilates; less concerned with expectations of classical composition, Tupaia’s work displays the expression, movement and feeling of the dance. In capturing the dancing subject in such a manner, Tupaia reveals the shortcomings of the visual depictions of Pacific encounter that were being popularly circulated. He shows them to often be caught up in presenting a comprehensible aesthetic framework to European audiences rather than accurately illustrating the cultural encounter. By looking to Tupaia’s illustrations, we are reminded of the knowledge we lack of relationships and interactions during these voyages of discovery (Williams 2003, 50), and we are offered a different perspective on these encounters that is unconcerned with European aesthetic and social norms that would prevent the accurate communication and interpretation of the experience of contact (Donaldson and Donaldson 1985, 15).

Conclusion It is a fascinating and revealing fact that Reynolds’s Portrait of Omai continues to spark not only widespread interest, but also controversy today (Fullagar 2010). Over the past decade, a significant debate has occurred over the portrait’s ownership. The painting was purchased for a private collection in 2001 but prevented from leaving the UK in 2003. Since then, with few exceptions, it has remained in storage, while curators fight to include it in national museum collections as a key example of British portraiture and a symbol of its history of empire and exploitation.30 This eighteenth-century portrait of a man from Ra‘iatea has proven itself to be somehow at the heart of Britain’s conception of its own history. Mai’s legacy continues to serve as a reminder of the significant role Indigenous persons played in the circulation of knowledge and of ideas about the self and the world in the Romantic era. The clash over ownership and display of the Portrait of Omai reaffirms the centrality of the Pacific to the study of the metropole in this period and to conceptions of British identity today. By looking more closely at the visual culture surrounding the Cook voyages, new avenues open for research that emphasise the diverse aspects of visual experience which fall under ‘Romantic visual culture’ and access the ways Romanticism may have developed out of a European romanticisation and interpretation of the Pacific (Thomas 2012, 88).

Notes   1. See Turnbull (2001) for the history of Mai from a perspective focused on his person and not what he reflected about Enlightenment values.   2. The first, Endeavour, 1768–71; the second, Resolution and Adventure, 1772–5; the third, Resolution and Discovery, 1776–80. Cook was killed in Kealakekua Bay in February 1779. For more on the significance of the Cook voyages, see Thomas (2003) and Cook and Omai: The Cult of the South Seas, especially Hetherington.   3. Smith (2009) also discusses Mai, Tupaia and the accounts of ‘Oceanic travelers’.   4. As Ian Haywood, Susan Matthews and Mary L. Shannon note, this was a period characterised by ‘an “explosion” of visual material within printed books’ (2019, 1).

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  5. For more on the ‘noble savage,’ see Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s discussion of the noble savage and natural man in A Discourse upon the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind (1755).  6. Hawkesworth’s An account of the voyages undertaken by the order of His present Majesty for making discoveries in the southern hemisphere, and successively performed by Commodore Byron, Captain Wallis, Captain Carteret and Captain Cook was published as the ‘official’ account of the voyage.   7. It is also important to note, as Gascoigne points out (2015, 131), this knowledge accumulation was necessarily connected to the promotion of empire. For more on the relationship between bodies of knowledge, science and exploration in the Romantic era, see Fulford, Lee and Kitson (2004). For more on mediating knowledge, see Blair and Stalybrass (2010), and Cook (2001, 37), who emphasises the popularity of the Cook voyages being rooted in the new interest in being an armchair traveller.   8. Sydney Parkinson, Voyages and Travels: Drawings of Cook, Wallis and Byron’s voyages: 1768–1780. Topography Collections of Drawings. Watercolour. Tahiti, 1769. The British Library. Add MS 323921, f.9.b. Available at (last accessed 21 April 2022).   9. See Gascoigne (1998). 10. See also Smith (2006) and Fulford, Lee and Kitson (2004, 108–126). 11. William Hodges. A View taken in the bay of Oaite Peha Otaheite. Oil on canvas, 1776. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. BHC 2396. Available at (last accessed 21 April 2022). 12. For more on Hodges’ and Hawkesworth’s impact on the public conception of the Pacific, see Binney (2016), Guest (2007, 3), Salmond (2009), Thomas (2003, 153–5). 13. For more on Mai in London, see Connaughton (2005), Fulford, Lee, and Kitson (2004), Guest (2007, 149-–68), McCormick (1977), Smith (2009). 14. John Verelst. Sa Ga Yeath Qua Pieth Tow, King of the Maquas, Ho Nee Yeath Taw No Row, King of the Generethgarich Nations, Etow Oh Koam, King of the River Nation (Mohican), Tee Yee Neen Ho Ga Row, Emperor of the Six Nations c. 1680–1755. Oil on canvas, 1710. Library and Archives Canada. 15. See Fullagar (2010) and Turner (2001, 26). 16. See note 5. 17. According to Norman (2019, 29), the plot of the pantomime strayed so far from the historical events of Mai’s life it was unrecognisable. 18. The National Library of Australia has eighteen of the drawings, while Te Papa has three. 19. It is of note that both Joppien (1979) and Norman (2019) have argued that de Loutherbourg is not responsible for all of the illustrations that have been found. At least three of the drawings Norman attributes to John Webber. The handwriting on the Omai illustration is more in line with that of de Loutherbourg; however, I believe it is possible that the caption may have been added to the illustration later, as the designation of Omai as a Native of the Sandwich Islands is incorrect and is not a mistake that de Loutherbourg would make. Additionally, I allow that this illustration may have been made by an individual who saw the production. This accounts for the differences in style from the other costume designs. 20. Norman (2019, 38) notes, additionally, the costume designs themselves should be treated with caution, since ‘the costume makers of the Theater Royal may have struggled to realise the ambitious designs’ of the artist. 21. Francesco Bartolozzi after Nathanial Dance. Omai, a Native of Ulaietea. Engraving on Paper, 1774. National Portrait Gallery. 2007.29. Available at (last accessed 21 April 2022); Turner (2001, 26) discusses the similarities between the Dance engraving and the Reynolds portrait.

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22. See James Record, after John Frederick Miller, ‘Tools from the South Seas Islands . . .’ Etching on paper, 1773. The British Museum. 1977, U.706. Available at (last accessed 21 April 2022). Plates such as this one were included in John Hawkesworth’s published account of the Cook voyages. 23. See Banks (1963), Forster (1996), and Guest (2000). 24. In addition to Tupaia’s illustrations I discuss here, others, along with his map of the Society Islands, are held at the British Library. MS 15508, f.10; Add MS 15508; Add MS 15508, f.11; Add. MS 21593 C. 25. For more on Tupaia’s history, see Salmond (2012). 26. Salmond (1990, 238) and Turnbull (2000, 68) speak to the significance of Tupaia’s relationship with the Māori. 27. When Banks mentions this exchange, it is a nail in his hand (Sir Joseph Banks to Dawson Turner, F. R. S. 1812, Letter. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Banks Collection, MS 82, discovered by and quoted in Harold Carter [1998]). Additionally, Williams (2003, 45) notes the striking depiction of the eyes in the illustration. He connects this to the significance of the eye to the cult of Oro. 28. Sydney Parkinson. Head of a New Zealander, with a comb in his hair. Engraving, 1770. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. PAJ2159. Available at (last accessed 21 April 2022). 29. Sydney Parkinson. View of the inside of a house on the island of Ulietea, with representation of a dance. Engraving, late 1760s–70s. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. PAJ2156. Available at (last accessed 21 April 2022). 30. See John Wilson, ‘Row as rarely seen Reynolds portrait is set to go on show – in Amsterdam’. The Guardian, 24 February 2018, at (last accessed 21 April 2022).

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Donaldson, Ian and Tamsin Donaldson. 1985. Seeing the First Australians. Sydney: G. Allen and Unwin. Forster, Johann Reinhold. 1996. Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World. Edited by Nicholas Thomas, Harriet Guest and Michael Dettelbach. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Fulford, Tim, Debbie Lee and Peter J. Kitson. 2004. Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Fullagar, Kate. 2010. ‘Reynold’s New Masterpiece: From Experiment in Savagery to Icon of The Eighteenth Century’. Cultural and Social History 7 (2): 191–212. ———. 2018. ‘Envoys of Interest’. In Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in A Revolutionary Age, edited by Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell, 239–55. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Gascoigne, John. 1998. Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ———. 2015. ‘Cross-Cultural Knowledge Exchange in the age of the Enlightenment’. In Indigenous Intermediaries, edited by Shino Konishi, Maria Nugent and Tiffany Shellam, 131–45. Canberra: ANU Press. Guest, Harriet. 2000. ‘Curiously Marked: Tattooing and Gender Difference in Eighteenthcentury British Perceptions of the South Pacific’. In Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History, edited by Jane Caplan, 83–101. Princeton: Princeton UP. ———. 2007. Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation: Captain Cook, William Hodges and the Return to the Pacific. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Hetherington, Michelle. 2001. ‘The Cult of the South Seas’. In Cook and Omai: The Cult of the South Seas, edited by Michelle Hetherington, 1–8. Canberra: The National Library of Australia. Haywood, Ian, Susan Matthews and Mary L. Shannon, eds. 2019. Romanticism and Illustration. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Johnson, Marguerite. 2019. ‘Black Out: Classicizing Indigeneity in Australia and New Zealand’. In Antipodean Antiquities: Classical Reception Down Under, edited by Marguerite Johnson, 13–28. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Joppien, Rüdiger. 1979. ‘Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s pantomime “Omai, or, a Trip round the World” and the artists of Captain Cook’s voyages’. In British Museum yearbook 3: Captain Cook and the South Pacific, edited by T.C. Mitchell, 81–136. London: British Museum Publications. Joppien, Rüdiger and Bernard Smith. 1985. The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages, Vol. I: The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768–1771. Oxford: Oxford UP in association with the Australian Academy of Humanities, Melbourne. Kaeppler, Adrienne L. 2015. ‘Culture, Conservation and Creativity: Two Centuries of Polynesian Barkcloth’. In Made in Oceania: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Social and Cultural Meanings and Presentation of Oceanic Tapa, edited by Peter Mesenhöller and Annemarie Stauffer, 2–14. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. The London Stage, 1660–1800: a Calendar of Plays, Entertainments & Afterpieces, Together with Casts, Box-receipts and Contemporary Comment. pt 5.1960–68. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. Lum, Julia. 2017. ‘Visual and material economies of bark cloth in Robert Smirke’s The Cession of the District of Matavai in the Island of Otaheite’. Paper presented at Joseph Banks: Science, Culture and Exploration, 1743–1820, The Royal Society, 15 September 2017. McCormick, E. H. 1977. Omai: Pacific Envoy. Auckland: Auckland UP. Marra, John. 1775. Journal of the Resolution’s Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Hemisphere. London: F. Newberry. Newell, Jennifer. 2018. ‘New Ecologies: Pathways in the Pacific, 1760s–1840s’. In Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age, edited by Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell, 91–114. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.

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Norman, Mathew. 2019. ‘Webber or de Loutherbourg? New observations regarding drawings for the 1785 pantomime Omai, or, A Trip round the World’. Tuhinga 30: 29–55. O’Quinn, Daniel. 2005. Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Parsons, Harriet. 2015. ‘British-Tahitian Collaborative Drawing Strategies on Cook’s Endeavour Voyage’. In Indigenous Intermediaries, edited by Shino Konishi, Maria Nugent and Tiffany Shellam, 147–67. Canberra: ANU Press. Public Advertiser. 1785. Issue 16092, 21 December 1785. n.p. 19th Century British Newspapers. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. [1755] 2004. A Discourse upon the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind. Reprint. Mineola and New York: Dover. Salmond, Anne. 1990. Two Worlds: First Meetings Between Maori and Europeans, 1642–1772. Auckland: Viking. ———. 2003. The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas. London and New Haven, CT: Yale UP. ———. 2009. Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. ———. 2012. ‘Tupaia, the Navigator Priest’. In Tangata o le moana: New Zealand and the Peoples of the Pacific, 57–75. Wellington: Te Papa Press. Semmens, Richard. 2016. Studies in the English Pantomime: 1712–1733. Sheffield: Pendragon. Smith, Bernard. 1992. Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Smith, Keith Vincent. 2005. ‘Tupaia’s Sketchbook’. eBLJ, article 10: 1–6. Smith, Vanessa. 2006. ‘Give Us Our Daily Breadfruit: Bread Substitution in the Pacific in the Eighteenth Century’. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 35: 53–75. ———. 2009. ‘Banks, Tupaia, and Mai: Cross-cultural Exchanges and Friendship in the Pacific’. Parergon 26 (2): 139–60. Thomas, Nicholas. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. ———. 2003. Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook. New York: Walker and Company. Thomas, Sophie. 2012. ‘Visual Culture’. In A Handbook of Romanticism Studies, 1st edition, edited by Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright. Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Turnbull, David. 2000. ‘(En)-countering knowledge traditions. The story of Cook and Tupaia’. Humanities Research 7 (1): 55–76. Turnbull, Paul. 2001. ‘Mai, the Other Beyond the Exotic Stranger’. In Cook and Omai: The Cult of the South Seas, edited by Michelle Hetherington, 43–50. Canberra: The National Library of Australia. Turner, Caroline. 2001. ‘Images of Mai’. In Cook and Omai: The Cult of the South Seas, edited by Michelle Hetherington, 23–30. Canberra: The National Library of Australia. Williams, Glyndwr. 2003. ‘Tupaia: Polynesian Warrior, Navigator, High Priest – and Artist’. In The Global Eighteenth Century, edited by Felicity Nussbaum, 38–51. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP.

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5 Elite and Popular Orientalisms James Watt

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he parameters of the British imaginary of the East were significantly expanded in the final third of the eighteenth century, as the Seven Years War (1756–63) and the East India Company’s establishment of sovereign power in Bengal directly or indirectly helped to circulate new and more culturally specific understandings of difference (Watt 2019, 1–2). As Nigel Leask has shown, ‘coterminous with a more systematic exploration and codification of the colonial, contact zone’, a distinctive ‘Romantic exoticism’ began to develop, constituted by ‘new technologies and genres of aesthetic illusionism’, and providing ‘new and “all-embracing” ways of seeing and telling’ (Leask 1998, 170). Topographical paintings, plays performed against spectacular backdrops, and panoramas depicting actual sites or events offered their viewers novel kinds of absorbing, immersive experience in scenes that were at once ‘particularised’ and exotic. This ‘aesthetic of particularism’ (Leask 1998, 176) also characterised many contemporary literary works too. The epic poems of Robert Southey, notably Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810), demonstrate especially well the overlap between visual and literary techniques of representation, since (according to the Critical Review’s description of Thalaba) they appeared to readers to consist of ‘successive pictures’ in which ‘the personages, like the figures of landscape-painters, are often almost lost in the scene’ (cited in Leask 1998, 184). Other critics likened Southey’s epic poetry to pantomime and panorama as well, often complaining, however, that despite their extensive accompanying footnotes, these poems ‘engrossed’ their audience in ways which were at once disorientating and vulgar (Leask 1998, 184–5). As well as helping to generate innovative and challenging forms such as the Romantic Orientalist epic (Southey’s Kehama was made possible by the British encounter with Hinduism from around the 1760s onwards), the late eighteenth-century ‘imperial turn’ initiated a diverse range of cultural productions which more overtly responded to Britain’s new position in the world. The absorptive aesthetic of Romantic exoticism stimulated not only greater metropolitan awareness of empire but also vicarious pleasure in Britons’ exploits overseas: one of the most renowned panoramas of the period was Robert Ker Porter’s ‘The Storming of Seringapatam’, depicting the final defeat of Tipu Sultan of Mysore in 1799. Rather than focus on primary materials that directly engaged with new kinds of Orientalist knowledge or with the expansion of British authority in India or elsewhere, however, this chapter will instead emphasise the continuity across diverse – high and low – cultural forms of a generic and non-referential Orientalism, comprising ‘old’ but readily adaptable stories and tropes of various kinds, for example the tales of the Arabian Nights and the mythology of Oriental despotism. Addressing the interface of literary and visual representation discussed by Leask, I will begin

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by looking at the domain of popular theatre, where in the case of Matthew Lewis’s melodrama Timour the Tartar (1811), for example, supplementary kinds of spectacle compromised the play’s critical reputation but nonetheless garnered for it both publicity and commercial success. I will go on to note that more prestigious works by William Beckford and Lord Byron remained loosely affiliated with the world of popular drama, even as their authors sought to distance themselves from the crowd, and I will then consider the most famous example of elite Orientalist performance in the Romantic period, the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. The ‘Regency Orientalism’ of the Prince of Wales was often caricatured as frivolous and grotesque, but it was sympathetically repackaged by Thomas Moore (though he was a critic of the Regent’s politics) in his ‘Oriental romance’ Lalla Rookh (1817), which was read by some at least as a successful pastiche of an ‘authentic’ magnificence that recuperated the social exclusivity of elite Orientalism. As I will finally discuss, writers of the so-called Cockney school such as Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb in turn responded to Regency Orientalism, playfully disrupting the elite/ popular binary that is the organising focus of this chapter. Rather than conflate aristocratic display and vulgar show in the manner of the graphic satirist George Cruikshank, they self-consciously domesticated the exoticism of Regency Orientalism and – as in Lamb’s ekphrastic essay ‘Old China’ (1823) – explored the pleasures of an absorptive experience that was seemingly removed from social reality altogether. With the idea of spectatorial pleasure in mind, I will conclude by briefly considering the much-debated question of the nature of Britons’ lived relation to empire in this period (Porter 2004, Hall and Rose 2006).

Theatrical Spectacle Daniel O’Quinn has influentially discussed the way in which late eighteenth-century plays can be seen to ‘stage governance’ by directing audience response to the ‘recalibration’ of the relationship between metropole and empire during and after the American War, as the East India Company extended its authority in the Asian subcontinent (O’Quinn 2005, 1). Even as popular theatre was probably the most important medium of engagement with contemporary politics in this period, however, numerous plays still present versions of the East that seldom appear to refer beyond themselves. Charles Dibdin’s The Magic of Orosmanes; Or, Harlequin Slave and Sultan (1785), for example, subordinates political engagement to theatrical spectacle. Its opening scene features a chorus of slaves defiantly proclaiming that their spirits have not been broken, but while it thus alludes to the emergent campaign to abolish the slave trade it also conceives of slavery as ‘a magically induced, transformable state rather than a deliberate, irrevocable, commercial transaction’ (Nussbaum 2018, 39). Harlequin and the Clown who accompanies him are among the slave group in this scene, and they are ‘purchase[d] as mutes for the seraglio’ (Dibdin 1785, 3) of Sultan Osmyn, but as his father Orosmanes explains to him, Harlequin is in fact a prince who had previously been ‘shrunk . . . to an ape’ (Dibdin 1785, 5) by the sorcerer Octar, his rival for the hand of the Sultan’s daughter. Dibdin’s play depicts a contest between rival forms of magic, and as it shows Harlequin’s eventual subduing of Octar’s power it draws attention to the virtuosity with which it orchestrates its action. After the initial slave-market episode, the play moves between different spaces, familiar and exotic, including a Covent Garden streetscene and the Haymarket theatre as well as formulaically ‘Oriental’ milieus such as a

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seraglio, caravanserai and desert. This scenography was the work of the famous artist and designer Jacques de Loutherbourg (creator of the ‘pre-cinematic’ Eidophusikon in Leicester Square), and Dibdin’s play celebrates its own visual appeal when, as stage directions tell us, after an episode in Covent Garden which leaves Octar and his party ‘disfigured by having been hustled among the mob’, ‘Bill-stickers come on, and the Clown reads in one of the bills – “the Gigantic Magician”’ (Dibdin 1785, 12). In the next scene the whole cast of characters enters the magician’s apartment to watch his tricks, and by knowingly incorporating advertised spectacle in this way Dibdin here situates his own play squarely within the realm of commercialised entertainment. A later play such as George Colman the younger’s Blue-Beard, or Female Curiosity! (1798) is similarly reflexive in its appeal to an audience appetite for spectacle. It relocates Charles Perrault’s late seventeenth-century tale of an aristocrat who serially murders his wives to a Turkish setting, making the aristocratic Blue-Beard a ‘Bashaw’ somewhat reminiscent of the Sultan Schahriar in the frame tale of the Arabian Nights. This transposition allows Colman to draw upon the long-standing association of Ottoman Turkey (and the Islamic East more generally) with the oppression of women, and the play’s basic plot is politically resonant, not least since it culminates in the lowly soldier Selim leading an assault on Abomelique’s castle and overrunning it just as the latter is about to behead his latest wife, Fatima, after she has discovered the secrets of its forbidden apartment. As Elizabeth Kuti argues, however, Colman’s play is also ‘characterised by irony, metatheatrical awareness, and a self-conscious pleasure in fantasy and illusion’ (Kuti 2013, 324). It depicts the Bashaw as a stage manager as well as a tyrant, most memorably perhaps when he addresses as ‘A prisoner to my Art’ the skeleton in his castle’s ‘Blue Chamber’ – the centrepiece of an animated display above which ‘in characters of Blood, is written “THE PUNISHMENT OF CURIOSITY”’ (Cox and Gamer 2003, 85). At the same time, it presents curiosity as an innate instinct, shared by characters in the drama and spectators alike. Even as Abomelique may potentially be read as an exemplar of old-regime corruption, Blue-Beard nonetheless complicates any distinction between the despotic authority of the Bashaw and the rebellious energy of the lower orders, because it incorporates so many odd and diverting elements which do not in any straightforward way serve this story. The ‘surplus’ content of the play is evident, for example, in its portrayal of the relationship between Fatima and her irrepressibly inquisitive sister Irene: not only does Irene contradict Fatima’s claim to ‘have no joy . . . in observing the idle glitter, and luxury of wealth’ (Cox and Gamer 2003, 89), but she also remarks on the handsomeness of the Bashaw, declaring that ‘bating his Beard, [he] isn’t so very ugly neither’ (2003, 86). Another index of this surplus is the fact that Fatima’s father Ibrahim has as much of a presence in the play as the title-character himself. Having for personal advantage offered his daughter’s hand to Abomelique rather than Selim (with whom she is in love), Ibrahim repeatedly demonstrates his childlike pride in the privileged status which his new position affords him, describing himself to one of the Bashaw’s slaves as ‘the Father of the Lady who is to be Wife of the Man, who is the Master of you’ (Cox and Gamer 2003, 87). The (albeit unsophisticated) verbal play which is Ibrahim’s signature helps to render farcical the events of the drama. In response to a cry of ‘to Arms!’, when it is apparent that the castle is about to be taken, for example, he exclaims ‘To Arms! O, dear! – I had much rather to legs, if I knew which way to escape’ (Cox and Gamer 2003, 95).

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When Blue-Beard was revived at Covent Garden in February 1811, it was censured by Leigh Hunt as ‘one of those wretched compounds of pun and parade’ (cited in Cox and Gamer 2003, 338) that confirmed the corruption of popular taste and the demise of ‘legitimate’ theatre. It was succeeded as a Covent Garden after-piece by Matthew Lewis’s Timour the Tartar, which was performed forty-four times (Cox and Gamer 2003, 98), and, like the revived Blue-Beard (and similarly to the displeasure of many reviewers), incorporated live horses into its action. As is the case with Blue-Beard, the potential for topical allegory is embedded in Lewis’s play, since its protagonist had previously featured in overtly politicised dramas (such as Nicholas Rowe’s Tamerlane [1701]), and was moreover readily assimilable to Napoleon: at one point he declares his ambition to ‘raise the towering Column of my greatness!’ (Cox and Gamer 2003, 103). Like Blue-Beard too, however, Timour the Tartar incorporates a comic commentary on the despotic authority of its title-character, with the ostensibly ‘secondary’ character Oglou, Timour’s father, delivering (in a comparable manner to Colman’s Ibrahim) some of the play’s most amusing lines. ‘[M]y Son – isn’t like other people’s Sons’, he states: ‘His very speaking to me gives me a fit of the ague; and I never leave his presence without shaking my head to be certain, that it still sits tight between my shoulders’ (Cox and Gamer 2003, 100). The threat of forms of violence coded as ‘Oriental’ – strangulation and throat-cutting as well as beheading – is played for laughs throughout, and the way in which Lewis’s drama makes available for comic treatment a historical figure associated with a once powerful imperial dynasty would no doubt have had a significant ideological effect. The most directly striking thing about Timour the Tartar for contemporaries nonetheless seems to have been its visceral force as a melodrama. Performances of the play supplemented its dialogue not only with equestrian spectacle, but also with music, costume and visually splendid set-designs, the latter reproduced in Skelt’s ‘toy theatre’ sheets. As Skelt’s image of Timour’s castle shows (see fig. 5.1), the non-specific Orientalism of the play’s scenography – as vividly apparently in the bulbous domes depicted – differentiates it from Romantic-period productions with Indian settings, such as James Cobb’s Ramah Droog (1798), which often based their sets on landscape paintings done ‘on the spot’ by artists such as William Hodges and William and Thomas Daniell. For many commentators, the combined multi-media impact of Lewis’s play seemed to presage a new era in which dramatists pandered to undiscriminating audiences and conventional theatrical criticism struggled to make itself heard (Gamer 2006). By mid-July 1811, Michael Gamer writes, ‘every major and minor London theatre of consequence advertised among its nightly entertainments a hippodrama modelled on Blue-Beard or Timour, as rivals scrambled to bring forward their own equestrian offerings’ (Gamer 2006, 319).

Orientalist Self-Fashioning Lewis’s immediate goal with Timour the Tartar was to produce a lucrative spectacular to rival Blue-Beard. Timour also looks back however to William Beckford’s portrayal of an overreaching Oriental protagonist in his novella Vathek (1786). Itself an Oriental-Gothic hybrid, like these plays, Vathek is a text that is obliquely connected to the world of popular theatre, most obviously via the figure of de Loutherbourg, the chief scenographer at Drury Lane whom Beckford hired to produce the lavish Oriental

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Figure 5.1  From Skelt’s Scenes in Timour the Tartar. Courtesy of the Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford. extravaganza at his Fonthill Christmas party in 1781 which (he later claimed) provided the inspiration for his remarkable work: Iain McCalman describes this spectacle as ‘a novel experiment in “virtual reality” two centuries before the computer-digitised technologies of Silicon Valley reified that term’ (McCalman 2007). Beckford initially presents the five wings which the Caliph adds to his palace, ‘destined for the particular gratification of each of the senses’ (Beckford 2013, 3), almost as if they were theatre-sets designed by de Loutherbourg. Beckford’s ‘editor’ Samuel Henley (who produced an unauthorised version of Vathek in June 1786) sought to elevate the text by appending to it an extensive apparatus of learned notes based upon the latest British and French scholarship, and Beckford’s work helps us to see how in Romanticperiod Orientalism there was both traffic and tension between popular entertainment and more apparently serious forms of cultural production At the same time, it vividly exemplifies the way in which ‘Orientalism’, however conceived, could provide a metaphorical stage on which diverse and idiosyncratic forms of elite self-fashioning might be pursued. Although Vathek is structured as a moral tale that finally punishes the Caliph for his insatiable curiosity, it is a work in which, as Thomas Keymer puts it, ‘style . . . trump[s] mere morality’ (Beckford 2013, xxviii). Srinivas Aravamudan suggestively refers to Vathek’s ‘uninhibited celebration of despotism’ (Aravamudan 1999, 214), and its protagonist at one point declares himself ‘not over-fond of resisting temptation’ (Beckford 2013, 80). Beckford seems to have revelled in the hedonism of the Caliph as a means of exploring an alternative world of sexual possibility (as evident in Vathek’s homoerotic relations with the mysterious Giaour), and of escaping from the constraints of social expectation and ‘Englishness’ (Landry 2008). Lewis

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would later depict Timour as a comically infantilised figure prone to act impulsively: ‘He’d kill me first, and be very sorry for it afterwards’, Oglou states (Cox and Gamer 2003, 100). Vathek is similarly childlike, to the extent that he is at one point ‘put to bed’ (Beckford 2013, 8) by his mother Carathis, but Beckford also aligns his immaturity with a broader sense of freedom from duty and responsibility, as he is tempted by the Giaour to renounce Islam and undertake a quest for the treasures of the Palace of Subterranean Fire. Although Beckford was socially ostracised following his alleged liaison with the young William Courtenay at Powderham Castle in 1784, his literary example endured for admirers such as Byron. Just as Beckford in his correspondence sometimes imagines himself ‘as if [he] were the Grand Turk’ (Beckford 1957, 160), so Byron in his own way considers the social and sexual power-dynamics of Oriental despotism from the vantage point of a male sovereign. Byron’s narrator in Don Juan (1819–24) indulges in the fantasy of ‘playing the sultan’ (Yeazell 2000, 145), initially contrasting himself with his hero by declaring that: ‘I’m fond myself of solitude or so/ But then, I beg it may be understood,/ By solitude I mean, a sultan’s, not/ A hermit’s, with a harem for a grot’ (Byron 1986, 36). His verse drama Sardanapalus (1821), which he wrote as a closet piece, meanwhile presents a protagonist who identifies as his creed ‘Eat, drink, and love; the rest’s not worth a fillip’ (Byron 2006, 646). Byron was aware that Leigh Hunt had likened the Prince Regent to the Assyrian King Sardanapalus in the article that led to his imprisonment for libel in 1812, but rather than endorse the reformist critique of elite extravagance – which itself often took an Orientalist cast (CohenVrignaud 2015) – his play explores the predicament of Sardanapalus, as the hedonistically inclined ruler of a people habituated instead to war and conquest. When Sardanapalus first enters the scene (‘a Hall in the Royal Palace of Nineveh’), just after his brother-in-law Salemenes has described him as a ‘man-queen’ ‘steep’d . . . in deep voluptuousness’, he instructs his attendants: ‘Let the pavilion over the Euphrates/ Be garlanded, and lit, and furnish’d forth/ For an especial banquet’ (Byron 2006, 637–8). Albeit that Byron’s portrayal of Sardanapalus is more sympathetic than most contemporary accounts of the Regent (who had become George IV by the time of the play’s completion), his work thus alludes to one of the most famous and striking performances of elite taste in the Romantic period, the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. The architect John Nash began to transform the Pavilion in 1815 (though plans had been drawn up by others including Humphrey Repton well before this), and its ‘Indian’ exterior was inspired by Sezincote House in Gloucestershire (see fig. 5.2), built for the East India Company official Sir Charles Cockerell on his return from Bengal. The remodelling of Sezincote, from around 1805, was done by the owner’s brother Samuel Pepys Cockerell, who never visited India but was inspired by the aquatints and paintings in William and Thomas Daniells’s Oriental Scenery (1795–1808), especially their depiction of the Jami Masjid mosque in Delhi. The addition of a dome, mini-minarets, and window mouldings to the neoclassical house at Sezincote – also surrounded by ‘Indianized gardens’ (Czennia 2021, 108–19) – constituted ‘by comparison with Nash’s Pavilion’, in the words of John Dinkel, ‘a conscientious tribute to Mughal architecture’ (Dinkel 1983, 41). The Pavilion’s freer display of its loose cultural affinity with Mughal style (see fig. 5.3) may also have been understood by the Regent and others as a version of that ‘imperial heraldry’ (Leask 1998, 177) by which British writers and artists incorporated decorative insignia of Indian otherness into their work, as a statement of

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Figure 5.2  Sezincote House. Photograph, courtesy of Bärbel Czennia. their actual or vicarious association with British India. In contrast to Sezincote’s single dome and four mini-minarets, however, the Pavilion’s features are at once more imposing and heterogeneous, and it is notable that its profusion of generically ‘Oriental’ embellishment somewhat resembles that of Timour’s castle, as represented by Skelt’s ‘toy theatre’ sheets. Nash claimed that his aim was to achieve an effect ‘not pedantic but picturesque’ (Batey 1995, 68), and Thomas Daniell commented critically on the Pavilion’s attempt to channel a spirit of Eastern magnificence when he stated that ‘if the architect aimed at an imitation of Oriental architecture, it is to be lamented that he trusted so implicitly to conjecture’ (Dinkel 1983, 67). For Daniell, in other words, the Royal Pavilion lacked that legitimising connection to a specific analogue which the Mughal-inspired Sezincote possessed.

Regency Orientalism and its Critics The art historian Greg M. Thomas has interpreted the Pavilion in more generous terms than this, referring to its combination of an ‘Indian’ exterior and ‘Chinese’ interior as ‘a spectacle of intelligent, creative internationalism’ made possible by the global circulation of elite aristocratic cultures (Thomas 2015, 233). For many contemporary satirists, however, the Pavilion was less an expression of such intercultural exchange than of a fantasy of absolute power and unrestrained self-gratification. George Cruikshank’s coloured etching ‘The Court of Brighton a la Chinese!!’ (1816), for example (see fig. 5.4), depicts the Regent handing instructions to Lord Amherst prior to the latter’s departure for China, requesting via the paper which he hands to the ambassador ‘fresh patterns of Chinese deformities to finish the decoration of ye Pavilion’. The othering of the conspicuously Sinicised Regent is echoed by the alignment of the ‘British Adonis’ – the prince in profile – and a racist caricature of Sara Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus. Cruikshank’s image emphasises that the cost of the Regent’s vanities is borne by the populace at large (another paper in the foreground

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Figure 5.3  Augustus Charles Pugin, ‘Royal Pavilion, Brighton: the Steine front as built’, 1824. RIBA Collections.

Figure 5.4  George Cruikshank, ‘The Court of Brighton a la Chinese!!’, 1816. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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contains a ‘Proposal to continue the Property Tax for ever, to pay off Arrears of ye Civil List occasiond by ye Regency Whims’), but rather than simply accentuate the gulf between the prince and ordinary Britons it also ridicules elite magnificence as essentially vulgar in character. The ‘radical Orientalism’ of the 1810s and early 1820s exploited the physical comedy of the Regent’s prodigality and ostentation and in doing so sometimes collapsed the distance between Orientalist self-fashioning and the show of popular theatre. William Hone’s illustrated poem ‘The Joss and his Folly’ (1820), for example (see fig. 5.5), declares that ‘the queerest of all queer sights I’ve set sight on;/ Is, the what d’ye-call-t thing here, the FOLLY at Brighton’, which it presents as if it were the work of a scenographer, ‘A patron of painters who copy designs,/ That grocers and tea dealers hang up for signs’ (Hone 2003, 234–5). Cruikshank’s accompanying woodcut of ‘The JOSS’ (a Chinese figure of a deity or idol) as an obese mandarin perched on a teapot bearing an image of the Pavilion alludes to his earlier depiction of the Regent holding court, and the grotesquerie of both of these images is plain to see, as a deviant aristocratic masculinity is rendered at once laughable and alien. Hone here demonstrates both his genius for parody and his ability to draw upon a diverse visual register, and as Marcus Wood points out, ‘The Regent is attacked not in the direct terms of Painite anti-monarchism but on what he considered his home ground – fashion and aesthetics’ (Wood 1994, 16).

Figure 5.5  George Cruikshank, ‘The Joss and his Folly’, for The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder, 1820. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Caricatures such as Cruikshank’s demonstrate that, as noted above, critiques of the Regent’s excess could display an Orientalist extravagance of their own, however. Some of those who satirised the Regent could be captivated by the apparent aura of splendour that surrounded him, too. The Irish poet Thomas Moore often lampooned the Regent (as in works such as The Fudge Family in Paris [1818]), but he attended the June 1811 Carlton House revels at which the prince celebrated the formal beginning of his Regency, and he subsequently wrote to his mother that ‘Nothing was ever half so magnificent. It was in reality all that they try to imitate in the gorgeous scenery of the theatre’ (Moore 1964, 152). Francis Jeffrey would later refer to Moore’s verse romance Lalla Rookh (1817) as exemplifying ‘the finest orientalism we have had yet’ (Review of Lalla Rookh 1817, 1), and – in line with the distinction which he made in his letter to his mother – Moore can be seen as attempting in this work to pastiche a ‘real’ magnificence anterior (and superior) to derivative popular spectacle. Lalla Rookh’s frame tale situates the poem in the reign of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, whom it associates with ‘a style of magnificent hospitality’ (Moore 1841, 6: 5) that is impressive even by Eastern standards. This tale evokes an atmosphere of Eastern pageantry by describing the impending marriage between the Emperor’s daughter Lalla Rookh, ‘more beautiful than Leila’ or any other of the heroines ‘who embellish the songs of Persia and Indostan’ (Moore 1841, 6: 6), and it culminates in the revelation that the young poet Feramorz, who accompanies Lalla Rookh’s cavalcade, is in fact the betrothed whom she thought she had been travelling to meet. En route to Kashmir, Lalla Rookh and her party rest overnight in a ‘Royal Pavilion’ which, like its namesake at Brighton, generates pleasurable illusion from heterogeneous component parts: it is said to be surrounded by ‘artificial sceneries of bamboo-work . . . representing arches, minarets, and towers from which hung thousands of silken lanterns, painted by the most delicate pencils of Canton’ (Moore 1841, 6: 61). Halfway through the first of the four tales narrated by Feramorz, ‘The Veiled Prophet of Khorasan’, its hero Azim enters the chambers of the impostor-prophet Mokanna’s harem in search of his sweetheart Zelica. He reminds himself here that freedom flourishes in ‘the bracing air/ Of toil, – of temperance’ rather than in the debilitating environment of the harem, but his resolve soon fails: ‘ev’n while he defied/ [the] witching scene’ before him, ‘he felt its witch’ry glide/ Through ev’ry sense’ (Moore 1841, 6: 71–2). Having ‘sunk upon a couch’ and ‘[given] his soul up to sweet thoughts’ (Moore 1841, 6: 73), he is entranced by a group of women seductively performing to musical accompaniment, among them two ‘lightsome maidens’ who ‘Chase one another, in a varying dance/ Of mirth and languor, coyness and advance’ (Moore 1841, 6: 79–80). As it presents Azim as – despite himself – a passive and susceptible consumer of dazzling novelty, Moore’s poem effects a partial ‘re-enchantment’ of the seraglio, which in so many works of the previous fifty years or so had been presented in allegorical terms as above all a site of asymmetrical power-relations (Makdisi 2003, 204–32). Canto V of Byron’s Don Juan alludes to the predicament of Azim in Mokanna’s harem (as well as to visitors’ experience of the Royal Pavilion) when it describes Juan in Gulbeyaz’s palace being led ‘room by room/ Through glittering galleries’, before encountering ‘A dazzling mass of gems, and gold, and glitter,/ Magnificently mingled in a litter’ (Byron 1986, 268, 270). Lalla Rookh came to be regarded as a byword for exotic opulence, and its varied afterlife saw it

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adapted and excerpted in many different contexts, including courtly spectacle. In the preface to his 1841 Poetical Works, for example, Moore states with evident satisfaction that ‘Tableaux Vivans and songs’ (Moore 1841, xxiii) derived from Lalla Rookh had been performed in Berlin in 1822 for the state visit of the Russian Grand Duke Nicholas, brother of and successor to Tsar Alexander I, who had helped to form the Holy Alliance in 1815.

Cockney Orientalism Moore’s Lalla Rookh therefore circulated a widely appealing version of an exotic East that was seemingly free from any moral commentary about the corrupting effects of Asiatic luxury. The reception history of Moore’s poem shows that it additionally generated critical hostility, however, since it was read by some as proffering an irresponsible fantasy of the East that occluded the much less attractive reality, for example where the condition of women was concerned (Majeed 1992, 102–5). The splendid Regency Orientalism that Lalla Rookh exemplified was also subject to parody by the Cockney School of Hunt, Keats and others. Hunt asserted his familiarity with figures such as Byron and deployed throughout his writings a comparably cosmopolitan range of reference, yet at the same time emphasised that the inclusive exoticism of this work was ungrounded in any first-hand knowledge of the wider world. Hunt’s Dante-inspired poem The Story of Rimini (1816), for example, presents the lovers Paolo and Francesca consummating their illicit affair in a temple of pleasure named a ‘pavilion’ (Hunt 2003, 5: 191), which it is tempting to read as an ironic nod to the Royal Pavilion. Reviewers were affronted not only by the sexual content of this episode, but also by the seeming artifice of the work’s poetic ornament more generally, strikingly equated by ‘Z’ (J. G. Lockhart and Christopher North) in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine with a tawdrily imitative style of interior decoration: One feels the same disgust at the idea of opening Rimini, that impresses itself upon the mind of the man of fashion when he is invited to enter . . . the gilded drawingroom of a little mincing boarding-school mistress, who would fain have an At Home in her house. Every thing is pretence, affectation, finery, and gaudiness. (‘On the Cockney School’ 1817, 39) The same review article develops its caricature of Hunt by associating him with lowly artisanal activity and further insinuating that he possessed neither the national sympathy nor the cultural capital that would allow him to appreciate Wordsworth’s poetry or the ‘marbles’ brought to Britain from Greece by the Earl of Elgin and then exhibited at the British Museum: ‘for the person who writes Rimini, to admire the Excursion, is just as impossible as it would be for a Chinese polisher of cherry-stones, or a gilder of tea-cups, to burst into tears at the sight of the Theseus or the Torso’ (‘On the Cockney School’1817, 39–40). Francis Jeffrey’s review of Lalla Rookh distinguishes between the ‘extravagance of excessive wealth’ that characterises Moore’s poem and the ‘vulgar ostentation’ of Cockneyism (Review of Lalla Rookh 1817, 33), and ‘Z’ here still more emphatically seeks to stigmatise Hunt’s boundary-crossing aesthetic, albeit that the repetitive insistence of such denunciation also provides a measure of Hunt’s success as a literary provocateur.

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Charles Lamb largely escaped the critical treatment to which his friend Hunt was subjected, but his writing nonetheless probes the distinction between high and low culture in similar ways, not least where the practice and representation of seeing is concerned. As if responding to Z’s juxtaposition of teacup and Torso, Lamb’s essay ‘Old China’, for example, explores how industrially produced porcelain might provide the creative stimulus for individual flights of the imagination, and perhaps even more overtly than the other works discussed in this chapter it therefore addresses ‘the status of the visual’ (Thomas 2008, ix) itself. Lamb’s narrator Elia declares at the outset that ‘When I go to see any great house, I inquire for the china-closet’ (Lamb 1987, 281), and even as he thus associates the Chinese taste with a leisured elite, he asserts his desire and capacity to partake of it, sharing in the pleasures of the ‘great’ as a Cockney connoisseur. At the same time, he celebrates the avowedly small scale of his own visual delights, puncturing the aura of Kubla Khan’s pleasure-dome, that ‘miracle of rare device’ (Coleridge 1997, 251), by identifying the ‘speciosa miracula’ that appear ‘upon a set of extraordinary blue china’ (Lamb 1987, 282). In this conspicuously benign – and, for Lamb/ Elia, atypically insouciant – vision, ‘china jars and saucers’ provide access to a realm in which ‘little, lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques . . . under the notion of men and women, float about, uncircumscribed by any element’. Lamb’s essay arguably responds to Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English OpiumEater (1821) as well as Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ (1816, composed in 1797), therefore, because it thus presents a ‘world before perspective’ (Lamb 1987, 281) in which the relations of time and space that disorientate De Quincey during his opium nightmares are simply suspended, to amusing effect. In the ‘Pains of Opium’ section of his autobiography the paranoid De Quincey evokes a domain of overpowering Asiatic antiquity and situates himself within it as the object of others’ attention: ‘I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at’ (De Quincey 1998, 73). Where De Quincey concludes by referring to ‘the legions that encamped’ in his dreams (‘drawing off, but not all departed’ (De Quincey 1998, 80)), Elia’s final sentence by contrast emphasises his enjoyment of detached spectatorship, as he entreats his sister Bridget: ‘now do just look at that merry little Chinese waiter holding an umbrella’ (Lamb 1987, 286). Responding to Bridget’s nostalgic memory of playgoing when they were younger and poorer, Elia here reflects on how, in the words of Gillian Russell, ‘the commodity culture of domestic affect . . . has become modernity’s new theatre, consigning the old sociality to the realm of women and “dreams”’ (Russell 2007, 210). It is interesting to consider the domestic focus of this essay in the light of its publication context, since it appeared (shortly after De Quincey’s Confessions) in the London Magazine, the prospectus of which announces a desire to ‘convey the very “image, form, and pressure” of that “mighty heart” whose vast pulsations circulate life, strength and spirit, throughout this great Empire’ (‘Prospectus’, London Magazine 1820, iv). While Lamb served the East India Company as an accountant at its Leadenhall Street headquarters, he did not in any such affirmative way imagine the burgeoning ‘world city’ of London as the centre of an imperial system, and he generally tried to conceive of domestic space as free from the rigours of work and social responsibility. Even as Lamb reflected on the nature of his position as an ‘imperial man’ in a manner which is highly idiosyncratic, then, his case helps us to think about the potential unevenness of the relationship between, on the one hand, British political and material interests and, on the other, Britons’ cultural horizons.

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I began this chapter by referring to the way in which new kinds of more specific awareness of the East began to circulate in metropolitan circles as a result of the Seven Years War and the East India Company’s acquisition of sovereignty in Bengal. The idea that a ‘mutually constitutive’ relationship between Britain and its empire increasingly developed thereafter is now readily accepted, and an imperial culture of sorts is evident across both elite displays of ‘imperial heraldry’ (at Sezincote House if not the Royal Pavilion) and popular entertainments celebrating distant military victories, such as Porter’s panorama depicting the final defeat of Tipu Sultan. I have also tried to show here, however, that even as Britain established itself as the world’s leading power and extended its authority in India and elsewhere, non-referential kinds of Orientalism seemingly ignoring this activity continued to flourish, perhaps especially in buoyant popular cultural forms such as pantomime and melodrama. Needless to say, this popular Orientalism was not apolitical or ideologically neutral, because as noted above the comic depiction of hapless despots no doubt reflected and helped to shape a sense of diminished ‘Eastern’ power which in turn threw into relief Britain’s increasingly dominant role on the world stage. Nonetheless, for both those who celebrated and those who censured plays like Blue-Beard and Timour the Tartar, any potential resonance of this kind seems to have been secondary to the literal and metaphorical noise that such productions generated. The endurance of a non-referential popular Orientalism is particularly evident in early nineteenth-century plays with broadly ‘Chinese’ content. Peter Kitson presents the – by most reckonings – unsuccessful 1792–4 Macartney embassy to the Chinese imperial court as a ‘watershed in British understandings of China’ which introduced ‘overdetermined scenes of kowtowing and gift exchange’ (Kitson 2013, 152) into the national imaginary. In a chapter concerning ‘China on the Stage’, however, Kitson also discusses plays such as Andrew Cherry’s comic opera The Travellers; or Music’s Fascination (first performed in 1806 at Drury Lane, where it ran for at least twentythree nights), which incorporates China into an expansive musical entertainment (Kitson 2013, 210–40). The Travellers is topically suggestive, since it is structured around scenes of actual or abeyant hospitality (the Chinese Prince Zaphimiri goes on an educational tour which takes him to Turkey, Italy, and then England, all of which are figured by splendid stage sets), but rather than appeal to any idea of Chinese despotism it establishes an affinity between China and Britain, where both are presented as models of good government. Furthermore, while it does rehearse popular stereotypes about China, through the uneducated Irishman O’Gallagher’s references to foot-binding and physiognomy, it draws upon eighteenth-century sources which predated the politically pivotal episode of Macartney’s embassy: Zaphimiri is the name of the title-character of Arthur Murphy’s enormously popular tragedy The Orphan of China (1759), while his ‘philosophical’ travel project harks back to that of Oliver Goldsmith’s Chinese itinerant Lien Chi Altangi in The Citizen of the World (1762). As a caveat to this point about the endurance of a residual exoticism in metropolitan representations of China it is important to note that works with Chinese content may have been non-referential in part because the nature of Britain’s engagement with China was significantly different from, and more indirect than, its connection to, say, India; Lamb’s Elia essays (‘A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig’ as well as ‘Old China’), for example, obliquely acknowledge the position of China within the

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trading networks of the East India Company but at the same time present a merely notional ‘China’ as affording the basis for playful reverie and reflection. By way of conclusion, however, I would like to suggest that – notwithstanding all of the excellent scholarship on Georgian theatre in recent decades (as collected in Swindells and Taylor, 2014) – there is still scope for more research to be done in the substantial archive of popular Orientalism. A greater emphasis on the production and reception of popular forms may afford more discriminating perspectives on the ‘mutually constitutive’ relationship between Britain and its empire, fostering attention to the ways in which Britons’ sense of national consciousness may have been modified by social distinction (Price 2006): where Macartney’s embassy is concerned, for example, it is notable that the irreverent mock-heroic satires of Peter Pindar have little to say about Chinese intransigence but revel in the humiliation of the gentlemanly elite that the Qianlong Emperor rebuffed (Williams 2013). While the various examples of popular Orientalism that I have discussed in this chapter clearly cannot be regarded as in any sense ‘open’ to the East, because they are so often chauvinistic as well as inaccurate, neither can they straightforwardly be aligned with a will-to-empire. Works of this kind merit further consideration precisely because they elude the terms of such a schematic opposition, and because thinking about their ostensible removal from contemporary realities can help us to develop and nuance our understanding of how Britons may have come to feel ‘at home’ (or otherwise) with empire across the period covered by this volume.

Bibliography Aravamudan, Srinivas. 1999. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804. Durham, NC: Duke UP. Batey, Mavis. 1995. Regency Gardens. Princes Risborough: Shire Publications. Beckford, William. 1957. Life at Fonthill, 1807–1822: With Interludes in Paris and London, from the Correspondence of William Beckford. Edited by Boyd Alexander. London: R. Hart-Davis. ———. 2013. Vathek. Edited by Thomas Keymer: Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Byron, Lord. 1986. The Complete Poetical Works, Vol. 5: Don Juan. Edited by Jerome J. McGann. Oxford: Oxford UP. ———. 2006. Selected Poems. Edited by Susan J. Wolfson and Peter J. Manning. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Cohen-Vrignaud, Gerard. 2015. Radical Orientalism: Rights, Reform, and Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1997. The Complete Poems. Edited by William Keach. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Cox, Jeffrey N. and Michael Gamer, eds. 2003. The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Czennia, Bärbel. 2021. ‘Green Rubies from the Ganges: Eighteenth-Century Gardening as Intercultural Networking’. In Oriental Networks: Culture, Commerce, and Communication in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Bärbel Czennia and Greg Clingham, 92–131. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP. De Quincey, Thomas. [1821] 1998. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Edited by Grevel Lindop. Oxford: Oxford UP. Dibdin, Charles. 1785. The Magic of Orosmanes; or, Harlequin Slave and Sultan: A Pantomime, Drawn from the Arabian Legends. London.

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Dinkel, John. 1983. The Royal Pavilion Brighton. London: Summerfield Press. Gamer, Michael. 2006. ‘A Matter of Turf: Romanticism, Hippodrama, and Legitimate Satire’. Nineteenth-Century Contexts 28 (4): 305–34. Hall, Catherine and Sonya O. Rose, eds. 2006. At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Hone, William. 2003. Regency Radical: Selected Writings of William Hone. Edited by David A. Kent and D. R. Ewers. Detroit: Wayne State UP. Hunt. Leigh. 2003. Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt. Edited by Michael Eberle-Sinatra and Robert Morrison. London: Pickering & Chatto. Kitson, Peter J. 2013. Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange 1760–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Kuti, Elizabeth. 2013. ‘Scheherazade, Bluebeard, and Theatrical Curiosity’. In Scheherazade’s Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights, edited by Philip F. Kennedy and Marina Warner, 322–46. New York: New York UP. Lamb, Charles. 1987. Elia & The Last Essays of Elia. Edited by Jonathan Bate. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Landry, Donna. 2008. ‘William Beckford’s Vathek and the Use of Oriental Re-enactment’. In The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West, edited by Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum, 167–94. Oxford: Oxford UP. Leask, Nigel. 1998. ‘“Wandering through Eblis”: absorption and containment in Romantic exoticism’. In Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire 1780–1830, edited by Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, 164–88. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. The London Magazine 1 (January 1820). McCalman, Iain. 2007. ‘The Virtual Infernal: Philippe de Loutherbourg, William Beckford and the Spectacle of the Sublime’. Romanticism on the Net 46 (May). Majeed, Javed. 1992. Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s History of British India and Orientalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Makdisi, Saree. 2003. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Moore, Thomas. 1841. Poetical Works. 10 vols. London: Longman et al. ———. 1964. Letters of Thomas Moore, vol. 1, 1793–1818, edited by Wilfred S. Dowden. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Nussbaum, Felicity. 2018. ‘“Mungo Here. Mungo There”: Charles Dibdin and Racial Performance’. In Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture, edited by Oskar Cox Jensen, David Kennerley and Ian Newman, 23–42. Oxford: Oxford UP. ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry. No. 1’. 1817. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 2 (October): 38–41. O’Quinn, Daniel. 2005. Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Porter, Bernard. 2004. The Absent-Minded Imperialists: What the British Really Thought about Empire. Oxford: Oxford UP. Price, Richard. 2006. ‘One Big Thing: Britain, Its Empire, and Their Imperial Culture’. Journal of British Studies 45 (July): 602–27. Review of Lalla Rookh. 1817. Edinburgh Review 57 (November): 1–35. Russell, Gillian. 2007. Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Swindells, Julia and David Francis Taylor. 2014. The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre 1737–1832. Oxford: Oxford UP. Thomas, Greg M. 2015. ‘Chinoiserie and Intercultural Dialogue at Brighton Pavilion’. In Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West, edited by Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu and Ning Ding, 232–47. Los Angeles: Getty Publications.

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Thomas, Sophie. 2008. Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle. New York: Routledge. Watt, James. 2019. British Orientalisms 1759–1835. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Williams, Laurence. 2013. ‘British Government under the Qianlong Emperor’s Gaze: Satire, Imperialism, and the Macartney Embassy to China, 1792–1804’. Lumen: Selected Proceedings from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 32: 85–107. Wood, Marcus. 1994. Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790–1822. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. 2000. Harems of the Mind. New Haven, CT: Yale UP.

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Part II Exhibition, Commerce and Culture

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6 Collecting and the Country House, 1750–1840 Joan Coutu

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lassical busts and statues are ubiquitous in British country houses. They meet the visitor at the door, embellish formal staterooms, dining rooms and libraries, line or fill vistas in the gardens, and are gathered in dedicated galleries. Their presence as tangible manifestations of ancient Greece and Rome adds to the sense of permanence evoked by the houses, and the aristocracy and gentry who reside in them. The sculptures contribute to the perception that both the houses and the families have been and will always be there. However, this initial gloss of continuity breaks down when we consider when and which sculptures were acquired and by whom. The majority were purchased during the long eighteenth century (c. 1680–1840), when hundreds of country houses were built or significantly remodelled. This was a period when the ageold aristocracy and landed gentry (collectively the ‘patriciate’) would come to share the economic, political and social arena with men of ‘new’ money: merchants, bankers, West Indian sugar planters, East Indian ‘nabobs’ and naval and military officers who had made their fortunes in the colonial-imperial economy. With these seismic changes came unprecedented attention to people’s status and how they carried themselves in ‘polite’ society. The upper aristocracy evoked an aura of habitus ­– a term coined by Pierre Bourdieu – in which their status was elicited by thoughts and actions habituated ‘through the lasting experience of [their] social position’ (Bourdieu 1989, 19; Bourdieu 1984). Despite being, by definition, unattainable, others aspired to this habitus through imitation. However, the desire to imitate was more than the superficial mimicry gleefully mocked by social commentators such as Horace Walpole and Thomas Rowlandson. The upper aristocracy represented stability, continuity and a familiar social hierarchy, and those members of the lower levels of the patriciate who aspired to greater rank and sought to distinguish themselves from men of new money strove to carve out, through potent and nuanced imitation, a distinctive socially acceptable space for themselves. This constructive emulation was engrained – not unlike habitus – through the patriciate’s deep classical education and exposure to the philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of which the Earl of Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times (1711) was especially formative. Imitation was thus a model for learning and a blueprint for civilised society as a whole, and country houses were tangible demonstrations of that civility. By focusing on sculpture within these houses that so obviously evoked the classical past, this chapter considers how the patriciate navigated, whether consciously or not, the dynamic social terrain in which they found themselves, and how their choices helped shape modern collecting and collections per se.1

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Throughout the eighteenth century, visual aesthetics increasingly informed the acquisition of sculpture. Philological preference early in the century gave way to an emphasis on beauty, expressed through identity as well as pose, anatomical delineation, drapery and degree of finish. In concrete terms, this is evident in the move away from busts and statues of emperors, statesmen and deities that told reflexive tales of heroic leadership and rural idylls at, for example, Wilton, Chatsworth, Houghton Hall and Holkham Hall, to plaster casts and marble copies of iconic beautiful statues such as the Apollo Belvedere and the Venus de’ Medici installed in other houses at mid-century. This shift corresponded with a change in the perception of temporality itself with the emergence of an incipient ‘historic-mindedness’ that acknowledged and embraced the temporal distance between past and present (Lang and Bann, 2013; Bann 1990; Bann 1984; Salber Phillips 2013; Campbell 1982; Coutu 2015). The growing emphasis on aesthetic criteria was further spurred by archeological excavation in Italy beginning in the 1760s, the era of ‘marblemania’, when sculptures were assessed by dealers, buyers and viewers for their comparative value vis-à-vis the recently reified aesthetic canon. Of these, Charles Townley’s collection, strategically installed in his London town house, is the most famous. It, in turn, prompted and shaped collections amassed by other minor patricians for their country houses. By the beginning of the early nineteenth century, the most prominent collectors were once again members of the upper aristocracy but their collections were defined as much by their antiquities as by their contemporary neoclassical sculptures, commissioned from Antonio Canova, Bertel Thorvaldsen, John Flaxman, Francis Chantrey and others. By this point, historic-mindedness had become innate and while recourse to classical antiquity remained essential to the here and now, antique archetypes were now things to be surpassed. Wentworth Woodhouse in West Yorkshire, with its magnificent Marble Hall filled with copies of the Venus de’ Medici, the Antinous, the Idolino, the Dancing Faun and similarly beautiful statues is a good place to start since it sits at the turn towards the aesthetic (fig. 6.1). The house and its contents would also become politically actuated as the embodiment of the landed aristocrat in the 1760s, as its owner, the 2nd Marquis of Rockingham, and his political cronies strove to safeguard their hold on leadership in the face of challenges from other political factions and the king (Langford 1973; Brewer 1976). But before that, the young marquis was part of the great wave of Grand Tourists that descended upon Italy circa 1750 where he continued the aristocratic education laid out for him by his father and mentor. This included engaging in stimulating connoisseurial comparative study of antique statues and medals in the Uffizi and elsewhere, and in Rome he fell in with James Caulfeild (later Viscount Charlemont), who had recently returned from his archeological tour of the Levant. Caught up in the heady fervour, Rockingham funded James Stuart’s publication of the excavation of the obelisk of Caesar Augustus in the Campus Martius, and then Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s journey to Greece and Asia Minor (Coutu 2015, 49–92; Coutu 2016; McCarthy 2001; Salmon 2006, 113–17; Bristol 2006, 150–1). The canon of ideal beauty that emerged at mid-century and that Rockingham would help to perpetuate focused on the graceful mien. The Apollo Belvedere and the Venus de’ Medici were the epitome, supreme deities with exquisite, elegant forms. These were followed by the Antinous, Idolino, Dancing Faun, Callipygian Venus, the Ganymede and similar statues in which identity and form together evoked beauty. By contrast, the Farnese Hercules was criticised for its overstated musculature and even

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Figure 6.1  1st and 2nd Marquis of Rockingham, Henry Flitcroft, Marble Hall, Wentworth Woodhouse, from 1734. Photo © Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust. the Laocoön was scrutinised since, despite its perfect physical form, some observers deemed the father lacked paternal integrity because he was too caught up in his own struggle (Coutu 2016, 20–1).2 In a nutshell, excess was excoriated, whether in form or character. In addition to the copies and casts acquired by Rockingham, Charlemont and other Grand Tourists, the canon was entrenched by casts and copies installed in the French Academy in Rome as well as in a wing of the 3rd Duke of Richmond’s house in London that was intended to be an academy for young British artists. It also transmuted into contemporary painting, sculpture and architecture; in Britain this included Joshua Reynolds’s Grand Manner martial portraits in the pose of the Apollo Belvedere, Richard Wilson’s serene classical landscapes, Joseph Wilton’s dynamic all’antica busts, and the seamless classicising architecture of William Chambers and Robert Adam. Ultimately, Reynolds enshrined the canon in his authoritative Discourses (Fordham 2010, 65–71; Myrone 2005, 1–94; Solkin 1982, 37–55; Kelly 2014; Kenworthy-Browne 2009; Coutu 2015, 93–126). At Wentworth Woodhouse, the copies in the Marble Hall contributed, along with other parts of the house, to delineating the erudite habitus of the 2nd Marquis. The statues stand in niches along the walls between engaged columns and pilasters and below classical reliefs by James Stuart. Because they are iconic, the statues are remarkable in their own right but together with the other components of the room, including the ceiling design that is mirrored in the floor, they create a cohesive perfect whole; everything has a place and nothing seems out of place. The cohesion extends to the Palladian east facade begun by Rockingham’s father in the 1730s. Central to Palladian theory is the

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Aristotelian concept of imitation, translated into architecture via Vitruvius, Bramante and Palladio, in which each element, such as a column, a pediment or a window, is distinctive yet also contributes, through repetition – a form of imitation – to a unified whole (Onians 1988, 33–40, 225–46, 263–309). It is a clean purity that coalesces with the elegant, beautiful statues. At Wentworth Woodhouse, the oscillation is magnified by the massive width of the facade (600 feet), as the pedimented ends and centre block reverberate with the whole when seen from a distance, and then, closer, each element of each section also oscillates with the whole of that section. Plato’s dualism of materialimmaterial, another cornerstone of eighteenth-century thought, likewise resonates in the dynamic play of the physical and spatial components (Onians 1988, 33–40, 225– 46, 263–309). The overall impact is profoundly sensual, one of astonishment which continues within the house as the visitor ascends from the dark low-ceilinged Pillar’d Hall on the ground floor to the light-filled Marble Hall above. The elevated views from the hall of the vast estate intensify the effect. Imagined standing in the hall where he would greet his guests, Rockingham would be fixed at the heart of his noble estate with a backdrop of iconic beauty that accentuated and affirmed his aristocratic habitus. From there, he would take his guests into sequentially smaller spaces with increasingly more intimate objects – family portraits, small bronzes, musical instruments, telescopes, books, geological specimens, gems, medals and coins – that fully round out his erudition and sophisticated demeanour. Rockingham was unlikely to be consciously invoking Aristotle and Plato, although theirs and other philosophies innately informed his decisions. The correlation was more forthright in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757 with a second edition in 1759 containing an introduction on taste. Remarkably, Burke’s consideration of the conceivable limits of perception in magnitude of building, magnificence, vastness, infinity, succession and uniformity, and relationship between beauty and proportion, fitness and perfection correspond with the overall architectural experience of Wentworth Woodhouse (Burke 1759). A sense of stability, dignity and certain sensual masculinity also ring through both. Likewise, Burke’s assessment of sculpture, in which he focuses on the Venus de’ Medici as the embodiment of fitness and grace, is grounded in an innate acceptance of an aesthetic canon (Burke 1759, ‘Part III, Section VI, Fitness not the Cause of Beauty’ 191–7 & ‘Part III, Section XXII, Grace’, 226–7). Although Rockingham did not know Burke when he first became immersed in his building projects, which was also several years before Burke published his treatise, the link is important as it shows a shared discourse, in a Foucauldian sense. However, the connection between Burke and Rockingham became more concrete in 1765 when Rockingham hired Burke as his private secretary. In Burke’s subsequent political writings that are devoted to articulating the Rockinghamite party creed, the country house would come to serve as a metaphor for the landed aristocracy and its position at the apex of Britain’s social and political hierarchy. Burke portrayed the house as the embodiment of the nation that elicited such soft concepts of belonging, protection, order, continuity, patriotism, tradition and custom (Salber Phillips 2000, 222, passim).3 These, in turn, coalesced with what he called the ‘habitual native dignity’ (Burke 1791, 49) of the landed aristocracy, a forerunner, in essence, of Bourdieu’s habitus. The synergies with Wentworth Woodhouse would have been hard to miss (Coutu 2023). Within the visceral political arena of the 1760s and 1770s,

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such stability, tradition and custom were ultimately activated by all parties in their pursuit of leadership. While the impact of Wentworth Woodhouse cannot be quantifiably measured as country houses were embedded in England’s social structure, at least two groups of sculptures installed in nearby country houses – Kedleston Hall and Newby Hall – constitute explicit responses to Rockingham’s work. Kedleston, in nearby Derbyshire, was built by Nathaniel Curzon, a minor aristocrat who became Baron Scarsdale in 1761. Anxious to ascend the social hierarchy, he was at a deficit because he had not made a Grand Tour and was also a Tory when the Tories were just emerging from the Jacobite-tainted political wilderness. He hired the architects James Paine and Matthew Brettingham the Elder in 1759 but soon replaced them with the more fashionable Robert Adam who had recently returned from Italy proffering cohesive designs – exterior and interior – that simulated, or at least recalled, actual antique sites. Adam incorporated numerous plaster casts of iconic antique statues in Curzon’s own Marble Hall (fig. 6.2).4 However, the effect is strangely different from that at Wentworth Woodhouse. All of the components at Kedleston are taken in with a sweeping gaze (De Bolla 2003, 151–217) in contrast to the reverberating view of parts and the whole at Wentworth Woodhouse. Everything fits so well at Kedleston that the individuality of the parts is lost, creating an all’antica blur that lacks the erudite clarity of Wentworth Woodhouse. This is accentuated by being visually pulled through the hall at Kedleston to the Saloon beyond, whereas at Wentworth Woodhouse the Marble Hall is a destination in itself. In the context of Curzon’s social and political ambitions, such a space might thus ring of the ‘package deal’.5 Years later in 1765

Figure 6.2  Robert Adam, Marble Hall, Kedleston Hall, from 1759. Photo © Country Life / Bridgeman Images.

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Curzon sponsored Henry Fuseli’s translation of J. J. Winckelmann’s Gedanken uber die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks) but his support of even this erudite project resonates with a self-consciousness that runs counter to true habitus. Newby Hall in Yorkshire, meanwhile, was owned by William Weddell, an acolyte of the 2nd Marquis of Rockingham to whom he was related through marriage. He also hired Robert Adam and then William Chambers to complete the addition to his house, begun by John Carr, that would accommodate the enormous number of original antique sculptures he had amassed on a five-month buying spree in Italy in 1762 (Guilding 2014, 151–8; Coltman 2009, 192–9).6 By then, the ‘marblemania’ for antique sculptures invested with the Benjaminian aura of the original had taken hold. Artists-cum-dealers such as Gavin Hamilton and Thomas Jenkins developed wellhoned strategies including detailed sketches, written descriptions, and pronouncements on the identity of new finds to convince potential buyers to lay out considerable sums (Coltman 2009, 49–158). The frenzy was further fuelled by the intense debates about the primacy of Greece or Rome, in publications by Charlemont, Giovanni Piranesi, the Comte de Caylus and Winckelmann. In all of this, the ideal canon, reified just a decade before, acted as a gauge, with newly excavated works across the Italian peninsula measured against it. Of Weddell’s acquisitions, the so-called Barberini Venus, sold to him by Jenkins in 1765, caused a furore as it was considered the best antique Venus ever imported into Britain and compared well with the Venus de’ Medici. The fact that it was heavily restored mattered little since fragmentation would have detracted from the sculpture’s overall beauty.7 Weddell prominently displayed the Barberini Venus at Newby Hall in its own bay, surrounded by many more of his whole (restored) statues and busts (fig. 6.3). In contrast to the integration of sculpture and architecture at Wentworth Woodhouse or Kedleston, the architecture at Newby Hall acts as frames for Weddell’s sculptures, amplifying each piece and causing it to vie with the others for the viewer’s attention. Such forthright display was unprecedented and, while scholars have praised Weddell for being ahead of his time (Drawing from the Past 2004), this overt showcasing was also out-of-step with the in sotto nature of habitus. Such instances of self-conscious appropriation of the erudite material culture of the upper aristocracy increased with the expanding strata of the gentry and minor aristocracy. Henry Blundell, an untitled landowner, was candid in a letter to Charles Townley in 1787, saying buying antique sculpture was ‘ye sport of a day’ (quoted in Coltman 2009, 225). As a Roman Catholic barred from politics and most other formal organisations, the statues and other fine objects Blundell acquired for Ince Blundell in Lancashire helped assert his gentlemanly standing. In the same letter, he was circumspect about his intentions: ‘I do not aim for a collection, or crowding my house with marbles; nor will I ever build a Galleries [sic]’ (quoted in Coltman 2009, 225). This negative perception, which counters our usual understanding of collecting as a positive endeavour, suggests that such ‘crowding’ and ‘Galleries’ might be brazen and ostentatious, consequently undermining the supposed disinterestedness he hoped to achieve. Meanwhile, his correspondent Charles Townley, also a Roman Catholic Lancashireman, deliberately engaged in collecting as an erudite pursuit precisely to overcome his social shortcomings. Rather than aiming to be the quintessential landed gentleman whose full social roundedness he could never achieve, Townley devoted his energies to becoming an aesthetic connoisseur non plus ultra. Despite owning a country house

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Figure 6.3  Robert Adam, Sculpture Gallery, Newby Hall, North Yorkshire, c. 1767. Photo © Country Life / Future Publishing Ltd. (Towneley Hall), he installed his sculptures in his London town house in Park Street which he had purposefully bought for their display. Unlike Weddell or Blundell, Townley did not buy in bulk. Instead, he considered each acquisition, often in protracted negotiations with his Rome-based dealers, Jenkins and Gavin Hamilton. Consistent with buying practices of the time, the identity of the sculpture, wholeness (sometimes ‘restored’), pose, rendering of the anatomy, and the smooth surface constituted his criteria. His collection consisted of statues, relief panels from ancient buildings, and sarcophagi, complemented by busts, of which Homer and Clytie represented the intellectual and sensuous dimensions of his project (Coltman 2009, 49–158; Guilding 2014, 183–9, 221–7, 233–9; Bryant 2017, 6–85). He also owned two torsos of Venus that he and his friends ranked very highly; here

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their fragmentary nature was inconsequential since the sensual allure of Venus’s body is what mattered most (Coltman 2009, 159–90; Barrell 1989; Barrell 1991; Siegel 2000, 40–72). In terms of display, Townley did not integrate his collection into a sympathetically designed setting; in this regard he disparaged Weddell’s work at Newby Hall (Coltman 2009, 198–9). Two watercolours of Townley’s collection, painted by William Chambers (not the architect) in 1794, show the sculptures filling the dining room and entrance hall of his house, to the point that the architecture and the function of each room is almost obliterated (fig. 6.4). The idea of a ‘collection’ is enhanced by the presence of visitors moving from one sculpture to another, caught up in the beautiful and seemingly authentic aura of each piece. Gavin Hamilton, playing upon the double entendre of taste, fawningly compared the distribution of the sculptures to an ‘elegant feast [where] all the nice morsels must not be served up at once’ (quoted in Coltman 2009, 206). The metaphor continues with the positioning of certain sculptures, such as Townley’s prized Discobolus, as the main course around which are gathered less auspicious yet no less beautiful ‘morsels’ to satiate the aesthetic appetite. In terms of temporality, such focus on each piece accentuates its belongingness to the antique past but since the sculptures are in a discrete collection amassed by a collector in the here and now, the past surges forward to articulate Townley’s taste.

Figure 6.4  William Chambers, The Townley Collection in the Dining Room at 7 Park Street, 1794–5. Pen and grey ink and watercolour, with some bodycolour. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Townley heightened his connoisseurial reputation by contributing to the ongoing aesthetic discourse, in which similar countervailing temporal tensions resonate. He was motivated by Winckelmann’s expressive comparative methodology – also innately grounded in Aristotelian imitation – in the Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764). However, Townley was conscious of not undermining his gentlemanly status with the business of writing so he hired Pierre-François Hugues d’Hancarville who had recently published a four-volume catalogue of Sir William Hamilton’s antique vase collection (d’Hancarville 1766–7). Townley tasked d’Hancarville to write a comparative study to ‘make a classification or system illustrating the mythological significance of all the antiquities that I own in order to demonstrate both the means, and the principles of pagan beliefs by which their artists illustrated [the] various aspects’ (quoted in Guilding 2014, 221). However, d’Hancarville produced a much more complex and deeply esoteric treatise that went far beyond Townley’s collection and included the ancient art and literature of Europe, Asia, India and Egypt (d’Hancarville 1785). Central to his theory was a universal creative force – a shuddering être générateur – that had its genesis in a foundational religion ‘of sexuality that celebrated fertility and the creative urge’ (Guilding 2014, 222). As with Winckelmann, intellectual scholarship fused with the intensely sensual and erotic. Richard Payne Knight, a fellow collectorconnoisseur who was forging his own reputation for picturesque sensibilities, helped finance d’Hancarville’s publication in 1785, and the next year he and William Hamilton embraced d’Hancarville’s theory in their Account of the Remains of the Ancient Worship of Priapus, a libertine exegesis loosely veiled as erudite antiquarian study (Carter 2020). Payne Knight and Townley would then collaborate on Specimens of Antient Sculpture, Aegyptian, Etruscan, Greek and Roman: Selected from Different Collections in Great Britain, by the Society of Dilettanti, in which Townley’s collection played a leading role (published after Townley’s death, in 1808 and again in 1835). ‘Specimens’ here are whole statues and busts, and the term speaks to the individuality, iconicity and aura of each piece, as well as the erotic pleasure that had always been a defining characteristic of the Society of Dilettanti. Townley also commissioned numerous paintings of his collection that corresponded to his writing endeavours. The earliest, in line with the clubby randiness of the Society of Dilettanti (Kelly 2009, 35–59) and the mid-century caricatures by Reynolds and Thomas Patch of Grand Tourists aroused by antique sculpture, is Richard Cosway’s Charles Townley with a Group of Connoisseurs (1771–5), showing Townley and his fellow connoisseurs conferring on the front and rear of his Venus torsos. Townley kept the painting in a private room in his house (Coltman 2009, 164–70). In this space, bubbling with potential titillation, the temporal distance between past and present easily slipped away. In contrast, in 1781 Townley commissioned a portrait from Johann Zoffany showing himself and d’Hancarville in deep comparative discussion, backed up by two friends, in the Park Street library (fig. 6.5). The painting serves, as Viccy Coltman has demonstrated, as a visual articulation of d’Hancarville’s theories, with the large egg-like Townley Vase above d’Hancarville’s head standing in as a metaphor for his être générateur (Coltman 2009, 164–70).8 In contrast to Cosway’s erotic giggle, Zoffany’s painting was hung prominently in the house and was also exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1790. The latter corresponds to the contemporaneous practice of exhibiting paintings of country houses (Bonehill 2023), however the country house portraits dwell on the owner’s landedness while

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Figure 6.5  Johann Zoffany, Charles Townley and His Friends in the Towneley Gallery, 33 Park Street, Westminster, 1781–3. Oil on canvas. © Towneley Hall Art Gallery and Museum / Bridgeman Images. Townley’s focused on his sculptures. Finally, Townley commissioned Chambers’s watercolours in 1794 and had Zoffany rework his painting to commemorate his acquisition of his beloved Discobolus. Perhaps Chambers’s watercolours were meant to be bases for prints for Payne Knight and Townley’s anticipated treatise. The impact of Townley’s collection and its dissemination was significant. Henry Blundell, for one, overturned his previous assertion and built a classical temple (1790–2) and a scaled-down ‘Pantheon’ (1802–5) in his garden for what he now called his ‘collection’ (Coltman 2009, 223–5; Guilding 2014, 189–95). He also published a two-volume

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catalogue in 1803, then a lavishly illustrated version in 1809 (Blundell 1803; Blundell 1809). Although comparative in methodology, these catalogues were indexical, lacking the intellectual rigour of Townley’s publications. By then, collecting was indeed ‘ye sport of the day’. The sculptures acquired by the minor aristocrat Richard Worsley, 7th Baronet, and installed in his house, Appuldurcombe, on the Isle of Wight was also a response to Townley’s endeavours, as well as to the fashion for archeological tours and treatises initiated by Charlemont and Stuart and Revett at mid-century. Anxious to recover from a faltering political career and an adultery lawsuit that had backfired, Worsley set out, in the mid-1780s, to re-present himself as a landed gentleman connoisseur (Guilding 2014, 208–20). In 1785–6 he travelled to the Levant and Crimea, accompanied by the draughtsman William Reveley. Along the way he acquired a substantial collection of gems and sculptures, augmented by purchases from Jenkins and Hamilton. He installed his treasures at Appuldurcombe upon his return, and with Reveley’s drawings, envisioned a treatise on the primacy of Greek art. Intended as a corrective response to Winckelmann’s Geschichte, it was also meant to rival Townley. Worsley affirmed the Apollo Belvedere and the Venus de’ Medici as the pinnacle of iconic ‘softness’ of the Greek ideal by inserting bronze painted plaster casts of the Apollo and the Venus, as well as the Borghese Gladiator, amongst his antiquities. Visitors could thus easily measure the originals against the canon. As for temporality, Appuldurcombe was something of a palimpsest where time was elided by a prominently displayed painting of Worsley portrayed as an ancient philosopher seated on one of his antique ‘Philosopher’s Chairs’. Yet temporal distance was also accentuated because he was presented as a connoisseur, with the Apollo, Venus and Gladiator functioning as aesthetic gauges, and the rooms packed with ‘specimens’ on display to be observed. The house was thus more museum than living space, further suggested by the fact that Worsley lived elsewhere on the estate and the house was open to visitors at appointed times. Such scheduled openings had become increasingly common as the trend for domestic tourism expanded. Notably, one of the outcomes of such controlled entry, often overseen by a servant rather than the owner, was an affirmation of the social differentiation between owner and visitor. In the end, although Worsley’s collection contained some of the finest Greek sculptures in Britain, his aspirations came to naught; his Museum Worsleyanum, finally published in 1794 and 1803, was eclipsed by the much-anticipated second volume of Stuart and Revett’s The Antiquities of Athens in 1790, and the subsequent Catalogue Raisonné of the Principal Paintings, Sculptures, Drawings, etc. at Appuldurcombe House, published in 1804, likewise left little mark. His solipsistic intentions, tainted by his damaged reputation, ultimately clashed with the disinterestedness that was inherent in a true gentleman. Worsley and Blundell were amongst the last country house owners to focus exclusively on antique sculpture. The three great private collections of the early nineteenth century – Woburn Abbey, Chatsworth House and Petworth – are a blend of antique and contemporary originals. At Woburn, the 5th Duke of Bedford built a Temple of Liberty in the late 1790s at the end of a long conservatory and filled it with busts of himself and his political cronies, in keeping with a potent Roman/Whig tradition that included a temple of the same name at Stowe and, more recently, the mausoleum for the 2nd Marquis of Rockingham at Wentworth Woodhouse. Soon after, Bedford’s son, the 6th Duke, paired the temple with another, designed by Jeffry Wyatville, to

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Figure 6.6  Jeffry Wyatville, Chatsworth Sculpture Gallery, 1818–40. Illustration by F. W. Fairholt, in ‘A Day at Chatsworth’ by Mrs S. C. Hall, The Art-Journal 4 (1852): 31. house the Three Graces that he had commissioned from Antonio Canova. In between, the conservatory was filled with antique sculptures and all’antica busts of his family and statues made by Canova, Bertel Thorvaldsen, Joseph Nollekens, John Flaxman, Francis Chantrey and Richard Westmacott. Meanwhile, the 6th Duke of Devonshire also filled a gallery at Chatsworth (likewise remodelled by Wyatville), with works by Canova – with whom he had become enchanted – Thorvaldsen, and several English sculptors, combined with antique sculptures and polychromed pedestals he had gathered on his travels or received as gifts (fig. 6.6). At Petworth, the 3rd Earl of Egremont positioned the antique statues his father had bought sixty years before alongside contemporary works commissioned from British artists. Of these, Flaxman’s St Michael Overcoming Satan held centre stage, highlighted – and virtually animated – by J. M. W Turner’s sensual watercolours (fig. 6.7) (Guilding 2014, 248–83; Yarrington 2009).9 In contrast to the preceding generation of significant collectors, Bedford, Devonshire and Egremont were of the highest echelons of British aristocracy. For them, collecting was less aspirational than demonstrative. Such exemplarity of habitus was likely also subliminally motivated by zealous nationalism engendered by the Napoleonic Wars and, in terms of sculpture specifically, the Elgin Marbles debate in 1815–16. Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, had removed the Marbles from the Parthenon when he was ambassador extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Selim III, Sultan of Turkey from 1799 to 1803, and, like any good patrician, planned to install them in his country house, Broomhall Hall, in Scotland. However, financial difficulties prompted him

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Figure 6.7  J. M. W. Turner, The North Gallery at Night: Figures Contemplating Flaxman’s Statue, ‘St Michael Overcoming Satan’, 1827. Ink, watercolour and bodycolour on paper. Tate. Photo: Tate.

to offer them to the nation as a study collection to be housed in the British Museum. Such was the perceived aesthetic value of the sculptures – they had been on display in London since 1807 – combined with the cultural cachet of owning such works – recently emphasised by Napoleon brandishing the looted Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön and the Venus de’ Medici at the Louvre – that the House of Commons struck a Select Committee in 1815 to consider the purchase. What unfolded was a formal debate about the nature of beauty, underscored by the legitimacy of acquisition and the cultural aesthetic superiority of one nation over another (Gurstein 2002; Siegel 2000, 58–64; McCue 2014, 65–6; Thomas 2016; Jenkins 1992, 13–29, passim; Guilding 2014, 309–21; Casey 2008; Rose-Greenland 2013). The aura of the Marbles was captivating; even Canova – who had assisted the British in repatriating stolen art to Italy – had come to London expressly to examine the pieces. In particular, almost everyone was astounded by their beauty despite being full of idiosyncrasies and thus corresponding to nature, an unsettling contradiction to the sine qua non insistence that true beauty was inherent only in a universal ideal canon. For some, such as William Hazlitt who already despised Reynolds’s authority, and the painter Robert Haydon, the Marbles suggested that nature was ideal, while others, such as Flaxman, sought to reconcile the Marbles with the established canon by more precisely articulating its core ingredients. For example, when asked by the Select Committee ‘Does the Apollo Belvidere [sic] partake more of ideal beauty than the Theseus?’ (Report 1816, 72) – the latter being the celebrated male nude statue in the

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collection – Flaxman’s affirmative response was grounded in the Apollo’s identity as a supreme divinity as well as the ‘look’ of the statue. He also mentioned he believed the Apollo Belvedere to be an ancient copy, which, although not a concern for him, prompted further questions by the Select Committee, indicating the value placed on authenticity to the point that even ancient Roman copies were liable to censure (Report 1816, 72–4). The fragmentary nature of the Marbles and their corroded and pockmarked surfaces were also of concern, although the fragment had been freed from antiquarian pedantry and further invested with erotic and erudite sensuality by Townley, Winckelmann and others (Hanson 2009, 2–8; Myrone and Peltz 1999; Kelly 2009). Hazlitt was effusive when he savoured the ‘mouldering imperfect state’ of the Marbles (Hazlitt 1930–4, 28) and John Keats exclaimed that the Marbles were ‘wonders’ that prompt ‘a most dizzy pain, / That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude / Wasting of old time . . .’ (Keats 1817; Thomas 2008; Guilding 2014, 316).10 Here, antiquity was emphatically in the very distant past. For others, the preference for wholeness and smooth surfaces was so entrenched that they could not overcome these apparent deficiencies. Payne Knight was the most vocal in his opposition. On one hand, the fragmentary and rough Marbles were incompatible with his picturesque sensibilities (despite his own study of the penises of Priapus) and on the other he was Townley’s old friend whose collection had recently been installed in the British Museum (Report 1816, 92–104; Siegel 2000, 60–1). In the end, the British government purchased the Marbles for £35,000 – about half of what Elgin had paid for them – and once they were installed in the British Museum, the Townley collection was soon utterly eclipsed. By contrast, as the sculpture at Woburn Abbey, Chatsworth and Petworth shows, the taste for wholeness, smoothness and canonical beauty persisted in the country house. Payne Knight unknowingly articulated a reason when he insisted in his testimony that the imperfect nature of the Marbles made them unacceptable as ‘furniture’ (Report 1816, 102­–4) indicating the ongoing perception of sculpture as discrete things that also contributed to the overall whole of the house. This is corroborated by Elgin’s initial plans to hire Canova to restore the Marbles – at which Canova baulked (Rothenberg 1977, 185; Casey 2008) – and years later, in the 1830s, the Duke of Devonshire’s decision to display his collections of fragments which he had amassed for their personal meaning not in the public spaces of his house but in a dedicated private antiquarium (Guilding 2014, 292–5). However, the preponderance of new neoclassical sculpture in these collections also suggests that the role of the aesthetic canon had evolved; antique iconic sculptures were no longer a gauge against which other sculptures might be measured, now they also constituted something to be surpassed. This sense of outdoing was emphatically spelt out in the foundation document of the British Institution, sponsored by the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Egremont in 1805, to encourage artists ‘to consider [the] excellent and immortal examples of the Grecian and Italian schools, as the objects, not merely of imitation, but of competition’ (Account 1805, 23) and in 1823 the Duke of Devonshire supported a similar endeavour in Rome so that young artists could learn from and ultimately rival the ancients, just as his beloved Canova had done (Guilding 2014, 260–1; McCue 2014, 36, passim). By the early nineteenth century, Britain’s increasingly confident imperial and martial swagger, coupled with an equally self-conscious historic-mindedness, fuelled this air of competitiveness. In terms of sculpture, this is demonstrated by the emphatic prominence

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of the taste for the neoclassical, and in terms of the country house, this is evident in the way in which neoclassical sculpture worked alongside authentic antiques and in conjunction with other parts of the house to exemplify the country house’s enduring primacy at the top of Britain’s stable social hierarchy. To recall Burke, the country house, with all of its ‘furniture’, remained the embodiment of the nation.

Notes   1. This chapter builds upon important publications about the collecting of sculpture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially: Potts (1980); Potts (1994); Coltman (2006); Coltman (2009); Guilding (2014); Coffin (2000); Scott (2003).   2. G. E. Lessing’s thoughts about the Laocoön came slightly later, in 1766.  3. Burke introduced the metaphor of the country house in his speech in Bristol in 1780: Burke, A Speech.   4. The casts were supplied in bulk by Matthew Brettingham the younger.  5. Mark Girouard and De Bolla contend Kedleston was Curzon’s challenge to the Whig bastion of nearby Chatsworth but Wentworth Woodhouse is a more contemporaneous contender. Girouard in Harris (1987, 8); De Bolla (2003, 151–217).   6. Weddell bought in bulk, filling nineteen chests.   7. Rumours of the cost ranged from £1,500 to £6,000. See Coltman (2009, 193); Guilding (2014, 154).   8. Zoffany’s painting is a conceit in terms of the distribution of the sculpture.   9. The three collections are well illustrated in Guilding (2014, 248–83). 10. Sir John Soane offered an artist-architect’s perception of the fragment with his idiosyncratic collection.

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Jenkins, Ian. 1992. Archeologists and Aesthetes. London: British Museum Press. Keats, John. 1817. ‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’. (last accessed 1 October 2021). Kelly, Jason. 2009. The Society of Dilettanti. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. ———. 2014. ‘Rome and its British and Irish Artists’. In Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting, edited by Martin Postle and Robin Simon, 35–51. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. Kenworthy-Browne, John. 2009. ‘The Duke of Richmond’s Gallery in Whitehall’. British Art Journal 10: 40–9. Lang, Karen and Stephen Bann. 2013. ‘Interview. The Sense of the Past and the Writing of History: Stephen Bann in Conversation with Karen Lang’. Art Bulletin 94 (4): 544–56. Langford, Paul. 1973. The First Rockingham Administration. Oxford: Oxford UP. McCarthy, Michael, ed. 2001. Lord Charlemont and His Circle. Dublin: Four Courts Press. McCue, Maureen. 2014. British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793–1840. Farnham: Ashgate. Myrone, Martin. 2005. Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art 1750–1810. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. Myrone, Martin and Lucy Peltz, eds. 1999. Producing the Past, Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice 1700–1850. Aldershot: Ashgate. Onians, John. 1988. Bearers of Meaning. The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton UP. Potts, Alex. 1980. ‘Greek Sculpture and Roman Copies – 1. Anton Raphael Mengs and the Eighteenth Century’. Journal of Courtauld and Warburg Institutes 43: 150–73. ———. 1994. Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Earl of Elgin’s collection of sculptured marbles; &c. 1816. London: printed for John Murray. Rose-Greenland, Fiona. 2013. ‘The Parthenon Marbles as icons of nationalism in nineteenthcentury Britain’. Nations and Nationalism 19 (4): 654–73. Rothenberg, Jacob. 1977. “Descensus Ad Terram” The Acquisition and Reception of the Elgin Marbles. New York: Garland. Salber Phillips, Mark. 2000. Society and Sentiment, Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820. Princeton: Princeton UP. ———. 2013. On Historical Distance. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Salmon, Frank. 2006. ‘Stuart as Antiquary and Archaeologist in Italy and Greece’. In James “Athenian” Stuart 1713–1788: The Rediscovery of Antiquity, edited by Susan Weber Soros, 103–46. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. Scott, Jonathan. 2003. The Pleasures of Antiquity: British Collectors of Greece and Rome. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. Siegel, Jonah. 2000. Desire and Excess, the Nineteenth-century Culture of Art. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP. Solkin, David. 1982. Richard Wilson: the Landscape of Reaction. London: The Tate Gallery. Thomas, Sophie. 2008. Romanticism and Visuality. Fragments, History, Spectacle. New York and London: Routledge. ———. 2016. ‘Human Objects, Object Rights: From Elgin’s Marbles to Bullock’s Laplanders’. European Romantic Review 27 (3): 319–29. Yarrington, Alison. 2009. ‘“Under Italian Skies”: The 6th Duke of Devonshire, Canova and the formation of the sculpture gallery at Chatsworth House’. Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies 10: 41–62.

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7 Public Improvement as ‘National Ornament’: Commerce, Culture and Patriotism in London and Edinburgh Alison O’Byrne

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his chapter examines the relationship between art, commerce and patriotism as expressed through the urban built environment in London and Edinburgh during the Romantic period. From the middle decades of the eighteenth century, through to the development of Regent’s Street, Regent’s Park and what would come to be known as Trafalgar Square in the early nineteenth century, debates about the appearance of London circulated in treatises and proposals concerning urban improvements. For some, the pursuit of a more polite and refined cityscape was a necessary development that could complement British commercial and military achievement by demonstrating progress in the fine arts as well. Others, however, remained sceptical of the possibility that commerce and the arts could be mutually supportive. Whereas in London this question persisted in the art world, in Edinburgh, writers, artists and architects began to cultivate a reputation for the city as, in Ian Duncan’s words, ‘a new kind of national capital – not a political or commercial metropolis, but a cultural and aesthetic one’ (2005, 48). As a much smaller city than London, Edinburgh had more open space near its centre on which to plan large developments, and improvers shared a desire to make the appearance of the city commensurate with its status as a national capital. The building of the New Town, undertaken in phases between the 1760s and 1820s, for example, signalled an ambition to make Edinburgh home to wealthy and fashionable families. In the early nineteenth century, a series of monuments on Calton Hill, including the (never completed) National Monument, were imagined as articulating Scotland’s cultural and intellectual prestige as well as its contribution to the Union through the British armed forces. The transformations that took place in London and Edinburgh were not, of course, unique to these cities. Their status as capital cities, however, meant that the appearance of their cityscapes was always likely to be read as reflecting upon the condition of their respective nations, and of Britain more broadly. In London, efforts to make the city appear more refined were always understood in the context of its position as an imperial metropolis, whereas in Edinburgh, such endeavours sought to offer an account of Scottish cultural distinctiveness which differentiated the city from London. The Romantic period – and in particular the period of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars – was, as Holger Hoock notes, ‘a transitional phase in British cultural politics, when the cultural state was first forged at metropolitan and imperial level’ (2010, 17). In examining Regency improvements in London and Edinburgh, we

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can begin to trace the ways in which an emergent sense of ‘cultural patriotism’, to borrow Hoock’s phrase, led to new conceptualisations of the relationship between commerce, the arts and military achievement (2010, 12). These developments presented both London and Edinburgh as sites where the arts flourished and could be called upon to articulate a sense of national distinctiveness. This process was more complex in Edinburgh, however, as we shall see in relation to the construction of the National Monument, where an account of the Scottish nation could unsettle, or be at odds with, a Unionist British identity. Debates about whether London appeared sufficiently magnificent were part of larger discussions about the relationship between commerce, the arts and military prestige that gained urgency in the 1760s. Britain’s victory in the Seven Years War, and the massive territorial gains that it brought, raised new and pressing questions about the meaning of Britishness, and in turn about how this might be articulated, for example via urban improvements and public works of art. London’s expansion had long been driven by speculative builders, and development was piecemeal rather than part of an overarching plan for the city as a whole. John Gwynn and Paul and Thomas Sandby, each of whom would become founding members of the Royal Academy when it was established in 1768, produced works in this decade that turned a critical eye on the appearance of London. The Sandbys’ Six London Views (1766–8), as John Bonehill notes, presents a series of sites that were then undergoing transformation, choosing vantage points that juxtaposed ‘old and new, the magnificent and the mean’ (2012, 367). Gwynn’s London and Westminster Improved (1766) took a different approach, presenting a vision of what London could and should be now that ‘[t]he English are what the Romans were of old, distinguished like them by power and opulence, and excelling all others in commerce and navigation’ with ‘dominions . . . spread over a large part of the globe’ (1766, xv). His approach was underpinned, as Douglas Fordham notes, by a sense that ‘cultural transformation should flow naturally from imperial grandeur’, while at the same time he acknowledged that proposals for a more majestic city would incite ‘the old cry of private property and the infringement on liberty’ that he saw as frustrating large-scale plans for improving London (Fordham 2010, 207; Gwynn 1766, vi). In the early nineteenth century, with leases on Crown land around Marylebone Park about to expire, John Nash was hired to develop the area; the top-down imposition of the improvement scheme offered the chance to bypass (if not to quiet) those defending private interests who Gwynn saw as impeding opportunities to make London more visually impressive in the 1760s. Nash’s plan, which had the full support of the Prince Regent, proposed not only the development of the ground around Marylebone, but also the creation of a magnificent thoroughfare linking the new residences that would be built around Regent’s Park to Pall Mall, and thus to the area around court and Parliament (fig. 7.1). Regent Street was planned as an elegant backdrop for gentlemen holding posts in public office as they moved between ‘the best inhabited quarters of the West and North-West ends of the Town’ towards Charing Cross and the various spaces devoted to government activity, including ‘Westminster-hall, the Houses of Parliament, Treasury, Admiralty, or any of the other public Offices in their vicinity’ (First Report 1812, 89). Nash ensured that premises were rented to luxury shops ‘appropriated to articles of taste and fashion’, thereby showcasing a display of commercial wealth at its most refined (First Report

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Figure 7.1  Robert Acon after Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, ‘Buildings on the East Side of Regent Street’, 1828. Engraving. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 1812, 89). The development of Regent Street therefore helps us to think about how London could now be understood as vying architecturally with other European capitals, but on its own distinctive terms. Regent Street’s grandeur required the eradication of an existing commercial area, one that served a labouring and lower-middling clientele, and whose residents were quick to note that the new street would be ‘more of a national ornament than of real necessity’ – privileging the aesthetics of commerce over transactions of a more mundane and everyday nature (as cited in Flinn 2012, 373). Nash’s plan sought to formalise borders between different neighbourhoods, establishing ‘a boundary . . . between the Streets and Squares occupied by the Nobility and Gentry, and the narrow Streets and meaner Houses occupied by mechanics and the trading part of the community’ to the east (First Report 1812, 88). As Laurel Flinn notes, local resistance to the improvements ‘encompassed not only an insistence on the right of access . . . but the right to circulate through public streets and to do business on accustomed terms’ (2012, 365). The elegance of Regent Street, then, acknowledged the role of commercial wealth in the city’s and nation’s prosperity but, via high rents and Nash’s careful selection of businesses to fill the street, as well as a plan that limited the movement of nearby shopkeepers and traders catering to a plebeian clientele, focused solely on constructing a display of commerce at its most polished. As well as refining the nation’s long-standing reputation as a centre of commerce in this way, efforts to construct a more architecturally impressive cityscape in this period also sought to commemorate victory in the Napoleonic Wars and, in so doing, to shape a patriotic public. From the mid-1790s, St Paul’s Cathedral became the site of a pantheon of British heroes, a project supported by funds from Parliament (who,

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in 1802, established what came to be known as the Committee of Taste to oversee the planning of war memorials) and developed in collaboration with the Royal Academy. In 1799, following a call for designs for a national monument dedicated to Britain’s navy, plans for large-scale acts of commemoration to adorn London’s cityscape began to circulate. These included, for example, John Flaxman’s colossal statue of Britannia intended for Greenwich Hill, and John Opie’s plans for a Temple of Naval Virtue, which was then developed into a proposal for a Dome of National Glory – though no structure was ever built (Hoock 2003, 276–80). After the final victory over Napoleon at Waterloo, acts of commemoration in the public spaces of the capital were understood as helping to sustain ‘a collective spirit of post-war nationalism, especially as economic crises and social dissension between classes began to tarnish the glory of post-Waterloo Britain’ (Lukacher 2006, 139). In 1815–16, with funds set aside by Parliament, the Committee of Taste invited proposals for national monuments celebrating Trafalgar and Waterloo as well as a palace for the Duke of Wellington (Hoock 2003, 273–5; Lukacher 2006, 146). The magnificent designs for royal and national palaces produced by Sir John Soane and Joseph Michael Gandy into the 1820s participated in the broader discussion of national monuments prompted by these calls and which played out in the periodical press as well as at the Academy’s exhibitions (Lukacher 2006, 142–55) (fig. 7.2). The sheer scale of Soane and Gandy’s proposed projects at once made them impractical and offered a critique of what the two men saw as Nash’s comparatively lacklustre transformation of Buckingham House into a royal residence (Dart 2012, 176; Lukacher 2006, 144). No proposals submitted to these calls were ever definitively rejected, but growing concerns about expenditure during a post-war recession meant that plans for Waterloo and Trafalgar monuments and a palace for the Duke of Wellington never came to fruition, and commemoration frequently involved acts of naming instead. John Rennie’s Strand Bridge, under construction since 1811, was renamed Waterloo Bridge by Act of Parliament in 1816. Its opening the following year offered an opportunity to mark the second anniversary of the battle, with celebrations featuring a procession of the Prince Regent over the bridge in company with the Duke of Wellington and other dignitaries, while the bridge itself was lined by members of the Horse Guards who had served at Waterloo (‘Waterloo Bridge’ 1817, 394). Other acts of naming include Waterloo Place (connecting Regent Street to the Mall) and Trafalgar Square, planned as part of Nash’s improvements though not named as such until the development was completed in the 1830s. In the 1820s, a series of triumphal arches were constructed as extensions to Nash’s redevelopment of Buckingham House; though not all were explicitly monuments to military victory, their invocation of imperial Rome asserted a confident account of Britain’s self-conception as a global empire. Nash’s Marble Arch (fig. 7.3), based on the Arch of Constantine at Rome, was erected at the entrance to Buckingham Palace in 1827, and Decimus Burton’s Wellington Arch, sometimes known as the Green Park Arch, was commissioned in this decade as well. Along with Hyde Park Screen, also constructed in the 1820s, it was part of a series of new gates and entrances into London’s royal parks. The arts were a patriotic endeavour in this decade in other ways, too. In 1824, after several decades during which Parliament had turned down opportunities to purchase artworks to form the basis of a national collection, the National Gallery was founded. Originally located in the Pall Mall house of the Russian-born insurance

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Figure 7.2  Joseph Michael Gandy, ‘Design for an imperial palace for the sovereigns of the British Empire, imagined to be in Hyde Park, London: perspective of a triumphal entrance’, 1826. Drawing. RIBA Collections.

Figure 7.3  S. Lacey after Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, ‘The Marble Arch’ c. 1830s. Hand-coloured engraving. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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broker John Julius Angerstein, whose private picture collection provided its basis, it moved to purpose-built gallery space in Trafalgar Square in the 1830s. As Brandon Taylor and Maureen McCue note, advocates of such an institution thought that a national collection would tap into an existing appetite for popular, commercial exhibitions, but at the same time elevate the taste of the public by offering it the opportunity to see ‘fine’ art (Taylor 1999, 33; McCue 2018, passim). The Gallery’s location was significant for a number of reasons. From the late eighteenth century, as John Barrell has shown, Charing Cross was not only a kind of geographical centre of London, but also a symbolic heart of both Britain and its global territories – ‘the epicenter of the cultural and commercial influence that radiated from the metropolis throughout the nation and empire’ (2006, 34). The improvement work underway here in the late 1820s and 1830s, which made space for Trafalgar Square, created an architectural statement that helped to cement a sense of the location as the heart of the city and the nation. In so doing, it transformed a busy nexus where disparate parts of the city met into a formal articulation of cultural refinement via the National Gallery and military prowess through the commemoration of the Battle of Trafalgar and Admiral Lord Nelson, whose memorial was erected there in the 1840s (Barrell 2006, 34–5; Taylor 1999, 40–3). The area’s development offered a clear statement about how the nation perceived itself and wanted to be perceived by others. Over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century then, debates about the relationship between art, commerce and patriotism reshaped the appearance of London. While aspects of these developments were sometimes criticised, they nevertheless radically altered parts of London, transforming a city that had up until then been characterised by piecemeal development driven by speculative builders, into – at least partially – a triumphal cityscape celebrating national distinctiveness. The result was, in Dana Arnold’s words, ‘the evolution of an urban self-consciousness’ and the development of a ‘notion of the city as consciously constructed artefact’ (2000, xv). This selfconsciousness and sense of the city as artefact was reinforced in texts and prints – most notably Metropolitan Improvements; or London, in the Nineteenth Century (1827), a collaboration between James Elmes and the artist Thomas Hosmer Shepherd. Although at times unimpressed by some of the transformations wrought by Nash, the work as a whole marked how a range of urban improvements shaped a more magnificent London, with Shepherd’s views emphasising, as Caroline Arscott puts it, ‘regular spaces, foursquare monuments and open paths for celebratory viewing’ (2009, 29) (fig. 7.4). For a brief period, before financial pressures brought an end to grand improvements and shifted public opinion about Nash’s projects, London had been transformed into ‘a stage on which to perform and on which to witness its own civility, grandeur, and ebullience’ (Nord 1995, 20). In Edinburgh, the relationship between the appearance of the city, the place of the arts, acts of commemoration and questions of national identity was also much debated over the course of this period – one of broad transformation for the city. In his ‘Postscript’ to Waverley (1814), Sir Walter Scott declared that ‘[t]here is no European nation which, within the course of half a century, has undergone so complete a change as this kingdom of Scotland’ (2008, 340). Scott attributes this to ‘[t]he effects of the insurrection of 1745’ (including ‘the destruction of the patriarchal power of the Highland chiefs – the abolition of the heritable jurisdictions of the Lowland nobility and the barons – [and] the total eradication of the Jacobite party’) and ‘[t]he gradual

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Figure 7.4  William Wallis after Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, ‘The Quadrant, and Part of Regent Street’, 1828. Engraving. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. influx of wealth, and extension of commerce’ (2008, 340). As Linda Colley notes, in the decades after the Jacobite Rebellion, ‘growing prosperity and a common investment in Protestant warfare and lucrative imperial adventure’ helped to make ‘internal fractures’ between England and Scotland ‘less violent’ (2005, 372). By the time Victoria ascended the throne, she suggests, ‘Scotland still retained many of the characteristics of a distinct nation, but was comfortably contained within a bigger nation. It was British as well as Scottish’ (2005, 372–3). Yet, the changes to Edinburgh’s cityscape in this period point to the ways in which conceiving of a distinct identity for the city and the nation that was also aligned with Britishness involved a concerted effort that sometimes disclosed the difficulty of the endeavour. Edinburgh was transformed in this period in such a way that any status it had as a centre of commerce or politics was superseded by its new association with a form of cultural nationalism, one which shaped the ceremony of George IV’s royal visit (or ‘King’s Jaunt’) in 1822 and the development of a series of public buildings and monuments on Calton Hill between 1818 and 1831 (Duncan 2005, 48–54) (fig. 7.5). Unlike London, Edinburgh had not yet developed a culture of artistic societies and exhibitions; indeed, as late as 1829 the English antiquarian and topographer John Britton declared that ‘The Fine Arts of Edinburgh, strictly speaking, are still in their infancy’ precisely because ‘the attractive influence of London has taken away’ artists of talent (1829, 13). Edinburgh’s reputation for culture and the arts focused instead on its flourishing intellectual community, rooted in the Scottish Enlightenment, and on the elegance of its built environment. The harmony between the city and the surrounding landscape was frequently celebrated, with Britton describing Edinburgh as

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Figure 7.5  James Johnstone after George Meikle Kemp, ‘The Calton Hill’, c. 1833. Engraving. National Library of Scotland. CC BY 4.0 licence. ‘one of the few large collections of the works of man in full accordance with the scenery around . . . in whose striking features every monument of human greatness mingles with a magnificence yet more unquestionable and enduring’ (1829, iv). The combination of the craggy hills, the winding lanes of the medieval Old Town, and the neoclassical architecture and broad streets of the New Town lent itself to a sense of a ‘“picturesque Edinburgh”’ in the early nineteenth century, Duncan notes, which ‘formed an aesthetic hinge for the turn from a “Classical” to a “Romantic” city, secured by the accession of a sublime vocabulary’ (2007, 14). The role of the picturesque in representations of Edinburgh, so crucial to the Romantic conceptualisation of the city, thus depended on the relationship between the natural landscape and the built environment, and on the juxtaposition of old and new via the interplay of architectural styles. The development and expansion of the New Town, beginning in 1767 and continuing through the early decades of the nineteenth century, radically changed the appearance of Edinburgh. The first New Town development, designed by James Craig, expanded the city beyond its medieval boundaries. It featured grand architecture and broad thoroughfares, and the place names assigned to the new streets and squares celebrated the city’s sense of itself as both Scottish and British. Further waves of development followed, with the area around Calton Hill developed from 1819 to designs by William Henry Playfair. Playfair’s proposals eschewed the rigid regularity associated with other parts of the New Town, developing instead a series of streets that highlighted the contours of the landscape, including a new entrance into the city alongside

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Calton Hill. Whereas previously, those travelling into Edinburgh from the London Road arrived into the Old Town via Canongate at the foot of the hill, the Regent Road carried passengers along the side of the hill before joining with the recently constructed Regent Bridge at Waterloo Place. As in London, acts of naming reflected what Duncan has described as the ‘Regency triumphalism’ of the post-Waterloo years, while the route – which at Waterloo Place connected with Princes Street – recentred the city around the New Town (2005, 48). Alongside these developments, Calton Hill itself was also transformed between the 1770s and 1830s via the construction of a series of public buildings and monuments that sought to celebrate Scottish national identity, developing a ‘vertical, monumental and imperial urban landscape’ that distinguished itself from ‘the rational, horizontal, rectilinear conception’ of Craig’s New Town (Duncan 2005, 48). Whereas in London, the architecture of magnificence (such as triumphal arches) frequently referenced imperial Rome, for Edinburgh, and for the monuments on Calton Hill especially, Athens provided a model for the city’s sense of itself. This association had been in circulation since at least the 1780s, when John Knox noted in A View of the British Empire; More Especially Scotland (1784) that ‘Besides the benefits of an increasing commerce, [Edinburgh] is considered as the modern Athens, in politeness, science, and literature’ (1784, 100). The moniker was also claimed by virtue of the city’s landscape, with descriptions frequently drawing attention to ‘[t]he similarity of the Calton Hill to the romantic eminence of the Acropolis of Athens’ (Britton 1829, 10). This association between modern Edinburgh and ancient Athens fed into debates about the construction of a national monument on Calton Hill in the wake of the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, an act of cultural patriotism that both celebrated Scotland’s role in Britain’s war effort and sought to proclaim a sense of national distinctiveness. Calton Hill’s place in Edinburgh’s development as a cultural and aesthetic capital is linked, in part, to the vantage point from the summit of the hill, which offers a wide-ranging survey – one that played an important role in the development of technologies of seeing. It was on Calton Hill that Robert Barker invented the panorama in the 1780s; Maria Theresa Short (who claimed to be the legal heir of Thomas Short, founder of the first observatory on the hill in 1776), first exhibited her Camera Obscura; and the pioneering photographer David Octavius Hill established his studio in the 1840s. The all-encompassing view invited the spectator to meditate on the city and its surrounding landscape, and on a series of places connected to Scottish history. While the view offered a survey of the visual contrast between the Old Town and the New, it never simply reduced this juxtaposition to a triumph of the latter over the former. Instead, as John Lowrey notes, commentators drew attention to ‘the distinctiveness yet interconnectedness of the two parts of the city and their relationship with the Picturesque’ (2001, 143). The panoramic perspective from the summit took in an important history of nationhood – symbolised, for example, by Holyrood House and Edinburgh Castle – bringing it into dialogue with modernisation projects like the New Town. In the 1820s, Walter Scott celebrated the ‘pleasing succession of views’ made available to those strolling on the hill, proclaiming that ‘[t]he promenade, in its successive richness of beautiful objects, and the numerous moral associations which they are calculated to excite, is perhaps unequalled, in Europe, or in the world’ (1826, I: 83–4).

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Scott’s account of Calton Hill in Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland (1826) is illustrated by an engraving of J. M. W. Turner’s painting Edinburgh from Calton Hill (c. 1819) (fig. 7.6). Scott introduces the image as undertaking ‘a daring representation of one of the most magnificent scenes in this romantic city’, taken from that point ‘upon which every passenger, however much accustomed to the wonderful scene, is inclined to pause, and, with eyes unsatisfied with seeing, to gaze on the mingled and almost tumultuous scene which lies before and beneath him’ (1826, I: 85). While ‘almost’ serves as an important qualifier here, Scott in this quotation draws attention to the varied and dramatic landscape and the clash of architectural styles that come together to define the ‘romantic city’ (1826, I: 85). As he surveys the scene, he draws the reader’s attention to the ‘Gothic’ jail (designed by Robert Adam) at the left; Calton Burial Ground, whose classical columns line the entrance and which features Adam’s monument to David Hume in the corner; the ‘magnificent’ Regent’s Bridge, whose columns echo those of the cemetery; the North Bridge connecting the New Town with the ‘deep masses of the Old Town’; and at the back ‘the Castle predominating over the whole’ (1826, I: 85). In architectural terms, this ‘mingled . . . scene’ brings together Gothic and classical, as well as old and new (with ongoing building work signalled by the long shed in front of the burial ground). At the same time, the view is firmly localised by the activities and figures in the foreground, among the latter the man in Black Watch regimentals and women wearing tartan. The woman to the right of the soldier

Figure 7.6  George Cooke after J. M. W. Turner, ‘Edinburgh from Calton Hill’, 1820. Open etching and line engraving. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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spreads a white cloth; her bare feet suggest that she is a washer woman who is laying laundry out to bleach in the sun – a custom that frequently appears in views of Calton Hill. Such figures develop a picturesque aesthetic of the local and traditional. Moreover, the presence of these labouring women, along with a range of other strolling and seated figures, reminds the viewer that the vantage point represented is accessible – the inclusion of ordinary people and mundane activities highlights that this is not the organising or ordering perspective of wealth and status in a view from a private house or estate, but one available to anyone. The landscape displayed in Turner’s view is a conglomeration of somewhat disparate parts. It is rooted in a tradition of landscape art in which, as John Barrell explains, ‘the past and present compete for attention, where the local is at odds with the national, where values are affirmed because somewhere else they are being called into question, where different versions of what Britain should be grind against each other’ (2010, 12). Whereas the view from Calton Hill in Turner’s painting presents a landscape which can be read as a contested site, views of the top of the hill are ostensibly more conducive to confident statements about the city and nation. As Lowrey suggests, the Greek Revival buildings and monuments constructed between 1818 and 1831 on top of Calton Hill played a key role in ‘establishing an identity within the political realities of the British state’ in a city that was ‘the capital of a nation that had lost its statehood’ (2001, 141). These architectural works signal a departure from the first buildings constructed on the site: the original observatory built for Thomas Short in 1776 in Gothic style, and the castellated Nelson Monument (constructed 1807–15). The shift to Greek Revival designs after this point can be understood in terms of a broader cultural narrative about Edinburgh’s status as the inheritor of the classical past; the Gothic jail pictured in Turner’s view, constructed in 1818 in the style of ‘an ancient citadel’, is the one notable exception to this trend (Scott 1826, I: 84). The first of these, William Henry Playfair’s Greek Revival observatory (built 1818), was designed as a temple of the winds with porticos facing in each direction, to which was added a monument to Playfair’s uncle, the scientist and mathematician John Playfair (constructed 1825–6). Thomas Hamilton’s Royal High School (constructed 1825–9) referenced the Hephaisteion (a temple on the Acropolis dedicated to the god of fire, metalworking and crafts), while his monument to the poet Robert Burns (1830) and Playfair’s monument to the philosopher Dugald Stewart (1831) were both based on the Choragic monument of Lysicrates (built near the Acropolis to house the trophy he was awarded in a choral contest). Taken together, these structures announced Edinburgh’s claims to be the Athens of the North, forming a collection of public buildings and monuments to famous Scots connected with mathematics and science, philosophy and poetry – thereby asserting the city’s reputation as a seat of learning. The boldest architectural statement of Edinburgh’s self-proclaimed status as the ‘Modern Athens’, however, was the never completed National Monument. The structure was intended as a full-scale reconstruction of the Parthenon from plans developed by Charles R. Cockerell based on his extensive study of its ruins during his Grand Tour, undertaken between 1810 and 1817, with William Henry Playfair appointed to oversee the project in Edinburgh while Cockerell remained in London (Gifford 2014, 56–61). In the wave of patriotism that followed victory in the Napoleonic Wars, discussions about a national monument for Scotland’s war heroes began to take place.

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The lawyer and historian Archibald Alison argued that while ‘it is quite right that the Scotch should glory with their aged sovereign in the name of Britain’, it is also the case that the ‘animating effects . . . which the sight of a national trophy is fitted to have on a martial people, would be entirely lost in this country, if no other monument to Scottish valour existed than the monument at London’ – which, as noted above, itself never came to fruition (1819, 379; 382). A ‘prominent’ memorial of this kind, Alison argues, would ‘attract the attention of the most thoughtless’ – the ‘young, the gay, and the active’ who naturally fill the ranks of the army, and who are unlikely to be inspired by a written historical record of the achievements of the moment (1819, 381). Such a monument would also see Scotland engaging England in a friendly cultural rivalry, one that could propel key developments in the arts in both countries. According to Alison, both the monument, and its impact on martial pride and the progress of the arts, would reaffirm Edinburgh’s status as a capital city in the age of union and counter the centripetal pull of London as a single metropolitan centre which threatened to marginalise Scotland’s capital. In arguing that ‘Scotland’s ancient metropolis should not degenerate into a provincial town; and that an independent nation, once the rival of England, should remember, with pride, the peculiar glories by which her people have been distinguished’, he appealed to the ‘good effects of the rivalry of the two nations’ (1819, 379). The architects and planners involved in the development of Calton Hill thus sought to signal Edinburgh’s status as a distinct and important city in its own right – a place that would attract the admiration of visitors. Indeed, in imagining the visual effect of a national monument, Alison considers its likely impact on ‘a stranger who enters the city from the London Road’ via the new entrance opened up as part of Playfair’s improvements, for whom ‘it would be the most splendid of all objects’, before meditating on the way it would transform the view from various other points in the city as well (1819, 386). The decision to build the monument in the style of the Parthenon was presented by Alison as a ‘transference of the model of ancient excellence to this country’ (1819, 383) (fig. 7.7). While there were some who questioned the invocation of a foreign style for the purposes of Scottish patriotism, supporters of the plan echoed Alison’s sense of the project by referring to it as an act of ‘restoration’ (‘Application and Intent’ 1822, 327; ‘Restoration of the Parthenon’ 1820, passim). Suggestions that a reconstruction of the Parthenon might preserve ancient Greek architecture for future generations were undoubtedly informed by the debates around Lord Elgin’s purchase and removal of the Parthenon statues, which he then sold to the British Museum in 1816. Elgin, who became a member of the committee overseeing the National Monument, certainly had his critics, but many contemporaries understood his removal of the socalled Marbles as an act of cultural rescue (Hoock 2003, 286). He may have intended his association with the National Monument project to signal a disinterested concern with cultural preservation, submerging the questions about unlawful acquisition and financial profit raised by his handling of the Parthenon statues. Like these works of art, which had been purchased for the nation on the grounds that the collection was ‘admirably adapted to form a school for study, to improve our national taste for the Fine Arts’, a reconstruction of the Parthenon in Edinburgh would stimulate, according to Alison, ‘the formation of a correct public taste’ by rebuilding one of the finest examples of architecture in the world (Report from the Select Committee 1816, 6; Alison 1819, 383).

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Figure 7.7  George Meikle Kemp, ‘Calton Hill, Edinburgh With Proposed National Monument – From Summit of Salisbury Crags’. Lithograph. © Courtesy of HES Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland Collection. The foundation stone for the National Monument was laid in 1822 as part of the ceremony of George IV’s royal visit that was carefully stage-managed by Sir Walter Scott. Work on the project did not begin, however, until 1825 and by 1829, with only twelve columns erected, the £15,000 that had been raised by subscription had been exhausted. Efforts to secure further funding, both from Parliament and from the public, failed. As Johnny Rodger notes, ‘a certain vagueness about what exactly constituted a national monument to heroic achievements, how it would be organised, would function, and how it would be accessed seemed to cause some apprehensions on the part of the public’ (2016, 82). Many subscribers imagined that they were contributing to the construction of a church or place of worship, leading some donors to believe that their monetary contributions gave them ‘a right to pews, in proportion to the amount of their subscription’ ([Cleghorn] 1824, 5). In an effort to placate these donors, and to enable the committee to request further funds from Parliament via the money set aside in 1818 for building new churches (sometimes known as ‘Waterloo churches’), the committee agreed to include a place of worship, though Parliament refused the application. The alteration of the plans raised broader questions about the intended function of the monument, and whether those who donated had a right to claim anything in return. As well as highlighting the problem of subscribers expecting pews in return for donations, Cleghorn also criticised the committee’s efforts to raise further funds by selling off burial space, questioning ‘the propriety or even decency, of making [burial vaults] the subject of commercial speculation and promiscuous sale’ in a building intended

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as a monument commemorating service in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1824, 68). Looking back on the monument’s history in 1852, Cleghorn offered an overview of the various difficulties impeding the monument’s completion, including the project’s lack of coherence and waning interest among members of the public. In an attempt to revive the project in the 1840s, the committee altered the plans for the structure once more, removing the impediment that it should include a place of public worship and reducing the minimum subscription necessary to become a member of the committee with a vote, but with little success. Cleghorn attributed the ongoing lack of funds to the growth of railway speculation and a desire on the part of the committee not to press too hard for contributions lest they jeopardise the completion of George Meikle Kemp’s Scott Monument in Princes Street Gardens, constructed 1840–6 with money from public subscription (1852, 90). Despite occasional efforts to revive the project, it remains today as it was left in 1829. Taken together, the discussions about urban improvement, national identity and cultural refinement that took place in both London and Edinburgh between the 1760s and 1830s point to a growing self-consciousness about how urban, regional and national identities might be articulated and reinforced through urban planning projects. In London, the nature of the relationship between commerce and cultural refinement lay at the heart of discussions about how the built environment could reflect national distinctiveness. In a period shaped by war, discussions about the appearance of London reflected the city’s position as a hub of international commerce and a growing awareness of Britain’s status as a global empire. Whereas in London, acts of improvement and commemoration broadly consolidated a narrative of military, economic and cultural prestige, in Edinburgh, as Duncan notes, the city’s ‘extraordinary civic confidence’ generated ideas of a ‘national identity . . . split between a political and economic dimension (imperial Union) and a supplemental cultural one (national distinctiveness)’ (2005, 48; 50). Understanding Edinburgh’s continuing relevance as a capital city required a careful presentation of its cultural achievements, one that set it apart from, yet positioned it as a friendly rival to, London. This split between imperial Union and national distinctiveness identified by Duncan may have undermined the National Monument project, its unfinished state pointing in part to the difficulties of articulating a Scottish sense of Britishness via a national monument. As James Coleman notes, the failure of the National Monument project is an exception in a period when ‘the Scots surrounded themselves with all the signs and symbols of a culturally and historically coherent nation’ in the form of individual monuments to ‘national heroes’ including Robert Burns, William Wallace and Walter Scott (2014, 20; 21). In using architecture both to signal the modernity of the present moment and to position London and Edinburgh as inheritors of classical culture, those tasked with improving these cities sought to announce confident yet distinct accounts of nationhood. The developments in London point to a self-assured metropolitanism, ‘a sense of the urban site as at once capital to the provinces and point of contact with the wider world’, as James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin put it, and a growing understanding of London as a ‘world city’ – one that was both the centre of a global empire and an object of interest and curiosity for visitors from around the world (2005, 1). Developments in Edinburgh, by contrast, asserted a sense of the distinctiveness of Scotland, pre-empting concerns that the city might be provincialised by its incorporation into the Union. In both cities, these developments reflect an interest in capturing the singularity of the

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historical moment – one in which, certainly after 1815, Britain appeared to be the dominant world power – as much as they articulate nationhood. In thinking through the status of and relationship between the arts, commerce and war, then, urban improvers and proposers of monuments were also meditating on history – drawing on stadial theories to understand the present, looking to the past for models to announce the achievements of the moment and considering the future as an audience for such works. Standing as it was left in 1829, the National Monument appears, in the words of an 1834 guidebook, as ‘a magnificent modern ruin’ (Pollock’s New Guide 1834, 29). This obtrusive conjoining of a state of incompleteness and ruin, whereby an unfinished reconstruction of the Parthenon ends up echoing the fragmented condition of the original, reminds us of the ways in which discussions about the appearance of London and Edinburgh also imagined what the monuments and public buildings of the present might say to future generations.

Bibliography Alison, Archibald. 1819. ‘On the Proposed National Monument at Edinburgh’. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, no. XXVIII, vol. 5, (July): 377–87. ‘Application and Intent of the Various Styles of Architecture’. 1822. Quarterly Review 27 (July): 308–36. Arnold, Dana. 2000. Re-presenting the Metropolis: Architecture, Urban Experience and Social Life in London, 1800–1840. Aldershot: Ashgate. Arscott, Caroline. 2009. ‘George Scharf and the Archaeology of the Modern’. In George Scharf: From the Regency Street to the Modern Metropolis. London: Soane Museum. Barrell, John. 2006. The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s. Oxford: Oxford UP. ———. 2010. ‘Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain at the Royal Academy’. London Review of Books 32 (9) (13 May): 9–12. Bonehill, John. 2012. ‘“The centre of pleasure and magnificence”: Paul and Thomas Sandby’s London’. Huntington Library Quarterly 75 (3) (Autumn): 365–92. Britton, John. 1829. Modern Athens! Displayed in a Series of Views: or Edinburgh in the Nineteenth Century. London: Jones & Co. Chandler, James and Kevin Gilmartin. 2005. ‘Introduction: Engaging the Eidometropolis’. In Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840, edited by James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin, 1–41. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. [Cleghorn, George]. 1824. Remarks on the Intended Restoration of the Parthenon of Athens as the National Monument of Scotland. Edinburgh: Printed for Archibald Constable and Co. and Hurst, Robinson, and Co. London. Cleghorn, George. 1852. ‘Essay on the National Monument of Scotland’. Transactions of the Architectural Institute of Scotland 2: 81–120. Edinburgh: Printed by William Burness. Coleman, James J. 2014. Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Commemoration, Nationality, and Memory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Colley, Linda. 2005. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. Dart, Gregory. 2012. Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1810–1840: Cockney Adventures. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Duncan, Ian. 2005. ‘Edinburgh, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’. In Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840, edited by James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin, 45–64. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

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———. 2007. Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh. Princeton: Princeton UP. Elmes, James. 1978. Metropolitan Improvements; or, London in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Arno. First Report of the Commissioners of His Majesty’s Woods, Forests, and Land Revenues, in Obedience to the Acts of 34 Geo. III. Cap. 75 and 50 Geo. III. Cap. 65. 1812. Ordered, by The House of Commons, to be Printed, 13 June. Flinn, Laurel. 2012. ‘Social and Spatial Politics in the Construction of Regent Street’. Journal of Social History 46 (2) (Winter): 364–90. Fordham, Douglas. 2010. British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy. Philadelphia and Oxford: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gifford, John. 2014. ‘The National Monument of Scotland’. Architectural Heritage 25 (1) (October): 43–83. Gwynn, John. 1766. London and Westminster Improved, Illustrated by Plans. London: Printed for the author. Sold by Mr. Dodsley, and at Mr. Dalton’s Print-Warehouse in Pall-Mall, Mr. Bathoe in the Strand, Mr. Davies in Russell-Street, Covent-Garden, and by Mr. Longman in Pater-noster-Row. Hoock, Holger. 2003. The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture, 1760–1840. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2010. Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850. London: Profile Books. Knox, John. 1784. A View of the British Empire; More Especially Scotland. London: Printed for J. Walter, at Charing-Cross; J. Sewell, in Cornhill; and W. Gordon, in Edinburgh. Lowrey, John. 2001. ‘From Caesarea to Athens: Greek Revival Edinburgh and the Question of Scottish Identity within the Unionist State’. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 60 (2) (June): 136–57. Lukacher, Brian. 2006. Joseph Gandy: An Architectural Visionary in Georgian England. New York: Thames and Hudson. McCue, Maureen. 2018. ‘Guiding the Nation’s Taste: Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and the Construction of the National Gallery in London, 1824–1842’. In Yearbook of English Studies 48 (Writing in the Age of William IV), edited by Maureen McCue, Rebecca Butler and Anne-Marie Millim, 13–30. Nord, Deborah Epstein. 1995. Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell UP. Pollock’s New Guide through Edinburgh. 1834. Edinburgh: Pollock & Co. and Glasgow: Lumsden & Son. Report from the Select Committee on the Earl of Elgin’s Collection of Sculptured Marbles; &c. 1816. Ordered, by the House Commons, to be Printed, 25 March. ‘Restoration of the Parthenon’. 1820. Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany (February): 99–105. Rodger, Johnny. 2016. The Hero Building: An Architecture of Scottish National Identity. New York: Routledge. Scott, Sir Walter. 1826. Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland, with Descriptive Illustrations. 2 vols. London: John and Arthur Arch and Edinburgh: William Blackwood. ———. 2008. Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Hence. Oxford: Oxford UP. Taylor, Brandon. 1999. Art for the Nation: Exhibitions and the London Public, 1747–2001. Manchester: Manchester UP. ‘Waterloo Bridge’. 1817. Examiner 495 (22 June): 394.

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8 Commemoration, Domestic Display and the Decorative Arts: Romantic Nelsonia Charlotte Boyce

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n 13 January 1806, diarist Mary Berry decided to set down for posterity her recollections of Lord Nelson’s funeral, a five-day spectacle of national mourning she had witnessed first-hand the previous week. Her overriding impression was one of disdain for the visual effect created by the event. ‘I had certainly hopes [sic] that it would have been more considerable than it was’, she wrote, ‘although I had little hope of its being conducted with any real taste or solemn effect, knowing that its conduct had not been entrusted to any persons of approved taste themselves’ (Lewis 1865, 309). In Berry’s estimation, the river procession that conveyed Nelson’s coffin from Greenwich to Whitehall Stairs was simply ‘a crowd of boats, in which the immense city barges only were conspicuous’ (309). The next day’s funeral procession from the Admiralty to St Paul’s Cathedral was ‘still less calculated to gratify the feelings’ of the assembled crowd: ‘instead of presenting to their eager eyes the surviving heroes of Trafalgar, following the corpse of their illustrious leader, the naval officers were all put into mourning coaches’, while the sailors of the Victory ‘were marshalled by themselves in another part of the procession’, devoid of fanfare (310). A key factor in the perceived aesthetic failure of the state-organised obsequies was the problem of translating idealised vision into practised reality. As Berry acknowledged, ‘It is much easier to set down upon paper the regulations of a ceremony, such as that the boats of the river fencibles are to line each side of the procession, &c., than to give the effect of a procession so lined on the water in the foggy atmosphere of the Thames’ (309). If Nelson’s funeral failed, in its execution, to achieve the level of tastefully orchestrated grandeur desired by Berry, the abundance of commemorative merchandise that followed swiftly in its wake aimed to supply the gap between patriotic fantasy and imperfect reality. Mourners who had struggled to distinguish the shallop bearing Nelson’s coffin among the mass of vessels on the misty Thames could console themselves by purchasing an etching by John Thomas Smith that depicted a perfectly synchronised river procession, or a coloured engraving of the principal vessel in close-up from Ackermann’s Repository of Arts on the Strand.1 An aquatint of the funeral convoy, published by Edward Orme on 12 January 1806, promised similar imaginative compensation to those members of the public who had hoped to see Nelson’s hearse flanked by the men of his flagship on its journey up Ludgate Hill to St Paul’s (fig. 8.1). Significantly, this latter image, designed by William Marshall Craig and engraved by James Godby, was not available only to the well-to-do customers of Orme’s Bond Street shop; it was quickly reproduced and marketed in a variety of other formats,

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Figure 8.1  W. M. Craig del., J. Godby sculpt., ‘The Funeral Procession of Lord Nelson’. Published by Edward Orme, 1806. Coloured engraving. © The British Library Board. K.Top.22.13

Figure 8.2  Hand-painted earthenware jug by the Cambrian Pottery, Swansea, c. 1806. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Caird Fund.

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Figure 8.3  Porcelain Coalport plate, painted in the workshop of Thomas Baxter Senior, 1806. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

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including a linen handkerchief and a calico furnishing fabric, rendering it accessible to a relatively broad array of consumers from across the country.2 Focusing closely on such commercially produced objects, this chapter analyses the cultural and aesthetic work they performed once they entered and were displayed within the early nineteenth-century home. Prints and textiles formed part of the huge wave of commemorative goods that were made and sold in the months following Nelson’s death. If the events of 21 October 1805 gave ‘new impulse to the fine arts’ in Britain (‘Monthly Retrospect’ 1806, 547), inspiring painters and sculptors to ‘[exert] all their powers to perpetuate [Nelson’s] praise and immortalize his fame’ (‘Monthly Retrospect’ 1805, 448), they also provided a keen impetus to the nation’s decorative or applied art industries. Almost from the moment that news of Nelson’s demise reached Britain’s shores, the country’s manufacturers raced to produce an ‘unparalleled . . . outpouring’ of memorabilia (Williams 2005, 70), ranging from costly, hand-painted porcelain plates and vases to less expensive, transfer-printed mugs and jugs; from brass tobacco-boxes and basalt sugar-basins to enamelled patch-boxes, glass-pictures and lacquered trays. Generally intended for domestic display rather than everyday use, commemorative Nelsonia enabled a socially diverse mix of consumers to participate in the memorialisation of the hero of Trafalgar, providing a lasting material focus for the complex sentiments of patriotism, sorrow and gratitude that found expression during the transitory events of the funeral ceremony. As well as providing a domestic nexus-point through which personal acts of mourning and remembrance could be channelled, decorative artefacts celebrating Nelson’s life and death also performed important cultural work. As Joanne Begiato has recently argued, the ‘martial material culture’ of the early nineteenth century was ‘emotionally dense’ (2020, 20), loaded with powerful valences and affective meanings that worked not only to reflect but also to mould and disseminate consumers’ social identities and political ideals. Through their conspicuous display, material objects intervened, on their owners’ behalf, in a range of contemporary debates, bringing ‘political, national, and imperial values into the home’ (Begiato 2020, 17). Depending on their form, content and location within the domestic space, items of commemorative Nelsonia could serve to shape, promote or even contest prevailing ideas about the nation state, civic duty, amor patriae and heroic manliness. Yet, despite their profound imbrication with early nineteenth-century cultural values and social discourses, these posthumously produced artefacts have received relatively little critical attention as objects of analysis in their own right, instead being recruited as so many proofs of Nelson’s illustrious fame and popularity within Georgian consumer culture. While the visual strategies deployed in paintings and sculpted memorials to Nelson have been extensively scrutinised by scholars such as Kathleen Wilson (2005), Holger Hoock (2005), Teresa Michals (2015) and Cicely Robinson (2018), the politics and practices of representation in popular memorabilia have rarely been examined in detail. This chapter seeks to supply this critical gap, paying sustained attention to the visual content of mass-produced Nelsonia in order to highlight its entanglement with wider cultural values and ideals. In the sections that follow, I shall argue that, despite their commercial origins and ‘low art’ status, commemorative wares often shared an iconographic vocabulary with their fine-art counterparts, reproducing well-known portraits of Nelson and deploying common

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symbols and motifs to communicate ideas about heroic masculinity, national sacrifice and immortal fame. The relationship of these objects to the fine arts was not simply emulative, however; while enabling the aspiring middle classes to engage with the art-culture of the Romantic period, goods embellished with Nelson’s likeness also allowed consumers to repurpose, reinterpret and reframe the meanings inherent in existing portraits and sculptures by recontextualising them within their homes. Before embarking on a more detailed examination of the complex narratives and cultural aesthetics bound up in such artefacts, though, I want first to situate early nineteenthcentury Nelsonia within the wider context of Romantic collecting and domestic display.

Naval Celebrity, Romantic Collecting and Domestic Display It is important to note that it was not only after his death at Trafalgar that decorative objects relating to Nelson began to appear in the marketplace. A profusion of souvenirs, trinkets and knick-knacks – ranging from items of personal adornment, such as jewellery, ribbons and fans, to homewares, including enamel drawer handles and ceramic plates and jugs – had marked his earlier triumph at the Battle of the Nile in 1798 (see Lincoln 2002, 142; Williams 2005, 69–70). These material objects formed part of a wider eighteenth-century trend for collecting items depicting or associated with celebrities. As Tom Mole has argued, ‘the modern vocabulary for talking about celebrity emerged with the phenomenon it described’ in the mid 1700s, along with an entire cultural apparatus that worked to connect famous people with their audiences (2007, xi). In particular, innovations in image production and reproduction at this time initiated new forms of public life, as it became easier than ever for consumers to know, purchase and display the likenesses of renowned personalities. New techniques such as stipple engraving opened up the market in portrait prints to ever-larger numbers of the middling classes, while the development of transfer-prints and transparencies widened the range of domestic artefacts (firescreens, lampshades and ceramics) on which the faces of the famous could be found (see Clarke 1991). By the end of the Romantic period, then, ‘one could meaningfully speak of a celebrity or a star as a special kind of person with a distinct kind of public profile’ (Mole 2007, xii) – a profile that was purposefully mediated and disseminated through visual and material culture. At first glance, the synergetic relationship between the worlds of celebrity and commodity might appear inimical to the values of a Romanticism that exhorted its followers to pursue ‘enjoyments, of a purer, more lasting, and more exquisite nature’ (Wordsworth and Coleridge 2005, 313) than the ‘intense but fleeting attachments to objects’ encouraged by consumer culture (Anderson 2002, 4). It is all too easy to align the acquisitive materialism of collectors of celebrity artefacts with the obsessive ‘getting and spending’ critiqued in Wordsworth’s anti-capitalist sonnet ‘The World is Too Much With Us’ (2011, 637, l. 2). However, as Judith Pascoe points out, the accumulative practices of Romantic-era collectors were in fact often driven by the very same ‘modes of longing (for permanence, immortality, pleasure, recognition) which suffuse romantic poetry’ (2006, 4). Romantic collecting and Romantic poetry shared a belief in the power of the imagination to bridge temporal and spatial divides and conjure immediate, emotionally charged (if virtual) interactions between contemplating subjects and absent referents. Collectible items associated with celebrities, in particular, promised to mitigate the distance separating public personalities from their audiences

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by fostering an illusory sense of intimacy and proximity; the celebrity’s image, branded onto domestic objects, offered consumers a tangible point of connection with the famous, rendering them recognisable, knowable and possessable. Crucially, the gratification derived from such imaginative encounters was not diminished by their parasocial status. To adapt Colin Campbell’s (1987) well-known argument, a Romantic ethos underpinned the commercialism of the nascent celebrity industry, as consumers vested collectible merchandise with a heady range of emotional attachments and resonances. Alongside luminaries from the worlds of theatre, literature and politics, naval heroes formed an important constellation in the eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury celebrity firmament. Following his victory over the Spanish at Porto Bello in 1739, Vice-Admiral Vernon’s image was extensively ‘festooned on tavern signs, mugs, prints and plates’ (Wilson 2005, 50), while Admiral Rodney’s features were immortalised in the form of a teapot after his 1782 triumph over the French at the Battle of the Saintes. Naval men clearly represented a highly marketable commodity in Georgian celebrity culture: when Admiral Keppel was acquitted with honour following a much-publicised court martial in 1779, the potter Josiah Wedgwood sent urgently for a portrait from which he might produce ‘pictures, bracelets, rings, seals &c.’ to meet the demands of an eager public. In a letter to Thomas Bentley, Wedgwood expressed regret at not having secured a copy of Keppel’s image sooner, claiming that his travelling salesman ‘could sell thousands of Keppels at any price. Oh Keppel Keppel – Why will not you send me a Keppel. I am perswaded [sic] if we had our wits about us as we ought to have had 2 or 3 months since we might have sold £1000 worth of this gentleman’s head in various ways’ (as cited in McKendrick 1960, 422). The celebrity appeal of naval heroes stemmed directly from their construction as exemplary men, role models who performed and embodied culturally potent ideals such as courage, vigour, self-mastery and self-sacrifice. As Margarette Lincoln notes, naval officers often played an active role in shaping this public image of themselves, commissioning portraits from well-known artists that might be copied and recirculated within Georgian print culture (2002, 33). Nelson, in particular, proved highly adept at deploying and manipulating the machinery of the period’s burgeoning celebrity industry. He made concerted efforts to augment his profile through both word and image, ‘author[ing] texts that he knew would be widely disseminated and intensively read’ (Jenks 2006, 190), and sitting for numerous portraits that might be quickly reproduced and disseminated as prints; indeed, Lord St Vincent once claimed, ‘That foolish little fellow has sat to every painter in London’ (Walker 2005, 33). Immortalised in canvases by Sir William Beechey, John Hoppner and Lemuel Francis Abbott, among others, Nelson’s distinctively marked and incomplete body (its right eye blinded, right arm amputated and brow scarred by shrapnel) quickly became one of the most widely and immediately recognisable in Romantic culture, epitomising a particular version of ‘stoic, affective, masculinist patriotism’ (Wilson 2005, 50). If the ‘official’ corpus of Nelson portraiture was integral to Nelson’s self-fashioning as a modern naval hero, the commemorative domestic objects that replicated and disseminated this imagery were similarly bound up with the material self-construction of those who bought and displayed them. Blurring the boundary between the purely functional and the purely ornamental, the decorated plates, jugs, tankards and glasspictures on which this chapter will focus did not serve simply as private, personal

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possessions. If displayed or used in one of the so-called ‘public’ rooms in the house – the hallway, the dining room, the drawing room or parlour – they also functioned as legible objects, ‘semi-public declaration[s] of opinion and loyalty’ (Williams 2005, 70) to be seen and interpreted by friends, family and other visitors to the home. Of course, the meanings identified in decorative Nelsonia by householders and guests were by no means static or univocal. Even if domestic ornaments are ‘consciously intended to put the impress of the owner upon domestic space’ (Pearce 1995, 258), such objects ‘may be the site of contested meanings and given different readings by men and women or by members of different social classes’ (Vincentelli 2000, 107). Commemorative wares featuring Nelson attracted a particularly diverse customer base, and thus could be used to shape and convey a wide range of social identities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Nelsonia was especially popular with naval men – in an 1813 letter, Maria Edgeworth records that Admiral Foley’s residence at Portsmouth was decorated with a plate featuring ‘a head of Lord Nelson, and the word Trafalgar’ (Hare 1895, 224) – but women, too, proved avid consumers of such items. Kate Williams suggests that Nelson’s image was ‘pervasively sentimentalised in consumer goods marketed to a female purse’ (2005, 67), and that shopping for Nelson-themed commodities was construed as a way for women to provide both moral and economic support for the war-depleted British nation. The cross-gender appeal of Romantic Nelsonia was matched by its cross-class appeal. The beautiful pearlware jugs produced in 1806 by the Cambrian pottery in Swansea – hand-painted with Nelson’s portrait and embellished with caillouté gilding by renowned decorator Thomas Pardoe – were designed to attract buyers from the wealthier sectors of society (fig. 8.2). The catalogue of the Cambrian Company’s 1808 Christie’s sale reveals that one such jug was sold to a customer from the fashionable St James’s area of London for £1 2s.; another was purchased at the same sale for £1 3s. (Gray 2012, 276–7, 290–1). The merchant classes, too, were enthusiastic consumers of commemorative Nelsonia. As Lincoln notes, ‘patriotic display’ was not only ‘good for business’, but for ‘demonstrating and [. . .] enhancing social status’ when it took place within the home (2002, 101). Evidence of the middle-class taste for decorative Nelsonia can be found in the items excavated from 41 Southgate, a Georgian town house in Chichester, at a 1970 dig; among the fragments of early nineteenth-century pottery recovered there were an earthenware teacup and bowl celebrating the victory at Trafalgar (Down 1974, 31). Such transfer-printed items represented an attractive alternative to the expensive, hand-decorated objects preferred by the social elite – one better suited to the pocketbooks of the aspirational middle classes. The potteries of Sunderland and Newcastle, meanwhile, catered for the lower end of the commemoratives market; in particular, their ‘frog mugs’ (which contained a ceramic frog at the bottom of the vessel, ready to surprise drinkers as they drained its contents) were popular with sailors, who would incorporate them into their drinking games while on shore. The socially diverse character of the Britons who bought and displayed Romantic Nelsonia can perhaps be explained by the peculiarly mobile and ambiguous form of patriotism Nelson came to embody. Timothy Jenks argues that ‘one of the fundamental features of Nelson’s celebrity’ was ‘that it was open to use from a variety of partisan perspectives’: following his death, Nelson’s image was co-opted ‘by a state apparatus interested in emphasizing him as an object lesson in loyal service’ (2006, 185, 234), but it was also embraced by the wider populace in ways that could run

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counter to this officially sanctioned narrative. Nelson’s non-aristocratic origins and self-conscious identification with the ordinary seamen with whom he served meant that he could be recruited in the service of anti-establishment critique as well as loyalist affirmation. The sheer range of imagery available in the commemorative merchandise that appeared in the years 1805 and 1806 attests to this fluidity of meaning. Romantic Nelsonia, like the fine-art media on which it drew, engaged in wider artistic and political debates about how best to figure the national hero and, as a result, presented consumers with a dizzying array of representational alternatives from which to choose.

Commemorative Nelsonia (1): the Classical Mode The question of how best to represent the bodies of Britain’s martial heroes was very much in debate in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In keeping with the aesthetic philosophy of the pre-eminent portrait painter of the age, Sir Joshua Reynolds, many considered neoclassicism the most appropriate mode through which to convey the exemplary masculinity associated with the great men of British military history. The ‘grand style’ of neoclassical portraiture drew self-consciously on the poses and iconography of antique art in order to elevate and honour modern manhood, ‘sometimes deviat[ing] from vulgar and strict historical truth’ in order to achieve the desired impression of heroic grandeur (Reynolds 1778, 109). Justifying this use of ‘poetical licence’ (1778, 110), Reynolds explained that, unlike ‘the poet or historian’, the painter ‘cannot make his hero talk like a great man’; he must therefore ‘make him look like one’ (1778, 111–12). Reynolds’s insistence that no physical ‘defects ought to appear’ in visual narratives of male heroism gained significant cultural traction (1778, 110); writing in 1809, The Examiner’s art critic, Robert Hunt, argued that ‘to deviate from the common appearances of nature, and to combine the most select and beautiful parts so as to form an ideal and perfect whole, are essential to the more elevated class of painting’ (1809, 222). Of course, Nelson’s scarred and dismembered form existed in conspicuous tension with the neoclassical emphasis on corporeal integrity and physical perfection. As Michals points out, even if we discount the visible effects of Nelson’s battle wounds, his ‘short, slight, and frequently fever-ridden body differed markedly from the heroic masculine ideal’ (2015, 35). It is perhaps unsurprising to find, then, that a number of artists sought to mask or even rehabilitate Nelson’s injuries, downplaying – and occasionally ignoring outright – features such as his ‘fin’ (the name that he gave to the stump of his amputated right arm). Arthur William Devis’s The Death of Nelson (1807) was praised by contemporaries for its ‘faithful’ representation of the death ‘of one of our greatest naval heroes, precisely as it occurred in the Cockpit of the ship Victory’ (H[unt] 1809, 222); however, Devis’s concern for verisimilitude clearly didn’t extend to figuring Nelson’s amputated limb, as the expiring admiral’s stump is carefully concealed beneath the white cloth that swathes his naked form. The visual arrangement of this fabric recalls the drapery of ancient statuary; Devis’s painting thus works subtly to marmorealise Nelson into the classical tradition even as it promises to represent the moment of his death as it really happened. By contrast, John Flaxman’s Monument to Nelson (1808–18) in St Paul’s Cathedral depicts the hero of Trafalgar fully clothed in modern dress. Yet, as Hoock notes, this sculpture too ‘almost ignore[s] the admiral’s progressive mutilations’, concealing Nelson’s dismembered arm under

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the coat that hangs from his right shoulder and presenting ‘both eyes intact, with the pupils incised’ (2005, 124). Perhaps the most egregious example of corporeal renovation is to be found in Scott Pierre Legrand’s Apotheosis of Nelson (c. 1805–18), however. Wilson points out that this painting depicts ‘a deified Nelson being received into immortality among the gods’, his body made miraculously whole again as it ascends to the heavens; ‘his left arm is concealed, but his right arm broadly gestures’ (2005, 64). The makers of decorative art-objects had a smaller surface on which to convey visual narratives of Nelson’s heroism than the painters and sculptors working in the neoclassical tradition, but they nevertheless incorporated a number of the themes and motifs associated with the ‘grand style’ into their works. They also developed ingenious strategies by which to overcome the aesthetic problem of how to represent Nelson’s incomplete, wounded body in the heroic mode. One of these was to render Nelson as already sculptural in form, rather than as a fleshly, living being. The central panel of an 1806 Coalport porcelain plate decorated by Thomas Baxter, for instance, depicts a carved bust of Nelson on a stone plinth, unveiled by a spear-wielding Britannia, who is modelled on his lover Emma Hamilton (fig. 8.3). The plate’s parergonal features – its border of sphinxes and purple marbling – self-consciously reference the ancient world, while also hinting at Britain’s more recent victory at the Nile. The sculpted Nelson’s wreathed head and patrician bearing, meanwhile, recall the portraiture of the Roman Republic, forging deliberate links between the modern military icon and the triumphant heroes of antiquity. The subtle decentring of Nelson’s body in this object (it is Britannia’s imposing physique that occupies the central position on the plate) indicates that his function here is predominantly symbolic; he is immortalised as the servant of a vital, vigorous patriotism, which takes centre stage. Given this foregrounding of nationalistic sentiment, it is tempting to read the empty sleeve that lies across Nelson’s breast less as a signifier of disability and more as a codified gesture of masculine nobility and chauvinistic pride. As Arline Meyer notes, the placement of Nelson’s sleeve mimics the ‘hand-in-waistcoat’ pose frequently found in portraits of eighteenth-century men – a ‘classically derived stance’ that took hold at the ‘critical juncture when England was emerging as a national power’ and sought to bolster its self-image by adopting an ‘Augustan’ attitude (1995, 63, 49). Baxter’s finely decorated plate would have been marketed to relatively well-off consumers, who wanted to display their cultural capital and artistic literacy; however, it was not only higher-end wares that commemorated Nelson by visualising him in classical, sculptural form. Cheaper items, such as the creamware mugs produced by the Newcastle pottery, deployed a similar aesthetic in their tributes to the fallen hero. One example from circa 1805 (which was available in both black transfer-printed and hand-coloured variations) features a monument to Nelson, bedecked with flags and naval trophies (fig. 8.4).3 In the centre of the shrine, between two fasces, sits a portrait of Nelson, based on an 1800 drawing by Simon de Koster, which was subsequently popularised as an engraving by James Stow.4 The image (which, according to Nelson, achieved the best likeness of him) shows the admiral’s head in side profile, looking away to the left. For Leo Braudy, this arrangement, whereby the sitter ‘gazes outside of the frame, into eternity or posterity’, signals ‘an assurance of personal destiny’ (1997, 399); in Nelson’s case, it also has the convenient advantage of excluding any visual reference to his amputated right arm. Nelson’s strongly defined features here replicate the portraiture found on classical coins and medallions, and his mien is suggestive of

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Figure 8.4  Lead-glazed, earthenware mug by the Newcastle Pottery, c. 1805. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London. the Roman value of virtus: patriotic duty, martial bravery and moral fortitude. The mug’s celebration of masculine valour and heroic victory in classical terms continues with the inclusion of the Latin motto from Nelson’s coat of arms at the bottom of the monument (‘palmam qui meruit ferat’, or ‘let him bear away the palm who has deserved it’). The lines of verse inscribed just beneath the rim of the mug amplify this effect, directing the reader-viewer’s attention away from Nelson’s material body and onto his undying spirit, which now imbues the nation’s soul: ‘Remember whilst his mortal part has rest / Th’ immortal lives in every Briton’s breast’. Nelson’s physical remains may be no more, but his name will perpetuate in posterity, the mug suggests: ‘recording fame / Inscribes a deathless Volume to his Name’. This investment in posthumous renown as a means to immortality not only exemplifies Romantic attitudes to death and celebrity, but also echoes the celebratory practices of ancient civilisations, which placed particular ‘emphasis on fame at the point of death’ (Braudy 1997, 60). In both its verbal and visual schema, then, the Newcastle mug is indebted to a mix of classical fame cultures and representational practices. Significantly, though, the mug’s illustration of idealised, classicised masculinity coexists with some rather more plebeian imagery. Perhaps appropriately for a domestic object likely to have been purchased and displayed by modestly stationed consumers (possibly with naval connections), the national mourning imagined here is associated not with the allegorical figure of Britannia, but with two ordinary men of the type who might have served alongside Nelson: his monument is flanked on the left by a griefstricken sailor and on the right by a solemn, downcast marine. This compositional

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arrangement, with the sculpted hero surrounded by mourning seaman, was a common one in commemorative Nelsonia, its popularity no doubt deriving from its explicit visualisation of the eighteenth-century idea that ‘the leader is a larger version of the individual citizen as well as a concentration of the meaning of the nation’ (Braudy 1997, 399). The image on the Newcastle mug is based on a coloured engraving published by Laurie & Whittle of Fleet Street in December 1805, but variations on its theme can be found in a number of other decorative art-objects, particularly the glass-pictures that were swiftly marketed in the wake of Nelson’s death.5 One such item, by the maker W. B. Walker, dated 20 January 1806, portrays two desolate sailors resting against a monument decorated with the de Koster portrait, again tethering the idealised, classicised image of the military hero to more ordinary embodiments of contemporary masculinity in the interests of a cohesive, socially inclusive patriotism.6 The picture’s simultaneous celebration of individual fame and promotion of collective, nationalistic feeling is cemented by the inclusion of the national figurehead, Britannia, atop of Nelson’s monument, holding the twin symbols of victory – a laurel wreath and a palm branch – in her hands. Britannia was a common figure in such glass-pictures, where, fitted with her familiar accoutrements – helmet, trident and shield – and accompanied by a lion at her feet, she mostly served a symbolic function. One example by J. Hinton, however, generates a more ambiguous set of meanings.7 A dejected Britannia rests her elbow on the plinth of a monument to Nelson, with eyes downcast; opposite her, a seaman adopts a similar pose, while before her a young midshipman raises his hands in prayer, as she rests a comforting arm on his shoulder. Although Britannia wears her traditional plumed helmet in this picture, her dress is not distinctively antique in style; at first glance, then, the scene is suggestive of a simple family grouping, its members united in grief. The slippage between Britannia as national emblem and as ordinary maternal figure here invites viewers to recognise women as active participants in the national mourning that greeted Nelson’s death, forging a prospective space for them within the androcentric patriotism of the domestic art-objects considered so far. Indeed, early nineteenth-century women may well have fashioned their own, amateur versions of commemorative glass-pictures, to be framed and displayed within the home. As well as retailing such items, printsellers such as Rudolph Ackermann and Edward Orme provided their genteel female customer-base with the manuals and materials necessary to produce their own transparent handicrafts. In his Essay on Transparent Prints, Orme urged his ‘fair country-women [. . .] to make experiments in this art’ (1807, 45), and provided them not only with directions on how to fix engravings upon glass using Venice turpentine, but also on how to transform more affordable materials, such as linen and paper, into decorative transparencies. The resulting artworks could be used to ornament domestic spaces, but also to participate in public acts of pageantry and commemoration. John Plunkett explains that transparencies played a role in the general illuminations that typically followed great national events, including Nelson’s death; private families could contribute to these civic celebrations by displaying illuminated images from their homes, a phenomenon that ‘transformed the appearance of cityscapes up and down the land’ (2013, 46). Indeed, by replicating the glow associated with traditional stained glass, the transparent prints that commemorated Nelson’s death would have created a heightened sensory-aesthetic experience for observers, imbuing their representations of classicised masculinity and heroic apotheosis not only with an antique feel, but also with a reverential, quasi-religious aura.

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Commemorative Nelsonia (2): the Romantic-Heroic mode Classical cultures provided domestic arts manufacturers with a means of sacralising Nelson in death and immortalising his memory in ways that minimised visual references to his scarred and incomplete body, while also enabling Romantic consumers to demonstrate their conversance with prevailing ideas of artistic good taste. The problem with this approach, however, was that it risked ossifying Nelson’s identity, cementing him into stateliness and patricianism in ways that did not always fit with his independent, sometimes defiant personality. Many early nineteenth-century Britons celebrated Nelson as a ‘man of the people’, rather than a representative of state power. Thus, running counter to the staticising impulse of classically inspired Nelsonia was a body of representation that sought to energise and vitalise Nelson’s image, aligning it with more Romanticised conceptions of heroic masculinity. Whereas the sculptural and monumental forms preferred in classicised commemorative objects transformed Nelson into an emblematic hero, the abstract distillation of a patriotic ideal, Romantically inflected Nelsonia typically championed a more dynamic, humanised version of heroism – one that more readily accommodated references to bodily suffering and corporeal fragility. One of the favoured source-images for manufacturers seeking to represent Nelson in the Romantic-heroic mode was Daniel Orme’s hugely popular 1798 stipple engraving, in which a youthful-looking Nelson is figured as a dashing ‘Byronic hero’ (Walker 2005, 37), with cropped, tousled hair and chiselled features.8 Although Orme’s image, of course, predates Byron’s published works, it is possible to see parallels between the heroic attitude cultivated here and the bold spirit later imagined in Byron’s 1814 bestseller The Corsair, where the pirate-chief Conrad holds ‘No dread of death’, but rather ‘woo[s] the approaching fight’, ‘turn[ing] what some deem danger to delight’ (1959, 278, ll. 23, 17–18). Like Conrad, Nelson seems ready to leap into action in Orme’s portrait; his body position inclines forward, implying a certain restless energy, while the prominently displayed Naval Gold Medal and Star of the Order of the Bath at his breast provide visual confirmation of his bravery and relish for battle. Interestingly, a number of commemorative ceramics adapted Orme’s image by adding four ships and a seascape to the background, actively tying Nelson to the theatre of war in which he thrived. One such example, an 1806 earthenware jug, also includes pennants lauding the victories at Trafalgar and the Nile, and lines of verse that celebrate Nelson as a warrior-hero (fig. 8.5). The intrepid leader is ‘matchless in arms’, the jug suggests; his ‘valour crush’d the power of Spain’ and his ‘thunder bent the haughty Gaul’. The naïve oak leaves that decorate the jug’s rim further indicate that Nelson is a man with a ‘heart of oak’, always ready (in the words of the Royal Navy’s famous marching song) to fight and conquer, again and again. The commemorative ceramics produced by the Herculaneum pottery in Liverpool similarly conjured Nelson as a man of action in the Romantic-heroic mode (fig. 8.6). Drawing on another popular 1798 stipple engraving – this time by John Chapman9 – the Herculaneum’s jugs and mugs invested Nelson’s form with a sense of quickness and vitality, very different from the remoteness implied by the sculptified heads in the classicised imagery explored earlier. The ceramics’ paean to masculine vigour is enhanced by the inclusion of supplementary textual and cartographic material: Nelson’s portrait is framed by his famous appeal to patriotic service, ‘England expects

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Figure 8.5  Earthenware jug, unknown maker, 1806. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Sutcliffe-Smith Collection.

Figure 8.6  Earthenware, transfer-printed jug, Herculaneum Pottery, Liverpool, c. 1805. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

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every Man to do his duty’, while, on the reverse of the large jugs, a battle plan of Trafalgar is accompanied by a narrative account of ‘intrepid’ Nelson’s ‘glorious’ victory over ‘the combined / fleet of France and Spain’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the active, spirited model of gallantry valorised in this type of Romantic Nelsonia seems to have been particularly popular with male householders: an 1807 blue transfer-printed jug that represents Nelson in the dashing, heroic style is inscribed with the name ‘John Hyde’, while the 1806 jug in figure 8.5 is dedicated to ‘James Harris’, who may himself have had naval connections (at least three men with that name served at the Battle of Trafalgar).10 While some of the domestic artefacts that represented Nelson in the dynamicheroic mode sought, like their classicising counterparts, to modulate references to wounding and disfigurement, others foregrounded – in fact, almost venerated – the fact of Nelson’s disability. As Wordsworth indicated in his 1807 poetic tribute to the hero of Trafalgar, the Nelsonian ‘happy warrior’ is no immortal, left unscathed by his martial exploits, but a man ‘doom’d to go in company with Pain’ (2011, 600, l. 12). Accordingly, the physical traces of his pain should not be interpreted as defects, but as badges of honour, salutary reminders of his exemplary stoicism and fortitude; the happy warrior is a man ‘more able to endure, / As more expos’d to suffering and distress’ (601, ll. 24–5). Notably, Wordsworth was not the only poet to have admired Nelson’s simultaneous vulnerability to and capacity to withstand bodily trauma. As Jenks has demonstrated, the mass of commemorative poetry that flooded the market in late 1805 and 1806 ‘referred regularly to [Nelson’s] “nobly mutilated form”’ and ‘“Lopp’d, batter’d and broke”’ body (Jenks 2006, 197–8), conjoining ideas of heroism with ideas of physical self-sacrifice. In the fine arts, too, some Nelsonia departed from strict neoclassical convention by explicitly ‘incorporating disability into the representation of heroic military masculinity’ (Michals 2015, 36). Lemuel Francis Abbott’s much-reproduced 1797 portrait, painted while Nelson was recuperating at Greenwich following the amputation of his arm, forces the viewer to confront the physical effects of that agonising operation: the lower portion of Nelson’s right sleeve is conspicuously flattened against his chest, with no limb present to fill out the material, while the upper part is tied with ribbons, the stitching having being torn open to accommodate the dressing on Nelson’s still-healing stump. According to Richard Walker, Abbott’s original painting describes ‘the severe unsmiling countenance of a man in great pain’ (2005, 39), and something of that suffering is also captured in the hand-painted portrait that decorates the Cambrian pottery jug in figure 8.2. Based on William Barnard’s 1806 mezzotint after Abbott,11 the jug depicts a ‘haggard and weary’ Nelson, his melancholic face unsmiling, his eyes heavily lined, and his grey hair ‘combed over his forehead to conceal the permanent scar above his right eye’ (Hallesy 2017, 71). Although, like Barnard’s engraving, the jug omits the ribbons from Nelson’s right sleeve, in other ways it makes Nelson’s disability highly visible, the flattened fabric of the sleeve and empty aperture at the cuff both attesting to the extreme physical suffering he had undergone. Another way in which commemorative wares captured the heroic male body in pain was to show Nelson at the moment of his fatal wounding. There was an appetite for such death scenes in Romantic culture; shortly after news of Nelson’s death

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reached Britain, the printsellers Boydell & Co. offered ‘five-hundred guineas to any British artist who shall paint the best picture on the subject’ in the ‘size’ and ‘manner of [Benjamin West’s] death of General Wolfe’ (‘The Fine Arts’, 601). Domestic art-objects lacked the scope to reproduce such epic visual accounts, so instead tended to zero in on Nelson’s dying body. This was a particularly popular subject for the makers of glasspictures; Leslie P. Le Quesne identifies more than ten different variations on the theme, most of which were published in the two months following Nelson’s death (2001, 34–43). One of the earliest, published by Hinton on 21 November 1805, is a highly romanticised construction: Nelson’s pale, lifeless body is draped dramatically across a red couch, while the ship’s surgeon anxiously takes his pulse and an attending group of officers and men demonstratively weep and pray (see Le Quesne 2001, 43). The picture is unusual in its depiction of an interior scene; more commonly, glass-pictures featured Nelson on the quarterdeck, having just been shot through the left shoulder by a French sniper. Unsurprisingly, this climactic moment held a particular emotional charge for the British public. The authors of the 1806 poem, Stanzas on Lord Nelson’s Death and Victory, apostrophised: O see th’ expiring Chief ’midst Conquest’s rays, Yield up the fleeting Breath that Nature gave; Enrapt in glory, one unclouded blaze! He looks for Heav’n, and smiles upon the Grave. (Bentley 1806, ll. 9–12) As well as capturing the apotheotic sentiments expressed here, Romantic Nelsonia also worked to foreground themes of masculine emotion and fraternal love. The firms of Walker, Patriarcha, Stampa and Hinton all produced glass-pictures portraying the dying Nelson falling into the arms of his colleagues, as did the Bilston-based makers of enamelled patch-boxes.12 Although not strictly historically accurate, these representations of Nelson’s death neatly demonstrate how ‘martial men were imagined through emotionalised bodies’ in Romantic culture (Begiato 2020, 20). In his dispatches from Trafalgar, published by The Times on 7 November 1805, Vice-Admiral Collingwood had given keen expression to the affective power of male military friendships, confessing ‘my heart is rent with the most poignant grief for the death of a friend, to whom [. . .] I was bound by the strongest ties of affection’ (‘The London Gazette Extraordinary’ 1805, 1). Decorative art-objects such as the glass-picture in figure 8.7 emphasised the intensity, but also the crossclass nature of these male bonds; as the mortally wounded Nelson gives his last instructions to his fellow officer, Captain Hardy, his dying body is cradled by two lower-ranking sailors. The intersecting themes of comradeship and patriotic duty, love and loss visualised here would have resonated powerfully with a large section of the British public, over a fifth of whom had had direct involvement in the war against France. By tacitly recruiting Nelson as a ‘screen’ on which those who had fought or lost loved ones ‘could project their own experience, identifications and desires for recognition’ (Wilson 2005, 63), such imagery forged sentimental points of connection between the iconic hero and the ordinary citizens who displayed Nelsonia within their homes.

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Figure 8.7  Picture transfer-printed on glass by J. Hinton, 21 November 1805. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

Conclusion Today, posthumously produced celebrity memorabilia tend to be dismissed as mere kitsch; tasteless, vulgar tat designed to appeal to the least discriminating of consumers. In her study of European collecting traditions, Susan Pearce characterises the products of the contemporary ‘gift ware and collectable “instant heritage”’ markets as ‘spurious, illegitimate and essentially trivial’, ‘a cynical parody of “sacred values”’ (Pearce 1995, 409). Such disdainful attitudes are conspicuously absent, however, from the discourse surrounding early nineteenth-century commemorative Nelsonia. Although the officials at St Paul’s Cathedral were roundly criticised for ‘cashing-in’ on Nelson’s death by charging visitors to see his tomb (Hoock 2005, 133), the producers of domestic art-objects that

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commoditised his memory were spared similar censure. Commemorative merchandise was understood to be a legitimate part of memorial culture; indeed, it was seen as doubly patriotic, for not only did the display of Nelsonia within the home communicate a sense of nationalistic pride, the purchase of such objects helped to bolster the war-ravaged national economy (Williams 2005, 70). Tellingly, the scene of production of commemorative manufactures was itself considered worthy of representation and display in the early nineteenth century. An 1810 watercolour in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection (fig. 8.8) depicts the porcelain painters of Thomas Baxter’s workshop labouring over the decoration of a range of ceramic items, including the neoclassical-style plate of Nelson and Britannia illustrated in figure 8.3, which can be seen in the bottom left-hand corner of the image.

Figure 8.8  Thomas Baxter, Jr, Painting Room of Mr Baxter, No 1 Goldsmith Street, Gough Square, London, 1810. Watercolour. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

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In later years, commemorative Nelsonia would be sought after by well-off private collectors, such as Lady Dorothy Neville, Lady Charlotte Schreiber and Lily Lambert McCarthy, and subsequently bequeathed into national museum collections, where, decoupled from its original, domestic context, it was made to signify in more homogeneous, less personalised ways. At the moment of its production, however, Romantic Nelsonia was enthusiastically bought and displayed by an eclectic, socially diverse range of consumers, and invested with an equally miscellaneous array of meanings. Like the fine-art culture it emulated and adapted, Nelsonia deployed a variety of representational modes, enabling consumers to articulate their personal, social and cultural identities through their aesthetic choices. From the classicising to the proto-Byronic, the sacralising to the sentimental, domestic objects bearing Nelson’s image functioned as important theatres of identification and repositories of taste and value, demonstrating the complex assortment of visual preferences, political allegiances and cultural ideals at work in Romantic culture.

Notes   1.   2.   3.   4.  5.   6.   7.   8.   9. 10. 11. 12.

National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, item nos. PAG6706 and PAD3935. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, item nos. TXT0267, TXT0120 and TXT0121. See also National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, item no. AAA4933. British Museum, London, item no. 1868,0808.1833. For the engraving, see Brown University Library Digital Repository, (last accessed 28 April 2022). For examples of the glass-pictures, see Le Quesne (2001, 60–2). National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, item no. GGG0511. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, item no. GGG0510. National Portrait Gallery, London, item no. NPG D5335. British Museum, London, item no. 1918,0107.72. For the ‘John Hyde’ jug, see National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, item no. AAA4874. The National Archives’ ‘Trafalgar Ancestors’ database records the names of those who served at the battle. National Portrait Gallery, London, item no. NPG D38490. See National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, item nos. GGG0498 and GGG0507 (glasspictures); and OBJ0020, OBJ0068 and OBJ0142 (patch-boxes).

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Down, Alec. 1974. Chichester Excavations II. Chichester: Phillimore. Gray, Jonathan. 2012. The Cambrian Company: Swansea Pottery in London, 1806–1808. Llandysul: Gomer Press. Hallesy, Helen. 2017. Swansea Commemorative Pottery. Llandysul: Gomer Press. Hare, Augustus J. C., ed. 1895. The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. I. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company. Hoock, Holger. 2005. ‘Nelson Entombed: The Military and Naval Pantheon in St Paul’s Cathedral’. In Admiral Lord Nelson: Context and Legacy, edited by David Cannadine, 115–43. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. H[unt], R[obert]. 1809. ‘Fine Arts.’ The Examiner 66: 222–3. Jenks, Timothy. 2006. Naval Engagements: Patriotism, Cultural Politics, and the Royal Navy 1793–1815. Oxford: Oxford UP. Le Quesne, L. P. 2001. Nelson Commemorated in Glass Pictures. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club. Lewis, Theresa. 1865. Extracts of the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry from the Year 1783 to 1852, Vol. II. London: Longman, Green, and Co. Lincoln, Margarette. 2002. Representing the Royal Navy: British Sea Power, 1750–1815. London and New York: Routledge. McKendrick, N. 1960. ‘Josiah Wedgwood: An Eighteenth-Century Entrepreneur in Salesmanship and Marketing Techniques’. The Economic History Review 12 (3): 408–33. Meyer, Arline. 1995. ‘Re-dressing Classical Statuary: The Eighteenth-Century “Hand-inWaistcoat” Portrait’. The Art Bulletin 77 (1): 45–63. Michals, Teresa. 2015. ‘Invisible Amputation and Heroic Masculinity’. Studies in EighteenthCentury Culture 44: 17–39. Mole, Tom. 2007. Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ‘Monthly Retrospect of the Fine Arts’. 1805. Monthly Magazine, or, British Register 20 (136): 448–50. ‘Monthly Retrospect of the Fine Arts’. 1806. Monthly Magazine, or, British Register 20 (137): 547–9. Orme, Edward. 1807. An Essay on Transparent Prints and on Transparencies in General. London: Printed for and sold by the author. Pascoe, Judith. 2006. The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collections. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell UP. Pearce, Susan M. 1995. On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition. London and New York: Routledge. Plunkett, John. 2013. ‘Light Work: Feminine Leisure and the Making of Transparencies’. In Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain, edited by Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski, 43–67. Farnham: Ashgate. Reynolds, Joshua. 1778. Seven Discourses Delivered in the Royal Academy by the President. London: T. Cadell. Robinson, Cicely. 2018. ‘The Apotheosis of Nelson in the National Gallery of Naval Art’. In A New Naval History, edited by Quintin Colville and James Davey, 151–74. Manchester: Manchester UP. ‘The Fine Arts’. 1805. The Literary Magazine; or, Monthly Epitome of British Literature 1: 601–3. ‘The London Gazette Extraordinary’. 1805. The Times (7 November 1805), 1. Vincentelli, Moira. 2000. Women and Ceramics: Gendered Vessels. Manchester: Manchester UP. Walker, Richard. 2005. ‘The Nelson Portraits’. In The Nelson Companion, edited by Colin White, 33–57. Stroud: Sutton Publishing.

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Williams, Kate. 2005. ‘Nelson and Women: Marketing, Representations and the Female Consumer’. In Admiral Lord Nelson: Context and Legacy, edited by David Cannadine, 67–89. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilson, Kathleen. 2005. ‘Nelson and the People: Manliness, Patriotism and Body Politics’. In Admiral Lord Nelson: Context and Legacy, edited by David Cannadine, 49–66. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wordsworth, William. 2011. The Poems of William Wordsworth, Vol. I, edited by Jared Curtis. Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks. ProQuest. Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 2005. Lyrical Ballads. Edited by R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones. London and New York: Routledge. ProQuest.

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9 Building(s) for Art: The Evolution of Public Art Galleries in England, 1780–1840 Susanna Avery-Quash

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n 1768, on account of being commissioned to produce portraits of the 3rd Duke and Duchess of Montagu, Thomas Gainsborough encountered Rubens’s painting now known as The Watering Place on display in their private home in London. Rubens’s idyllic rustic scene so impressed Gainsborough that he advised his friend, the actor and playwright David Garrick, to invent an excuse to call on the duke in order that he might get ‘to see his Grace’s Landskip of Rubens’ (Egerton 1998, 112), and painted his own Watering Place (National Gallery, London) in response. Half a century later, in 1820, another eminent English painter, J. M. W. Turner, promoted more explicitly the advantages arising from displaying great art in places where many people could benefit from it. Turner exhibited Rome from the Vatican: Raffaelle, Accompanied by La Fornarina, Preparing his Pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia at the Royal Academy (fig. 9.1) and in 1843 he finished another historicising painting commemorating the patronage of

Figure 9.1  J. M. W. Turner, Rome from the Vatican: Raffaelle, Accompanied by La Fornarina, Preparing his Pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia, 1820. Oil on canvas. Tate. Photo: Tate.

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publicly visible art, The Opening of the Wallhalla. These were the first and last of a series celebrating the arts, especially his own profession of painting. Part of Turner’s message was that for art to create and sustain the reputation of its creator, as well as to be of value to society, it had to be visible in public locations (Smiles 2007, 29–33). In the quarter century between the creation of Turner’s two works, the artistic landscape in Britain was transformed along the lines for which he had been arguing. Indeed, the Romantic era may be characterised as one of construction, with the creation on an unprecedented scale of a nationwide network of canals and railways, harbours and bridges, dams and sewers, as well as factories and houses. Britain’s cultural landscape also became increasingly populated with built spaces where art could be enjoyed ever-more publicly, by more diverse sections of society and on a permanent basis. This chapter will chart this development, with a geographical focus on London, which, as England’s capital city and the country’s financial and cultural core, set precedents which were followed in other important regional centres.

Promotion of the Fine Arts by the Church, Parliament and Crown In western Europe, especially in Roman Catholic France, Italy, Spain, the southern Netherlands and southern Germany, paintings and sculptures had traditionally been visible in ecclesiastical settings. In Britain, by contrast, the Protestant Church, since the dissolution of the monasteries and the later destruction of religious images under Oliver Cromwell’s ultra-Protestant regime, had done comparatively little to patronise the arts for fear of being accused of promoting popish practices. James Thornhill’s murals of 1719 for the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral were a notable exception. More characteristic was the failed scheme to decorate St Paul’s in the 1770s, an early suggestion of the Royal Academy, but foiled by the Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury (Pears 1988 and Lippincott 1983). The government, likewise, had never been swift to plough money into the arts. Indeed, successive parliaments at the end of the eighteenth century concentrated on recouping national finances after the American War, on financing the subsequent war against Napoleon and maintaining its political dominance in Ireland. Unsurprisingly, Pitt’s Act of Union of 1800 limited central government’s duties to defence of the realm, maintenance of law and order, and raising of revenue. In terms of public patronage, a handful of contemporary British sculptors were commissioned through the government’s Committee of Taste, set up in 1802, to create commemorative sculpture in St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey and elsewhere to the heroes of the Napoleonic wars. It was through this scheme that John Flaxman’s memorial to Admiral Lord Nelson was erected in St Paul’s in 1809, and that the Wellington Arch was commissioned. Equally limited was the British government’s willingness to buy historical works of art. Despite having overseen the opening in 1759 of the flagship British Museum, Parliament bought relatively few works to fill it; its purchase of the Townley antiquities in 1805 and the Parthenon Marbles in 1815 became the most prominent examples. It was slower to acquire paintings from the past, missing out more than once on the chance to establish a suitable nucleus. Arguably, the greatest lost opportunity was the sale in 1779 of the collection of the statesman Sir Robert Walpole from his country seat, Houghton Hall, Norfolk, which included works by Rubens, Van Dyck,

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Velázquez and Rembrandt (Morel et al. 2013). When his grandson put the collection up for sale, the radical MP John Wilkes suggested that the House of Commons should purchase it. When Parliament failed to act, the pictures were eagerly bought by Empress Catherine the Great of Russia. As far as the British government was concerned, promotion of culture, including the fine arts, should remain the preserve of private citizens. In relation to the British monarchy, there was a tradition, motivated by Continental practices, from the time of Charles I and continuing under George III and IV, of allowing elite visitors to inspect the royal collections. Although the superlative art collection built up by King Charles I was largely dispersed after his execution, some great works were retained for the country including a hugely esteemed set of tapestry cartoons by Raphael, while after the Restoration, Charles II succeeded in acquiring back a number of works. Among the earliest accessible parts of the royal collection were Windsor Castle’s state apartments, guidebooks for which survive from 1742 (Waterfield 1991, 68–73). Raphael’s cartoons, at Windsor since 1787, were moved to Hampton Court in 1809 (fig. 9.2). There they were made publicly accessible from 1838, having an untold influence on subsequent generations of English artists.

Figure 9.2  James Stephanoff, Cartoon Gallery at Hampton Court, c. 1815. From W. H. Pyne, The History of the Royal Residences, 1819, II, plate 44. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

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Privately-Owned Art Displayed in Semi-Public Spaces Traditionally, art collectors in Britain were members of the aristocracy who displayed their possessions in their country houses and increasingly their London town houses. During the long eighteenth century, many of England’s grandest stately homes, including Wilton House near Salisbury, Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire and Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, became known not only for their architecture and landscape gardens but also for their impressive collections of sculptures and paintings (Anderson 2018). It was also in the private sphere that groups of philanthropically minded individuals acted collectively to acquire paintings for display in semi-public spaces in important urban centres. Notably, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge had from at least the seventeenth century acquired portraits of former heads of houses and renowned alumni to hang in college dining halls and masters’ lodges, with the occasional Old Master altarpiece adorning their chapels. This practice spread to the dining clubs and intellectual societies that sprung up in London and major provincial centres during the eighteenth century. For instance, in London, the Society of Antiquaries, founded in 1707, built up an impressive group of portraits of British monarchs, while the Society of Dilettanti, established in 1732, displayed likenesses of its members by esteemed portraitists such as Joshua Reynolds, Benjamin West and Thomas Lawrence in the rooms where its members dined. However, access to colleges and clubs was at the time largely limited to elite male members. An early charitable initiative which saw the establishment of a picture gallery was London’s Foundling Hospital (fig. 9.3) (Solkin 1993). The institution had been set up in Brunswick Square, Bloomsbury, in 1739, by the philanthropic sea captain Thomas

Figure 9.3  William Hallett, The Foundling Hospital: The Interior of the Court Room, wood engraving. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

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Coram (c. 1668–1751), to care for and educate some of London’s abandoned children. Instrumental in helping Coram realise his vision were the painter William Hogarth and the musician George Frideric Handel. Hogarth encouraged fellow painters, including Gainsborough, to donate pictures to decorate its Court Room in the 1740s, which became Britain’s first permanent display of contemporary British art. Some early hospitals in London likewise came to own paintings which they displayed in public spaces; for instance, St Thomas’s Hospital has long possessed Hogarth’s Christ at the Pool of Bethesda and The Good Samaritan of the 1730s, which the artist again gave for free, as well as a seventeenth-century Flemish School picture of Saint Bartholomew. It was also in the 1740s that certain professionals, such as the physician Dr Richard Mead (1673– 1754), and aristocrats, like the 3rd Duke of Richmond (1735–1806), started to open their own London-based art collections to native artists for study purposes, although, like the Foundling Hospital, they contained relatively few historical paintings. At this date, there were many spaces in which works of art were put on display in temporary structures, which helped acclimatise the UK population to the visual arts. One such important site of display was Vauxhall Gardens, on the south bank of the River Thames, which had been opened by the entrepreneur Jonathan Tyers in 1723. Londoners entertained themselves and their friends by strolling down the avenues, listening to music, and enjoying a meal in one of the ‘supper-boxes’ which dotted the principal walks. These dining pavilions were decorated with genre subjects such as The Milkmaid’s Garland by contemporary painters including Hogarth, Joseph Highmore and Francis Hayman, while Louis-François Roubiliac’s impressive statue of Handel (1738) was to be viewed outside, under an arch topped by a female figure symbolising Harmony (Solkin 1993). Throughout the eighteenth century, sculpture, of all the arts, was especially esteemed because of the status it accrued through association with the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome. Young British aristocrats, brought up on a diet of classical authors and who travelled round Europe on Grand Tours as the final stage of their education, became interested in the excavations being carried out in Rome, and later in Herculaneum and Pompeii (Bignamini and Hornsby 2010). They shipped home examples of antique sculpture as well as countless copies of the most esteemed originals such as the Venus de’ Medici and the Apollo Belvedere, creating designated galleries to display them. At London’s Lansdowne House, for instance, Lord Shelburne, later 1st Marquess of Lansdowne (1737–1805), commissioned Robert Adam in the 1760s–70s to design exhibition spaces for his Roman sculpture. Yet by the end of the century, sculpture’s supremacy had been challenged by a serious new interest in historical painting, a topic given much coverage in seminal publications on art history and taste, such as the Discourses of Reynolds, given in his capacity as first President of the Royal Academy. Paintings came to dominate the small museums associated with literary, philosophical and scientific societies, set up all over the country during the Romantic era by private citizens. They initially amassed heterogeneous collections dominated by geology, natural history and archaeology, but by the end of the eighteenth century there was a shift from these types of collections associated with curiosity cabinets of the past in favour of acquiring and showing paintings, whether original works by living painters (including portraits of people important to the societies in question) or copies of famous masterpieces by contemporary artists (just as has been noted in the case of sculpture, owning copies of first rate paintings was considered acceptable at a time

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when it was difficult to acquire genuine work by Continental Old Masters). One of the most impressive, if atypical collections, was formed round a nucleus of thirty-seven pictures bought by the Liverpool Royal Institution in 1819 from its first director, the leading abolitionist, MP, lawyer, banker, botanist and writer William Roscoe (1753– 1831), after he became bankrupt. Roscoe’s interest in Italian history had led him to publish on the Medici family of Renaissance Florence and to amass a pioneering collection of early Italian painting, including Simone Martini’s astonishing The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple of 1342. However, a more general interest in paintings before the time of Raphael started only from the 1840s–50s (McCue 2014). Much historical Continental art, mostly of a significantly later date than Roscoe’s pictures, started to flood into Britain. This came about, initially, due to the suppression of religious institutions across Catholic Europe first under the Austrians and then under the French, and later because many European aristocrats became keen to sell family heirlooms either to raise funds to pay the swingeing fines imposed by the French or to prevent them from being pilfered by Napoleon’s invading armies. Consequently, during the period 1780–1820, London became a new hub of the Old Master market, and numerous auctioneers, including James Christie and Harry Phillips (a former clerk at Christie’s), evolved flourishing businesses in London’s West End (Russell 2019, 205, 210). In the run-up to public auctions, auctioneers’ showrooms often displayed portraits from Roman and Genoese palaces and altarpieces from suppressed religious establishments, and dealers also started to make attractive displays of the works of art they were marketing. Indeed, when the famous Orléans collection arrived from Paris for sale in London in the 1790s, the two promoters responsible for the sale of its two halves organised selling exhibitions. Private contract sales had distinct advantages: for the seller because pictures were exhibited for a much longer period than the short period before an auction, and for the buyer because a fixed price was attached to each work at the start of the exhibition. The avid speculator Thomas Moore Slade (1749–1831) mounted such an exhibition from March to the end of April 1793 in relation to the Northern European pictures from the Orléans collection, while the dealer Michael Bryan (1757– 1821) took things up to another level in relation to the Italian and French pictures. On behalf of a syndicate of three aristocrats, to whom Bryan had sold this part of the collection, he arranged a display across two venues from 26 December 1798, which ultimately lasted about six months because its run was constantly extended (Avery-Quash and Penny 2019, 145–58). Such imports largely reflected the art historical canon as promoted by art academies all over Europe. With the establishment of the Royal Academy on the Strand, leading auction houses and dealers located around Pall Mall, and the artists’ quarter embedded in Covent Garden, London’s West End became Britain’s cradle for art’s primary and secondary markets in the same way that it had already established its dominance over the nation’s governance and trade (Dias 2004). Consequently, aristocrats who were already in the habit of abandoning their country seats for London during the sitting of parliament often started to think of their town houses as the more prestigious venue for the art they were busily acquiring. From the late eighteenth century, therefore, a stricter division of art started to be seen: the country seat usually retained inherited art collections whereas the most expensive, prized European Old Masters went on display in London. Certain noblemen could take advantage of the recent importations of paintings as

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they were richer than the monarch. For instance, the Dukes of Bedford, Bridgewater, Devonshire, Portland and Buccleuch, the Marquess of Stafford, and Earls Fitzwilliam and Grosvenor all enjoyed vast annual incomes of over £100,000 – wealth that was derived from ownership of land, urban real estate, docks, harbours, canals and mines, or from activities related to the slave trade. The inspiration to make their art collections in often grandiose Regency interiors publicly accessible derived in part from Continental European practices. For instance, the Elector Palatine Johann Wilhelm II von der Pfalz (1658–1716) in Düsseldorf and Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland (1696–1763), in Dresden both displayed their collections in purpose-built galleries which had been open to respectable citizens since the 1710s. In France, a similar discourse about the public role of private picture collections had been encouraged by the Parisian connoisseur and collector Pierre Crozat (1661–1740), through discussions at his weekly salon, where his circle of cognoscenti praised publicly accessible private galleries, such as that of Duke Philippe II of Orléans. Crozat’s campaign eventually led to part of the French royal collection being opened in the Palais du Luxembourg in 1750, but it was the opening of the Louvre as the Musée Français during the French Revolution in 1793 (McClellan 1994), which really galvanised the English aristocracy. The first English aristocrat to work systematically towards making his collection publicly accessible was George Leveson-Gower, one of the syndicate of noblemen who had purchased the Italian and French paintings from the Orléans Collection. In 1803, he became the 2nd Marquess of Stafford, inheriting a life interest in the important collection amassed by his uncle, the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater (also part of the syndicate), including paintings by Raphael, Titian and Poussin (Waterfield 1991, 74–5; Nellis Richter 2016; Humfrey 2019). Lord Stafford employed C. H. Tatham to add a purpose-built gallery at Cleveland House (later rebuilt as Bridgewater House) in 1805–6 (fig. 9.4); a restricted public was admitted, via a free but vetted ticketing system, from summer 1806, into an enfilade of rooms, a layout derived from Renaissance models. During the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, the number of private galleries in London open to visitors increased markedly. With the diversification of collectors’ socio-economic profiles, some London town houses were opened by members of the professional classes who were motivated by a dual desire to promote national taste and to raise their own social status through a display of cultural capital. One such was the financier and philanthropist John Julius Angerstein (1735–1823), born in St Petersburg (Avery-Quash 2019, 246–66). He had not inherited an art collection, nor had he been on a Grand Tour. Having made his money largely through what became Lloyd’s insurance market (business which involved insuring, among other things, slave ships in the Atlantic), he invested his wealth not only in land and ships and charitable causes, but also in forming a choice painting collection. This he did between the 1790s and 1810s, with the help of various experts, notably Thomas Lawrence, who became President of the Royal Academy in 1820. Angerstein’s collection at No. 100, Pall Mall, was opened to certain visitors on a sporadic basis from 1800. In a similar vein, Thomas Hope (1769–1831), of the banking dynasty, opened his art collection in one of the earliest purpose-built galleries to ticket-holders from 1804 (Waterfield 1991, 74). Private art collections considered of public relevance and national reputation started to be cited in city guides and almanacs, art and amateur journals, travel literature and auction catalogues, with some also depicted in prints and paintings. As they became

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Figure 9.4  ‘Elevation of New Gallery, Cleveland House’, from William Young Ottley’s Engravings of the most noble the Marquis of Stafford’s Collection of Pictures in London, 4 vols, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, etc., 1818. better known, private owners made concessions to ensure that what was on display was more understandable to a broader swathe of visitors, many of whom would not have had the classical education they enjoyed, and therefore would have been mystified by much of what they saw. Although the introduction of wall labels was still some way off, information was provided in Leicester’s pioneering picture gallery via information bats (Waterfield 1991, 76). More usual was the addition of ivory plaques with painted digits, nailed to the frames, which related to the numbering system found in accompanying catalogues (Penny 2008, 468), which were themselves often published in different formats and sold at different prices to suit different visitors’ needs and pockets (Sebag-Montefiore and Stourton 2012, 323–9). Visiting became increasingly formalised in other ways too, with published opening hours, the standard 10a.m.– 4p.m. timetable becoming commonplace after 1800 to accommodate natural daylight, even though this did not accommodate the working classes’ weekday schedules. Elite homes were not the only type of semi-public venue where works of art could be viewed. Artists often added galleries or showrooms to their homes. These were advantageous before dealers started to mount separate exhibitions of the work of contemporary painters, which became an increasingly common practice during the second half of the nineteenth century. According to John Feltham’s Picture of London of 1809: ‘The houses of all our first artists are well worth the attention of strangers; and the general compliment for seeing them is a shilling to the attendant’ (Feltham 1809, 316). Artists could showcase their own work or the Old Masters they owned but

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generally mixed up both types of art in order that the contrasting groupings could serve as sources of inspiration or as teaching devices, and could impress clients with the artistowner’s personal ability and learning. Several Presidents of the Royal Academy amassed important collections, including Reynolds, who, in his lectures, constantly reiterated that the two essential sources of inspiration for aspiring artists were nature and the art of the past. Perhaps his decision to open his collection in Leicester Fields to students and others was influenced by what he experienced abroad during his study-trip round the Low Countries in 1791, when he saw much art in private hands. Among the highlights of Reynolds’s private collection was a sixteenth-century copy of Michelangelo’s Leda and the Swan (now in the National Gallery, London) and a version of Giambologna’s sculpture of The Rape of the Sabines (Esposito 2019, 191–210). Similarly, Benjamin West, second President of the Royal Academy, exhibited works he had painted alongside his esteemed Old Master collection in his house-cum-studio at No. 14, Newman Street, off Oxford Street (Waterfield 1991, 77–8). A third PRA, Lawrence, had a passion for Old Master drawings and hoped that the nation would buy his unrivalled collection on reasonable terms after his death. The government failed yet again to respond thereby depriving the national collection of many potential outstanding works of art. Fortunately in this instance, a selection of Lawrence’s Michelangelo and Raphael drawings was bought by the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. During the period under review, it became customary for artists to hire venues where one or more of their works could be displayed for sale. These selling exhibitions had the advantage that their products did not have to jostle for attention among the work of rivals, as was the case with shows put on by established exhibiting bodies, such as the Society of Artists (1760–91) which pioneered such events from April 1760, or the Royal Academy, which carried on such work in parallel after 1780 (Waterfield 1991, 122–9). These speculative one-man shows reached a peak in the 1840s. A linked but separate development was the rise of exhibitions dedicated solely to the work of deceased painters, where the exhibits were not for sale. This phenomenon in the British context was the brainchild of a body called the British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom, established in 1805, with premises at No. 52, Pall Mall, originally built as Boydell’s ‘Shakespeare Gallery’ (Waterfield 1991, 129–32). Its original members (called ‘subscribers’) included some of the most important figures associated with the arts in Britain, although practising artists were excluded from membership. Many of the subscribers were active in opening their own collections to the public and in due course these same collectors would also be influential over the foundation of the National Gallery. Determined to promote a native school of art, the British Institution set up an art school offering painting classes to counterbalance the Royal Academy’s provision, where only drawing was taught until 1817. Many subscribers lent Old Masters for copying in this context; indeed, Angerstein’s loan of a Claude and Van Dyck is commemorated in a lively sketch by A. E. Chalon of 1805 (fig. 9.5). Likewise, several Grand Manner paintings were lent by the newly opened Dulwich Picture Gallery (see below). It was as a distinct departure that from 1813 the British Institution decided to organise annual displays of Old Masters. From this point onwards, these exhibitions included hundreds of loans, a fact that points up the strength of Old Master holdings in UK private collections. Becoming a fixture in London’s cultural life, after the British Institution disbanded in 1867 the initiative was taken forward by the Royal Academy from 1869.

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Figure 9.5  A. E. Chalon, Students at the British Institution, 1805. Pen and brown ink with watercolour. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Jointly Owned and Administered Collections in the Semi-Public Domain The logical next step was to found permanent public art galleries. Among the first to promote the idea were Royal Academicians. Reynolds offered at the end of his life, in vain, to loan his entire art collection if the Academy took over the premises for its display which were about to be released by the Society of Artists. After Reynolds’s death, the newly elected Professor of Painting, James Barry, took up the cause, suggesting that Reynolds’s collection should be purchased, a notion that did not find sufficient backing to be carried forwards. Later, Barry and others recommended that the Academy should purchase the Italian pictures from the Orléans Collection but once again nothing happened. Barry’s final suggestion was that a picture gallery should be purpose-built in the courtyard of Somerset House and filled with pictures bought with money allocated from the Academy’s surplus funds. When the Academicians insisted that any profits should instead provide pensions for indigent older members, Barry became so enraged and offensive that he was expelled. There were other Academicians, like John Opie (1761–1807), who kept the idea of a national collection alive, but others, including John Constable (1776–1837), were initially uncertain, fearing the competition arising from potential patrons purchasing works by dead Continental painters rather than supporting native contemporary talent. Even if the Royal Academy never established a public art gallery, it got some way with amassing a top-quality study collection. One source was contemporary art which came from the Academicians themselves; at the institution’s foundation it had been stipulated that whenever an artist was elected to full membership, they had to donate an example

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of their work to the Diploma Collection. Additionally, the Academy acquired some Old Masters, albeit not in the way that academies in European cities such as Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels became custodians of nascent regional art collections before independent state-run public art collections were established in the 1790s. Since the Academy at this period did not have an acquisitions policy or purchase grant, its accumulation of historical works was achieved mainly through gifts, with a few strategic purchases. The Royal Academy’s art collection included a few copies of iconic masterpieces, not only contemporary efforts like those after Raphael’s cartoons (Waterfield 1991, 68) but also an early copy of Leonardo’s famous Last Supper, possibly painted around 1520 and then attributed to Marco d’Oggiono. This was bought in 1821, for 600 guineas, the highest price the Academy had ever paid for any work of art. It was displayed prominently, in the Great Room, where during the winter months lectures were held. For instance, when in 1825 Henry Fuseli, Professor of Painting, delivered his eleventh lecture in front of it, he used it as a visual aid. The Academy’s collection also came to include some fine originals. Most importantly, George Beaumont donated Michelangelo’s Taddei Tondo. It was received in 1829, and within its first week on display, Constable – newly elected as a full academician – admired it and sketched it, which demonstrates his shifting attitude to the Old Masters. A second significant gift was a cartoon of Leda and the Swan, then thought to be a work by Michelangelo, but now attributed to his pupil Rosso Fiorentino – a version of the work discussed earlier as owned by Reynolds. When the Academy’s Leda first came to England about 1773, it was owned by the collector William Lock (1732–1810), who was friendly with Angerstein, Reynolds and Lawrence, and who formed an impressive art collection at his London home in Portman Square to which favoured artists were admitted. His son presented it to the Academy in 1821. Although, initially, it was displayed for the benefit of the students in the Academy schools, because of its sexually explicit subject, the issue of where to hang it becoming increasingly difficult as the prudish Victorian era wore on. The Royal Academy’s ambition to create a permanent public collection was shared by those in charge of the British Institution, who similarly focused energy on purchasing notable paintings. Enthusiasm was galvanised by Sir Thomas Bernard (1750–1818), who had been behind the setting up of the British Institution and had been the Foundling Hospital’s treasurer between 1795 and 1806. What Bernard had in mind for the British Institution’s gallery was something more ambitious than the focused display at the Foundling Hospital – a public gallery of the works of British artists with a few examples of the Old Masters in order to contextualise the place of the British school within a European history – the holdings to be secured through funds donated by wealthy subscribers and to be housed in splendid new quarters. Indeed, the diarist and Academician Joseph Farington recorded in June 1806 that the 3rd Earl of Dartmouth, another founding member, suggested adding to their site ‘where something like a National Gallery might be begun’ (quoted in Hendy 1960, 14). Ultimately, the British Institution’s Pall Mall headquarters was not expanded and only a small nucleus of paintings was acquired, which was ultimately broken up, with pictures donated to appropriate bodies. The modern British religious pictures, for instance, mostly went to churches in the City of London, although West’s Christ Healing the Sick in the Temple was donated to the nascent National Gallery, which was also the recipient of other modern British works, including Gainsborough’s Market Cart in 1830. In terms of the Old Masters, very few

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were acquired; Veronese’s The Consecration of Saint Nicholas and Parmigianino’s The Madonna and Child with Saints were both given to the National Gallery in 1826.

Permanent Picture Galleries in the Public Domain The tide continued to turn in favour of the establishment of permanent, professionally administered and publicly funded art galleries which were accessible to all and which could show the development of painting both in Europe and in Britain. Beaumont, among others, continued to proclaim that making high art available via public museums would improve Britain’s art and the design of its manufactured artefacts. Simultaneously, politicians, including Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850), promoted a vision of the fine arts in public galleries having a positive social impact by providing an attractive venue where rich and poor might mingle through recreation and education rather than become dissipated through alcohol or gambling. Important precedents in terms of art galleries showing the history of art were now ubiquitous across Europe (Waterfield 1993, 81–111), including in Florence, whose gallery had been open since 1737, in Vienna since 1782, in Paris since 1792, in Amsterdam since 1808 and in Madrid since 1809, with museums in Germany flourishing in the first two decades of the nineteenth century – Frankfurt’s Städel Museum being founded in 1817 and Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie in 1823. Many of these foreign institutions had been formed from former royal collections; for instance, the Prado and the Louvre were created out of the Spanish and French royal holdings, while Florence’s Uffizi Gallery contained the princely collections of the Medici family. The situation in England was different given that the royal collection retained its original status and its contents remained inalienable heirlooms of the Crown. Two bequests of 1811 and 1816 stand out as significant milestones of private generosity in response to the perceived need to supply galleries to satisfy the increasing public interest in pictures, not least in art of the past. Indeed, it is the outstanding quality of their historical pictures that distinguished the generosity of two benefactors of the 1810s. By contrast, earlier collectors had not made paintings a priority. For instance, Elias Ashmole’s (1617–92) eclectic cabinet of curiosities, which formed the original nucleus of Oxford University’s museum, included only a few portraits, collected for historical interest rather than artistic merit (MacGregor 2001). Similarly, Dr William Hunter’s (1718–83) important collections, out of which Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery developed, were dominated by scientific specimens, its few pictures, including by Stubbs and Chardin, acquired more by chance than design (Waterfield 1991, 147–8). Sir Francis Bourgeois (1753–1811), a man of private means, was public-spirited enough to leave the collection of 350 pictures inherited from his friend and one-time business partner, the French dealer Noël Desenfans (1744–1807), to Dulwich College in south London on his death in 1811 (Waterfield 1991, 77). Interestingly, the collection had been proposed originally as the core of two national collections. It had been assembled at the request of the King of Poland’s brother, as the basis of a Polish national collection, but that project failed after Poland had been partitioned in 1795. Desenfans then lobbied the British government to create its own national collection, offering to contribute paintings from his own collection, but his suggestion was rejected. However, through Bourgeois’s subsequent initiative, Desenfans’s collection was destined to become the first public picture gallery in Britain to open in a purpose-built edifice from 1817 (fig. 9.6).

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Figure 9.6  James Stephanoff, Viewing at Dulwich Picture Gallery, c. 1830. Pencil and watercolour with heightening and gum arabic on paper. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

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The second example is Richard, 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam (1745–1816), who bequeathed his diverse collections, comprising 144 paintings, numerous engravings, coins, medals and a library, to his alma mater, the University of Cambridge (Burn 2016; Waterfield 1991, 149–53). Additionally, he left funds for ‘a good substantial and convenient Museum Repository, or other Building, within the precincts of the said University’ to house them. When George Basevi’s museum, built in a strictly classical architectural idiom, opened in its permanent home some thirty-two years later, visitors, admitted three days a week, would have encountered (as they still do, six days a week), classical sculpture on the ground floor and pictures upstairs. This model stemmed from the practical necessity of having heavy sculpture at ground level and it was made popular through Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum, Berlin, a design soon copied by countless museums worldwide. Debates surrounding state provision for a major national public art gallery came to a head in 1823, after the Prime Minister, the 2nd Earl of Liverpool, turned down the latest in the line of offers by private citizens to help found a national picture collection. When rejecting Sir John Leicester’s offer of his British collection, Liverpool had stated that the only suitable nucleus for any National Gallery was top-quality Old Masters. Leicester, not deterred, turned his sights to Manchester, near his country seat, Tabley House, Cheshire, and became instrumental in the foundation of the Royal Manchester Institution in October 1823 (Waterfield 1991, 84–5). Supported by the city’s wealthy businessmen, the Institution promoted living painters through mounting regular exhibitions and building up a collection with a focus on contemporary British art. Its first purchase was James Northcote’s A Moor, bought in 1827, the year after it had been painted. Back in London, Lord Liverpool was held to his word by Beaumont (Egerton 1998, 370–5). After Angerstein’s death in January 1823, when his Pall Mall collection was put on sale, Beaumont stated that he was prepared to give his own Old Master collection immediately if the government purchased and accommodated Angerstein’s. Another private collector, the Reverend William Holwell Carr (1753–1830), made a similar offer (Egerton 1998, 399–405). As fortunate was the fact that the Treasury unexpectedly received repayment on two large loans it had made in 1795 and 1797 to bring Austria into war against the French. This windfall meant that the House of Commons was happy to vote £60,000 for ‘the purchase, preservation and exhibition of the Angerstein collection’ (Egerton 1998, esp. 358–65). Since the government had no designated building, and connoisseurs like Beaumont had no desire to see the pictures absorbed into the sculpture displays at the British Museum, it was decided to secure the remainder of the lease on Angerstein’s former home. Thus, when Britain’s first national collection opened on 10 May 1824 it did so in Angerstein’s London house (fig. 9.7). Originally, little sustained thought was given to the National Gallery’s mission, administration or financing. No purchasing policy or regular acquisition grant for the collection was established. Consequently, the Gallery was heavily reliant on gifts and bequests. It was in 1826 that the British Institution gave the Veronese and Parmigianino and that the Beaumont Gift of sixteen pictures was received, while the Howell Carr Bequest of thirty-five pictures was accessioned in 1835. All the Gallery’s early gifts were of identical taste to the foundation collection because collectors like Beaumont and Holwell Carr were associated with the British Institution, just as Angerstein had

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Figure 9.7  Frederick Mackenzie, The National Gallery when at Mr Angerstein’s House, Pall Mall. Exhibited 1834. Watercolour. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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been, and all staunchly upheld the established hierarchy of artistic schools. Of identical taste were also the trustees’ first purchases, including Correggio’s little Madonna of the Basket in 1825. This conservative stance still held sway in 1844, when Peel, as a well-known collector and trustee of the National Gallery, wrote to fellow Board members: ‘It seems to me that we should give preference to works of sterling merit that may serve as examples to the Artists of this country, rather than purchase curiosities in painting valuable as illustrating the progress of Art, or the distinctions in the styles of different Masters’ (quoted in Waterfield 1991, 53). With regard to the British School, it was hoped that patriotic benefactors would come forward, and many did, including the poet William Wordsworth, the scientist Michael Faraday and the painter William Beechey, who, with other subscribers in 1837, donated Constable’s The Cornfield as a tribute to the recently deceased painter. Even after the Gallery moved into William Wilkins’s purpose-built gallery on Trafalgar Square in 1838 (fig. 9.8) (Waterfield 1991, 100–6), the pictures were not displayed in any systematic fashion but rather hung sky-high in an overcrowded arrangement. The art educator C. H. Wilson was one among many who lampooned the Gallery’s ‘shabby rooms of a monotonous dingy tint, with dirty floors, and miserable furniture and fittings; everything offending the eye of taste, depressing the spirits’ (quoted in Waterfield 1991, 55). A new order came into play after the National

Figure 9.8  Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, The National Gallery and Nelson’s Column, 1854. Lithograph on paper. National Gallery, London.

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Gallery had been investigated by a governmental Select Committee in 1853–4, whose 1,000-page report gave official sanction for the institution to transform itself. No longer was it to remain a treasure trove of already acknowledged masterpieces; rather it should aim to become a comprehensive historical collection: In order to understand or profit by the great works, either of the ancient or modern school of art, it is necessary to contemplate the genius which produced them, not merely in its final results, but in the mode of its operation, in its rise and progress, as well as in its perfection. (Quoted in Waterfield 1991, 53) Official statements like this heralded a new era of public collecting in Britain, in which state funding could henceforth justifiably be spent on acquiring art eligible on account of its historical interest as much as any perceived aesthetic merit. This new purchasing strategy inevitably had a huge impact both on the type of art that was collected – a backfilling exercise ensued which initially targeted the acquisition of early Italian and Netherlandish art – and on the way that the expanding national collection was arranged. Among the new aims were making pictures visible, ideally through placing them at eye level, and making them understandable to the non-expert, by hanging them in chronological sequence so that the story of western European painting might unfold before the visitors’ eyes (Whitehead 2005, 8–27). This new type of public art display would bring Britain into line with earlier Continental developments, the collection at Vienna’s Belvedere Palace, for instance, having been hung in chronological order since the 1780s. A Treasury Minute of July 1855 formally reconstituted the Gallery, creating a new, all-powerful position of director, which curtailed the influence of the conservative, aristocratic trustees. The first post holder was Charles Eastlake (1793–1865), a painter, internationally acknowledged connoisseur and art historian, and President of the Royal Academy (Robertson 1978, 139–41). Eastlake capably led the institution in this new direction, and largely as a result of annual trips abroad he acquired about 150 paintings, including much early Italian, Netherlandish and German art. Eastlake’s simultaneous implementation of more systematic methods of conserving, cataloguing, framing, displaying and disseminating information about the pictures helped to shape the National Gallery into the institution it is today, its modus operandi extending to other art galleries across the UK. Especially with the passing of the Museums Act of 1845, which allowed local boroughs to utilise rates for public facilities, public art galleries in the UK proliferated. As art galleries became, during Queen Victoria’s reign, the public institution par excellence for the conservation, exhibition and study of paintings as well as places for social interaction, they took over the prime functions that had been fulfilled during the preceding Romantic era by public-spirited private collectors.

Note I would very much like to acknowledge the help I received, as my chapter evolved, from Anne Helmreich, Peter Humfrey, Kate Retford, Catherine Roach and Charles SebagMontefiore.

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Bibliography Anderson, Jocelyn. 2018. Touring and Publicizing England’s Country Houses in the Long Eighteenth Century. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Avery-Quash, Susanna. 2019. ‘John Julius Angerstein and the Development of his Art Collection at No 100, Pall Mall, London’. In The Georgian London Town House: Building, Collecting and Display, edited by Susanna Avery-Quash and Kate Retford, 246–66. New York and London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Avery-Quash, Susanna, and Nicholas Penny. 2019. ‘The Dispersal of the Orleans Collection and the British Art Market’. In London and the Emergence of a European Art Market, 1780–1820, edited by Susanna Avery-Quash and Christian Huemer, 145–58. Los Angeles: Getty Publications. Bignamini, Ilaria, and Clare Hornsby. 2010. Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-Century Rome. 2 vols. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. Burn, Lucilla. 2016. The Fitzwilliam Museum: A History. London: Philip Wilson Publishers. Dias, Rosie. 2004. ‘“A World of Pictures”: Pall Mall and the Topography of Display, 1780– 1799’. In Georgian Geographies: Space, Place and Landscape in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Miles Ogborn and Charles W. J. Withers, 92–113. Manchester: Manchester UP. Egerton, Judy. 1998. National Gallery Catalogues: The British School. London: National Gallery Publications. Esposito, Donato. 2019. ‘Artist in Residence: Joshua Reynolds at No 47, Leicester Fields’. In The Georgian London Town Art: Building, Collecting and Display, edited by Susanna Avery-Quash and Kate Retford, 191–210. New York and London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Feltham, John. 1809. The Picture of London, for 1809; being a Correct Guide to all the Curiosities, Amusements, Exhibitions, Public Establishments, and Remarkable Objects, in and near London; with a Collection of Appropriate Tables; Two large Maps, and several other Engravings. The Tenth Edition. London: printed by W. Lewis, Paternoster-Row; for Richard Phillips, Bridge-Street. Hendy, Philip. 1960. The National Gallery London. London: Thames and Hudson. Humfrey, Peter. 2019. The Stafford Gallery: The Greatest Art Collection of Regency London. Norwich: Unicorn Press. Lippincott, Louise. 1983. Selling Art in Georgian London. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. McClellan, Andrew. 1994. Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. McCue, Maureen. 2014. British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793–1840. (Studies in Art Historiography) Burlington: Ashgate. MacGregor, Arthur. 2001. The Ashmolean Museum: A Brief History of the Museum and its Collections. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum. Morel, Thierry, et al. 2013. Houghton Revisited: The Walpole Masterpieces from Catherine the Great’s Hermitage. London: Royal Academy of Arts. Nellis Richter, Anne. 2016. ‘Changing Subjects: The Gallery at Cleveland House and the Highland Clearances’. British Art Studies, no. 2. Pears, Ian. 1988. The Discovery of Painting: The Growth of Interest in the Arts in England, 1680–17681. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Penny, Nicholas. 2008. National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings: Volume II: Venice, 1540–1600. London: National Gallery Company. Robertson, David. 1978. Sir Charles Eastlake and the Victorian Art World. Princeton: Princeton UP.

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Russell, Francis. 2019. ‘James Christie: Auctioneer and More’. In London and the Emergence of a European Art Market, 1780–1820, edited by Susanna Avery-Quash and Christian Huemer, 205–16. Los Angeles: Getty Publications. Sebag-Montefiore, Charles and James Stourton. 2012. The British as Art Collectors: From the Tudors to the Present. London: Scala. Smiles, Sam. 2007. J. M. W. Turner: The Making of a Modern Artist. Manchester: Manchester UP. Solkin, David. 1993. Painting for Money: Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenthcentury England. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Waterfield, Giles, ed. 1991. Palaces of Art: Art Galleries in Britain, 1790–1990. London: Dulwich Picture Gallery. Waterfield, Giles. 1993. ‘The Development of the Early Art Museum in Britain’. In The Genesis of the Art Museum in the Eighteenth Century, edited by P. Bjurström, 81–111. Stockholm: Nationalmuseum. Whitehead, Christopher. 2005. The Public Art Museum in Nineteenth Century Britain: The Development of the National Gallery. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

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10 Exhibitions Culture, Consumerism and the Romantic Artist Martin Myrone

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he proliferation of public art exhibitions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a vital factor in accelerating the modernising transformation of the visual arts in Britain. The scale and depth of change is readily captured with some facts and figures. In 1759 London was home to about 740,000 people, the population having increased unsteadily since the beginning of the century when it numbered about 600,000. Perhaps 200 of these Londoners were visual artists (Myrone 2020, 194). Most of these were closely connected and located within a limited geography, being mainly clustered around Covent Garden in central London. There were paintings to be seen in the theatres, or in the supper-boxes at the pleasure ground of Vauxhall Gardens, in art collections in private homes or by visiting artists’ studios. There were important collections in royal palaces and the houses of the great and the good but access to these was generally very limited, and the cultural legacy of Protestant Reformation meant there were very few paintings on show in churches. The easiest way to see Old Master paintings was at public auctions. In 1759 there were at least twenty-one of these in London, although the quality and range of pictures was generally not impressive (Lincoln and Fox 2016, fig. 4). In 1831 the fourth national census, taken on 30 May, established that the population of greater London was over 1.7 million people. Perhaps 2,000 of London’s population were occupied as visual artists. A reasoned estimate made in 1818 was that there were 1,000 in London; by the time of the 1841 census, the first time that individual’s occupations were captured, over 4,000 were recorded, heavily concentrated in London (Myrone 2020, 194). The Royal Academy of Arts, the dominant art institution, was over half a century old, having been founded in the winter of 1768–9. Since opening, over 1,550 young men had formally registered as students at the Academy’s drawing schools (Hutchison 1960). Artists were distributed across the metropolis, but the most successful congregated in the central areas of Westminster and Marylebone. The streets of neat modern housing in Mortimer Street, Charlotte Street and Newman Street, north of the major commercial thoroughfare of Oxford Street, were favoured by leading figures in the art world – Newman Street was donned ‘Artists’ Street’ – but there were artists to be found almost everywhere around the city, including the newly developing regions south of the Thames and to the north in Camden and Hampstead (Shannon 2019). This expanded population of artists reflected the expansion of the cultural marketplace. In 1831 there were over 200 art sales in London, and over 7,300 artworks were sold (Lincoln and Fox 2016, figs. 4–5). Most strikingly, while

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Figure 10.1  Pietro Antonio Martini after Johann Heinrich Ramberg, ‘The Exhibition of the Royal Academy, 1787’, 1787. Engraving and etching on medium, slightly textured, cream paper. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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Figure 10.2  Henry Thomas Alken after Henry Thomas Alken, ‘Exhibition Somerset House: Tom and Bob’, 1821. Hand-coloured engraving. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. the art lover of 1759 was hard-pressed to find any public displays, in 1831 they were potentially overwhelmed by what was now a well-established programme of shows. The Royal Academy, which supported its art-educational role through well-attended annual exhibitions of contemporary art, held its sixty-third show in the early summer. The venue was the exhibition rooms of the Academy’s home in Somerset House on the Strand, purpose-built and opened in 1780, and the display included 1,234 catalogued works by 669 artists. Since 1806 the Academy shows had been joined by annual exhibitions organised by the British Institution. By this date, these included separate shows of Old Masters borrowed from private collections and selling exhibitions of contemporary British art. The same year, the artist-run Society of British Artists held its eighth annual exhibition, the Society of Painters in Water Colour held its annual show in the Egyptian Hall; a rival New Society of Painters in Water Colours was in formation and held its first show the following year. The nascent collection of the National Gallery had its fourth showing as a ‘National Repository Gallery’ in the Royal Mews, taking shape as a national institution even before it had a permanent physical home (the finance for which was secured during 1831) (McCue 2018). Quite aside from these shows of paintings and sculptures there was the multitude of sideshows, spectacles and commercial exhibits, of waxworks, automata, the eight-ton, fourteen-feet tall ‘Royal Clarence Vase’ and so forth (Altick 1978). And this was the situation only in the English metropolis. Around England, and in Scotland and Ireland, there were now exhibitions in most urban centres, the full history

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Figure 10.3  Alfred Joseph Woolmer, Interior of the British Institution Old Master Exhibition, Summer 1832, 1833. Oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. of which has yet to be written (Fawcett 1974). In 1831, the Bristol Institution for the Promotion of Literature, Science and the Fine Arts held its sixth annual show; the Norfolk and Suffolk Institution ran its exhibition in Norwich. Liverpool, which had seen art exhibitions since the 1780s, saw the eighth annual show of the Liverpool Academy (illuminated by gas for evening viewings). The Royal Manchester Institution held its sixth and seventh exhibitions, of Old Masters and of modern British art respectively, the Northern Academy of Arts in Newcastle held its fourth annual show, with a rival show of the Northern Society of Painters in Water Colours organised for the first time. Dublin, which had art exhibitions regularly organised since the 1760s, had the sixth annual show of the Royal Hibernian Academy; Edinburgh saw its fifth annual show of the Scottish Academy. Everywhere, smaller cities and towns had their own commercial and touring exhibitions as well: a show in Cheltenham of portraits due to be engraved as ‘Lodge’s Portraits and Memoirs’, mixed Old Masters in Sheffield, and John Martin’s spectacular ‘Fall of Nineveh’ in York, a stop during its relentless countrywide tour. The decades bookended by the years picked out here comprise, by almost any definition, the core chronology of the ‘Romantic’ era. There can be little doubt that this was a period of profound change: even the historical commentator most determined to

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deny the idea of revolutionary change fostered by Marxist interpretations of economic and social history has been obliged to admit that by the 1830s the British ancien régime had come to an end (Clark 1985). But the absence of overt artistic engagement with the major historical developments of the period – industrial and political revolutions – means that the art history can seem hard to align with a bigger historical narrative. As the avowedly Marxist art historian Andrew Hemingway has noted: ‘we still await a historical writing of the visual arts in Britain in the period of Hobsbawm’s “Age of Revolution” (1789–48) that does justice to the extraordinary cultural energies released by the twin processes of rapid economic growth and political revolution’ (Hemingway 2017, 1). Newer accounts of this period have though shifted attention away from the technological transformation of industrial production, towards issues of consumption and consumerism. The art history of late Georgian Britain is now understood as centred on a ‘consumer culture’, with artistic careers being shaped by market forces, the public for culture taking on an ostensibly more ‘democratic’ character, and art itself assuming innovative and sometimes spectacular forms (Fordham 2008). Although the Royal Academy was a monarchical institution, the king did not provide long-term practical support. Once the Academy was set up, with a grant from George III, it was left to produce income for itself. In the absence of state, church or royal patronage, or even of much cultural leadership from among the aristocracy, the market came into its own as the main force influencing visual culture. Over the last twenty years, there has been intensive academic scrutiny of the Romantic flourishing of public shows and spectacles in London and around Britain. Scholars have located art exhibitions at the heart of the major cultural transformations of the era, including the emergence of the ‘public sphere’, female spectatorship and cultural engagement, and the ascent of visually orientated consumerism. The essays collected in David Solkin’s edited volume Art on the Line (2001), several subsequent monographs and essays, the Paul Mellon Centre’s series of chronological essays covering Royal Academy exhibitions year by year, together with several practical re-curations of historic exhibitions, have established the character and chronological framework of exhibitions culture in the Romantic period (Solkin 2001; Hallett 2004; Calè 2006; Myrone 2009; Hallett et al. 2018; Roach 2019; Myrone and Concannon 2019). The exhibitionary tactics of a succession of significant figures, including Thomas Gainsborough, Henry Fuseli, Sir Thomas Lawrence, David Wilkie and J. M. W. Turner, have been given consideration (Rosenthal 1999; Brenneman 1999; Bermingham 2005; Todd 2005; Myrone 2007; Solkin 2008; Solkin 2009; Wright 2020; Hallett et al. 2018). Attention has also been given to the dismay and aggravation experienced by artists who felt their work was ill-treated by the display conventions of the mainstream exhibitions, notably watercolour painters and miniature painters (Smith 2002; Todd 2005; Hallett et al. 2018). What this chapter focuses on is the role of annual, temporary exhibitions of contemporary art and suggests the different temporalities these fostered. The regularity of the artistic season, the anticipation of shows, the regularity with which reviews now appeared and the kind of generic coherence that the new patterns of commentary might foster. It was not merely the appearance of exhibitions that was important but the way in which they fitted into a social calendar, how they became ‘events’ that were repeatable and repeated, even as they achieved the appearance of spectacular singularity. In so doing, this chapter also addresses the question of how exhibitions culture can

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be situated in relation to the moral values associated with Romanticism, pivoting as they do around notions of individual experience and subjectivity. The deaths of the pre-eminent artists Thomas Gainsborough in 1788 and Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1792 created a flurry of activity with portrait painters sending in works to set out their claim to the mantle of leading portraitist, surely helping create a sense of generational identity (Hallett 2018; Johns 2018). The commercial and critical success of Benjamin West’s large-scale religious paintings in the 1810s, together with the promise of forthcoming church building, gave rise to an upsurge of younger (and some older) painters producing big pictures which they hoped would set out their credentials for potential commissions (Ardill 2018). More generally, there were new temporalities emerging within exhibition practices. With exhibitions now well established as seasonal fixtures, artists could expect visitors to recall works from previous years and connect experiences of shows, utilising ‘the memories they conjured up of previous visual encounters’ (Hallett 2004, 602). But the temporalities involved were not always so self-evident: Benjamin West’s famous ‘Death of Wolfe’ has been taken as encapsulating the historical moment of 1759, and the experiences and perspectives on the Seven Years War, but it was completed and exhibited in 1771, when international relations were in a different place (Myrone 2005, 105–20). The appearance of retrospective exhibitions, starting it appears with the career-reviewing solo show organised by Nathaniel Hone in London in 1775, made possible a new kind of reflexive career narrative (Stefanis 2013). The several high-profile exhibitions of recently deceased British artists organised by the British Institution, starting with the seminal exhibition of Reynolds’s work in 1813, and the inclusion of works by such figures in mixed shows, signalled the emergence of a previously oxymoronic modern British Old Master, the institutionalisation of ‘British art’ as a national school in a way which had formerly seemed almost unimaginable (Roach 2016). If recent scholarship has helped us understand some of the systematic and structural features of exhibitions culture, there is still scope for expanding our thinking about the display of art in relation to the widest social-economic transformations at the dawn of modernity, transformations captured by the idea of Romanticism. The ‘Romantic artist’ has figured large in various philosophical and theoretical accounts of modern selfhood, as the philosopher Charles Taylor reflected: The artist becomes in some way the paradigm case of the human being, as agent of original self-definition. Since around 1800, there has been a tendency to heroise the artist, to see in his or her life the essence of the human condition, and to venerate him or her as a seer, the creator of cultural values. (Taylor 1991, 62) Taking a cue from the sociologist Colin Campbell’s work on consumerism and Romanticism, I would propose that the phenomenon of exhibitions culture helped institute a structurally precarious, inherently competitive and individualist artistic field, revealing a still larger set of transformations accompanying social, economic and political modernisation. The repercussions of this shift are far-reaching, apparent in the present-day experience of the creative labour market. As Campbell observes in his analysis of the ‘cultural logic of modernity’ articulated by the figure of the Romantic artist, what defines the modern age is the ‘strain between dream and reality, pleasure and utility’ (Campbell 2018, 328).

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Art on Show The annual exhibitions inaugurated in London in the 1760s meant that art became for the first time routinely available to view for an expanded public that included anyone prepared to pay the standard entrance fee of one shilling (the cost of a substantial loaf of bread). Newspapers and magazines proliferated and included reports and commentaries on the exhibitions. These were sometimes scandalous or confrontational in tone: art criticism as we know it was taking shape. New printmaking methods and marketing techniques massively expanded the marketplace for engraved images. The idea of general access to national heritage developed. Having initially been a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ with a focus on antiquarian and scientific materials, after 1800 the British Museum became recognisable as an art museum in the modern sense, with more prominent and extensive displays of classical sculpture and a programmatic, if latterly overlooked, aim of engaging art students in the collections (Chambers 2007; Myrone 2017). The opening in 1817 of Dulwich Picture Gallery south of London, with its displays of Old Masters and recent British art, and the foundation of the National Gallery of Art in 1824, its growing collection initially shown in rather crowded rooms in Pall Mall, created permanent public spaces for art (Waterfield 2015). If, in the revolutionary context of continental Europe, palaces and aristocratic collections were (sometimes literally) broken into and opened to public view, the same changes were achieved in Britain by stealth and governmental decree, and with the minimum of state intervention. As the historian Holger Hoock has noted, Britain’s cultural institutions characteristically took shape in this period through a form of ‘public-private partnership’, of a kind that we are familiar with in our own ‘neoliberal’ times (Hoock 2010). Recent interpretations of British art in relation to consumer culture, empire, political revolution and industrialisation has helped create a strong sense of Romantic art in an expanded historical context. There is a further, overarching framework in which British art of the period might be placed. This was the emergence of new ideas about the moral and economic relationship of the individual to the state, captured in the notion of ‘liberal individualism’. It is more than coincidence that the period under consideration here saw the production of key statements about politics, the market and the self by philosophical writers from Adam Smith to Jeremy Bentham. What Karl Polanyi identified in his classic study The Great Transformation (1944) as the rise of a ‘market society’ over this exact period involved not only economic change but a transformed sense of selfhood (Polanyi 2001). This placed an emphasis on the role of the free market in ensuring social justice: the hard-working and entrepreneurial would become rich, the stupid and lazy would be damned to poverty. Such claims rested upon a new sense of human nature, set out with seminal effect by Adam Smith. He claimed that ‘economic rationality’ was somehow hardwired into human nature. Importantly, this was not something that was claimed exclusively by the Left or the Right: it is telling that Smith has been claimed as a prophetic figure by both. The deceptive promise of liberal individualism became apparent equally among the conservative and the progressive or radical, as highlighted by the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre: ‘the contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals. There is little place in such political systems for the criticism of the system itself, that is, for putting liberalism in question’ (MacIntyre

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1988, 392). MacIntyre singles out Edmund Burke, usually thought of as an architect of modern conservatism, as particularly revealing, as he ‘tried to combine adherence in politics to a conception of tradition’ with an ‘adherence in economics to the doctrine and institutions of the free market’ (MacIntyre 2013, 222). This may seem to take us a long way from the visual art of late Georgian Britain, but it is telling that Adam Smith and Edmund Burke were friends of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and that they probably influenced the constitution of the Royal Academy and had a hand in the composition of his much-read presidential lectures, the Discourses. The critique of the liberal tradition which achieves new clarity at this moment should help us overcome the tendency to see the Royal Academy as inevitably a conservative or reactionary organisation. The aesthetic dimension of the emerging political economy has complexities as well. Smith’s writings on ‘sentiment’, and Burke’s reflections on the category of the Sublime created a new sense of how personal, subjective, aesthetic and moral responses could serve a social function. If individual viewers responded emotionally to a charming image of a child, or a beautiful landscape, or were shocked by a scene of terror and imagination, they might be imagined as participating in a community of feeling which could exist over and above any actual community, with its divisions of class and status. There was a kind of democracy imagined in aesthetic communion. But there were contradictions involved here, as well. For there were real and symbolic barriers to getting access to such aesthetic experiences: over the door to the main rooms used for the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy was a Greek inscription translatable as: ‘Let none who are strangers to the Muses enter’. There was a prohibition at work there, more exclusionary in its effects than the oneshilling entrance charge. The emphasis being put upon the individual, on the value of experience and subjective response, and on the responsibilities of the individual, in aesthetics, in economics and in social theory, laid the foundations for our modern society. It did so more enduringly, perhaps, than the radical democracy mooted as an explicit political ideal in Revolutionary France.

Exhibitions and the Birth of the British School Reviewing the exhibition of the Scottish Academy in 1831, a commentator reflected this now-established wisdom: ‘The great advantage that public exhibitions hold out to the interest of art, is the opportunity offered to the public to encourage it, and the field that is thus opened to the unknown genius to exhibit his powers’ (Scotsman, 23 March 1831). Artists had rivalled each other before, of course. Competition itself was not something new, and we might observe that the history of art has often been organised around such direct oppositions between individuals, cultural traditions, styles (Michelangelo versus Raphael, Italian versus Northern art, classical versus baroque). But the rivalry between artists in the exhibitions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was played out in a new context, of the ‘market society’, and the new ways of conceiving of such professional rivalries within the artistic field in aestheticised terms. The London art world which took shape from the 1760s to the 1800s was openly fractious. There were multiple and shifting artistic affiliations and oppositions. The 1760s saw a bout of internecine conflict within London’s art community, with some artists calling for a formal academy, others opposing it, some calling for royal patronage, others insisting upon professional independence. The foundation of the Academy in

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1768 was a triumph for those wanting royal support, but several prominent figures including Joseph Wright of Derby, Thomas Gainsborough and George Stubbs initially stood against the new institution, and subsequently became involved only half-heartedly. In the event, whatever high-minded motivations might have been involved in the foundation of the Academy, its exhibitions became a showcase for professional rivalries and attention-seeking. As contemporary images show, exhibitions were dominated by the more commercial forms of art, portraiture and landscape painting. There were few examples of the large historical paintings that were traditionally held to be the highest achievement of art in academic theory, for there was no state or church support for producing these. There were, though, pictures which might appear to be in this ‘Grand Manner’. Reynolds’s large portraits of figures in heroic or mythological guise set out the artist’s claims to be working in the tradition of Michelangelo or Titian, while also flattering the sitters. Lawrence proved to be his most adept heir, creating glamorous images of celebrity that were calculated to demand a central and prominent position in the annual exhibitions. As a sensory experience, the annual exhibitions were overwhelming and confusing. Many visitors complained about the crowds, and the noise and smell. They were ‘blockbuster’ shows, and perhaps not the best place for aesthetic contemplation, at least insofar as that might be framed by reference to a Shaftesburian tradition of gentlemanly, detached reflection. But what they presented was a spectacle of contemporary British culture defined by vibrant diversity. The exhibitions encouraged artists to paint more brightly (toning down their works after exhibition to make them more suitable for private display), painters painted with more dash and flash, showing off their distinctive techniques. The portrait painters chose celebrities or infamous characters for their subjects, and the history painters popular literary subjects, or strange and sometimes shocking themes that might form the basis of reproductive prints for a wider market. Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare is the most enduringly famous example of a succession of pictures that led Horace Walpole, no less, to complain in 1783: ‘Of late, Barry, Romney, Fuseli, Mrs Cosway & others have attempted to paint Deities, Visions, Witchcraft &c, but have only been bombast & extravagant without true dignity’ (Myrone 2006, 35). Artists in the ‘lower’ genres of landscape, animal painting and everyday life, created larger, more visually striking works. In a crucial development, the intellectual ambitions associated with history painting were invested in the painting of landscapes – a more commercially viable genre, in Britain. Similarly, portrait painting became a kind of ‘half-history’ (West 1991). Paintings might take on unusual formats, particularly with strikingly upright compositions that were calculated to grab attention. Even the frames that artists supplied for their exhibition works tended to be bigger and more eye-catching. There were ways of recuperating such market-orientated diversity as a characteristic of the national school of art, obscuring its more cynical aspects. This was especially clear in the presentation of the commercial galleries of literary paintings which flourished, briefly, in the 1790s. Organised by the cultural entrepreneurs Thomas Macklin, Robert Bowyer and, most successfully, John Boydell, these showcased commissioned paintings by contemporary artists on popular literary subjects. The aim was commercial: to create a market for the prints reproducing these compositions. But these galleries also provided a rare opportunity for British artists to produce large-scale history paintings of a kind that otherwise did not have much of a market. As Boydell set

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Figure 10.4  John Downman, The Ghost of Clytemnestra Awakening the Furies, exhibited at Royal Academy 1782. Oil on panel. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Figure 10.5  Henry Fuseli, Dido, exhibited Royal Academy 1781. Oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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out in reflecting on his ‘Shakespeare Gallery’, such a commercial enterprise could be considered as a patriotic effort: I flatter myself the most prejudiced foreigner must allow, that the Shakespeare Gallery will convince the world, that Englishmen want nothing but the fostering hand of encouragement, to bring forth their genius in this line of art. I might go further, and defy the Italian, Flemish, or French Schools, to show in so short a space of time, such an exertion as the Shakespeare Gallery; and if they could have made such an exertion in so short a period, the pictures would have been marked with all that monotonous sameness which distinguishes those different Schools. Whereas, in the Shakespeare Gallery, every artist, partaking of the freedom of his country, and endowed with that originality of thinking, so peculiar to its natives, has chosen his own road, to what he conceived to be excellence, unshackled by the slavish imitation and uniformity that pervade all the foreign schools. (Boydell 1804) When British artists were suddenly exposed to contemporary French art, when the Peace of 1802 made visiting Paris possible again after a decade, they were unexpectedly heartened by what they saw. The French academic tradition seemed to their eyes to have become exhausted and formulaic. The ‘brick dust’ of contemporary French painting looked tame and mechanical compared to the variety and liveliness of British art (Vaughan 1993). The School of David seemed to many British commentators to exemplify the ‘slavish imitation and uniformity’ that prevailed where political democracy was allowed to reign over common sense and market forces.

Figure 10.6  Francis Wheatley, View of the interior of the Shakespeare Gallery, 1790. Watercolour on paper. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

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The Academy’s exhibitions, only faintly connected to state or royal authority and directed by artists who enjoyed a significant degree of independence, offered the very model of the free-market economy jolting into action, recuperable as a distinctly national achievement. In its optics, the hanging of the Royal Academy’s Great Room suggested a kind of autonomous order, with its symmetrical arrangements centred on larger pictures, the huddling of small works in corners and at a low level. In that setting, some pictures attract attention, some are overlooked: accordingly, if we accept the logic of the hang, imposing artists succeed, weak artists fail. The Royal Academy, with its ostensibly open provision of training and professional opportunities available on the basis of talent alone, and with, especially, its open annual exhibitions, provides the exemplar of a marketised cultural field, the mechanics of artistic success and failure exposed for all to see – great painters impose themselves, weak artists fall into the shadows, public opinion and critical judgement are freely aired. This was the forum for brilliant debuts or bravura displays of competitiveness among the more established, as with Turner famously ‘firing a gun’ at his competitors in 1832, with the dash of red paint applied at the last moment to his canvas which, according to legend, lifted his work away from that of his nearest rivals (Riding 2018). The complaint against the Royal Academy was not that it encouraged artists to think commercially, but rather that it manipulated the market unjustly. The opponents of the Academy, most vocal and influential in the radical and Utilitarian press in the 1820s and 1830s who were given a highly visible platform by the Parliamentary Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures of 1835–6, complained that the market fostered by the Academy was not free (Quinn 2012). The Academicians, they maintained, claimed all the best spots in the exhibition, arbitrarily excluded artists they didn’t like, and misapplied the funds raised by ticket sales, squandering it on providing inefficient and exclusive art training. With such vocal, and well-founded, criticism of the Royal Academy, but also of the British Institution and the National Gallery, how did they survive? Against the Academy were levelled the accusations of unjust monopoly over the arts, of insider dealing and nepotism. Of the British Institution it was claimed that the interests of modern artists had been sacrificed in favour of promoting the value of privately owned Old Masters, which extended even to the installation of the exhibition spaces, where ‘the drugget on the floor . . . the studied lights by awnings at the skylights’ and ‘the brass rail round the room to protect the works from profane fingers’ gave the Old Master shows a special allure which was ‘denied to the moderns’ (Whitley 1930, 207). The role of William Seguier, trained as an artist but primarily a picture restorer, in the affairs of both the British Institution and the National Gallery attracted particular criticism, the latter, it was complained, unduly influenced by an unqualified elite: ‘The Conservators are not conservers, the Committee of Taste have no taste, and the National Gallery is anything but National’, with its poor representation to that point of British painters (Whitley 1930, 221). Yet any potential critique of the dominant formations of artistic production never really gained traction. In the face of the grievous effects of an unstructured free market for art where there was minimal state support, opponents of the Academy ended up calling for less structure, less state interference, more freedom to the market. What was taking shape was the identification between ideas of creative freedom, selffulfilment and aesthetic resolution which were deeply complicit with consumerism, as observed importantly by Colin Campbell (2018).

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Exhibitions and the Death of the British School Boydell wrote his boastful comments about the unique freedom of the British School to accompany the luxurious volume of prints reproducing paintings in the Shakespeare Gallery. But the Gallery collapsed as a commercial venture. The economic hardship caused by the long war with France and the inaccessibility of a European market for prints meant that all the literary galleries of the 1790s failed as businesses. The paintings from the Shakespeare Gallery were sold off by lottery in 1804. British artists became disillusioned with the patronage of print-publishers, and more determined to assert their entrepreneurial independence alongside other cultural producers disenchanted by prevailing business structures (Klancher 2016, 107–24). A commercial gallery advertising itself as ‘The British School’ appeared in 1802 but closed soon after (Gage 1989). The British Institution opened in 1805 under the leadership of a group of gentlemanly amateurs with the explicit aim of promoting British history painting through exhibitions where artists could showcase their work. They went on to hand out prizes for painting, but their efforts were viewed with suspicion by many artists who wanted greater professional autonomy. With very limited practical support from the state, church or monarchy, the British School depended almost entirely on market forces. In the most literal, economic sense, the British School was a fragile thing. Exhibitions were showcases for speculations with no direct guarantee of sales. But there was more than economics at stake. In some real ways, British art of this period sees the terminal decline of the traditions of artistic training. Paradoxically, the Royal Academy was part of the problem. The 1,800 students who passed through the Royal Academy during the Romantic era received no practical training in architecture, engraving, painting or sculpture, although these were the occupations they were expected to pursue (Myrone 2020). Even when students did get time in a master’s studio, as a formal apprentice or paying pupil, it was not always clear what the benefit was. Sir Joshua Reynolds was famously secretive about his painting techniques, conveying little or nothing about them to the many pupils who passed through his studio; his successor as leading portrait painter, Sir Thomas Lawrence, also took on many pupils but these received little practical direction, and were treated instead as studio assistants, put to work in support of his commercial practice. The variety of the British School can be considered as an effect of marketplace competition in combination with the breakdown in the methods of artistic training and an opening up of shortcuts to public attention. The Royal Academy provided some elements of intellectual training and a chance to draw from the antique and from the living model, but the poor quality of its facilities and teaching were lamented by many commentators of the time. What prevailed was generally the ‘wise neglect’ that Henry Fuseli was said to display as the long-serving Keeper of the Schools (Leslie 1860, 1:26). The Academy did not provide practical training in art, but neither were there many studios or workshops where aspiring artists could learn these skills. Whereas in France, where in the wake of the collapse of the Académie Royale a new atelier system grew up, there was no real equivalent in Britain. William Holman Hunt lamented ‘There was indeed no systematic education then to be obtained amongst the leaders of art, of whom the principal had had a hard struggle to keep their art alive during all the days of poverty which followed the Napoleonic Wars’ (Hunt 1905, 1:46). The irregular, and often highly fugitive use of painting materials which is characteristic of

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British art during this period can be traced to the lack of practical training. The PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, Britain’s avant-garde of the 1840s, famously looked back on the individualistic, undisciplined painting style of the late eighteenth century with dismay. What Boydell diagnosed as a sign of economic vibrancy in the 1790s, appeared by the 1840s to be a symptom of the debilitation of artistic traditions. Individualism represented a kind of dead end for art, which needed to be reversed by appealing to the lost tradition of medieval and early Renaissance art. The historical specificity of Romantic visual art, the distinctive variety of its painted surfaces and visual effects, rests not only upon an expanded sense of subjective freedom but more materially upon the structuring forms of art education and display which were current at the time.

Romanticism, Exhibitions Culture and the Making of the Modern Artist Even if political revolution as such never came to Britain, the decades from 1760 to 1830 saw the image of the artist transform in radical, even revolutionary ways. The field of art became commercialised in ways which had never been known before, and this gave some artists an unprecedented visibility and social standing. The successful Academicians resided in Charlotte Street or Newman Street, north of the major commercial thoroughfare of Oxford Street, or around St James’s, with its high-end clubs and fashionable shops. The most successful had substantial town houses, little palaces. Gainsborough had Schomberg House, on Pall Mall, with the back windows looking out on St James’s Palace. Others set themselves up in handsome mansions outside of London. Reynolds had a big house placed advantageously on Richmond Hill to the south-west of London, as well as his working rooms in a town house in Leicester Square. These success stories conform to the idea of artistic professionalisation. As Nathalie Heinich noted in her history of the image of the artist, the English-language term carries certain connotations of commercial self-interest (Heinich 1993). ‘Professionalisation’ in this sense is not sufficient as a term to describe the more complex forms of selfidentification and practical behaviour we see in British art of the period. It hardly needs repeating that this was the era in which defining stories of artistic suffering, eccentricity and flamboyance emerged, from the reckless high-living and self-destructiveness of George Morland, to the miserable self-destruction of Edward Dayes. Henry Fuseli was professionally successful as a history painter, but that meant transgressing the boundaries of the genre and of good taste by pursuing outlandish, fantastical themes, giving rise to repeated accusations that he was, variously, insane, eccentric, or simply cynical and exploitative. And what about William Blake? He was an anomalous figure in many regards: the son of a shopkeeper, he was trained as a commercial engraver but aspired to create uncompromisingly ambitious works in the ‘Grand Manner’, inspired by Fuseli and James Barry as well as by his deeply felt spiritual commitments. What he was obliged to create, in the absence of sustained support for such painterly ambition, were highly individual, thematically radical prints and books produced using wholly idiosyncratic techniques. He was not commercially successful or publicly prominent, but neither was he as entirely hidden as he and his friends liked to claim: he did exhibit sporadically at the Royal Academy, and was certainly quite well known as a professional reproductive engraver. If his art was eccentric in the extreme, he did also attract a few

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long-term supporters and patrons and he was by no means as obscure or marginal a figure as later accounts like to suggest. His relationship with his friends and allies was fractious: he was at pains to establish his own ‘independence’, even when this meant shooting himself in the foot (Haggarty 2010; Myrone and Concannon 2019). Among his supporters there was the expectation – triumphantly fulfilled in the event – that his art would be better appreciated in future ages. We are used to seeing such contrary, sometimes tragic figures as Fuseli, Blake and Dayes as set boldly against the cultural establishment. They can be taken as representatives of a ‘Romantic’ oppositional stance. But, as Michael Löwry and Robert Sayre tell us, ‘Far from conveying an outsiders’ view . . . the Romantic view constitutes modernity’s self-criticism’ (Löwry and Sayre 2001, 21). British artists may not have formed themselves into radically oppositional brotherhoods, or declare themselves Bohemian, as peers in France and Germany did. The most experimental and innovative of artists, including Turner and Constable, Fuseli and de Loutherbourg, but even Blake to a degree, identified with the Royal Academy and academic values. There was no clear opposition between ‘classical’ establishment and ‘Romantic’. But they were in their diversity and contrariness distinctly modern, perhaps even exemplarily so. Heinich narrates the developing image of the artist in France over the same era as involving successive stages, from artisan to professional to vocational: the resulting modern image of the artist was ludicrous and contrary (Heinich 2005). In Britain those stages were collapsed together in a more compressed time frame, driven forward by the marketisation of the cultural field. The very diversity of British Romantic art, and of British Romantic artists, was both the symptom and the alibi of a new economic and social formation – the market society.

Bibliography Altick, Richard D. 1978. The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard UP. Ardill, Tom. 2018. ‘1813: Church Painting on Show at the Summer Exhibition’. In Hallett et al. 2018. Bermingham, Ann, ed. 2005. Sensation & Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s Cottage Door. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. Boydell, John and Josiah 1804. ‘Preface’. In Collection of Prints, from Pictures painted for the Purpose of Illustrating the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare. London: W. Bulmer. Brenneman, David A. 1999. ‘Self-Promotion and the Sublime: Fuseli’s Dido on the Funeral Pyre’. Huntington Library Quarterly 62 (1/2): 69–87. Calè, Luisa. 2006. Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: Turning Readers into Spectators. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Campbell, Colin. 2018. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chambers, Neil. 2007. Joseph Banks and the British Museum: The World of Collecting, 1770– 1830. London: Pickering & Chatto. Clark, J. C. D. 1985. English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice During the Ancient Regime. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Fawcett, Trevor. 1974. The Rise of English Provincial Art: Artists, Patrons, and Institutions Outside London, 1800–1830. Oxford: Oxford UP. Fordham, Douglas. 2008. ‘New Directions in British Art History of the Eighteenth Century’. Literature Compass 5 (5) (September): 906–17.

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Gage, John. 1989. ‘An Early Exhibition and the Politics of British Printmaking, 1800–1812’. Print Quarterly 6 (2): 123–39. Haggarty, Sarah. 2010. Blake’s Gifts: Poetry and the Politics of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Hallett, Mark. 2004. ‘Reading the Walls: Pictorial Dialogue at the British Royal Academy’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 37 (4): 581–604. ———. 2018. ‘1792: A Guided Tour’. In Hallett et al. 2018. Hallett, Mark, Sarah Victoria Turner, Jessica Feather, Baillie Card, Tom Scutt and Maisoon Rehani, eds. 2018. The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018. London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Heinich, Nathalie. 1993. De peintre à l’artiste: Artistes et academicians à l’âge Classique. Paris: Editions de Minuit. ———. 2005. L’Élite artiste: Excellence et singularité en régime démocratique. Paris: Gallimard. Hemingway, Andrew. 2017. Landscape Between Ideology and the Aesthetic: Marxist Essays on British Art and Art Theory, 1750–1850. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Hoock, Holger. 2010. Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850. London: Profile Books. Hunt, William Holman. 1905. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 2 vols. London: Macmillan. Hutchison, Sidney C. 1960. ‘The Royal Academy Schools, 1768–1830’. The Volume of the Walpole Society 38: 123–91 Johns, Richard. 2018. ‘1802: Head Shots’. In Hallett et al. 2018. Klancher, Jon. P. 2016. Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Leslie, C. R. 1860. Autobiographical Recollections. 2 vols. London: John Murray. Lincoln, Matthew and Abram Fox. 2016. ‘The Temporal Dimensions of the London Art Auction, 1780–1835’. British Art Studies 4. Löwry, Michael and Robert Sayre. 2001. Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity. Translated by Catherine Porter. London and Durham, NC: Duke UP. McCue, Maureen. 2018. ‘Guiding the Nation’s Taste: Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and the Construction of the National Gallery in London, 1824–1842’. The Yearbook of English Studies 48: 13–30. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1988. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? London: Duckworth. ———. 2013. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3rd ed. London: Bloomsbury. Myrone, Martin. 2005. Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art, 1750–1810. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. ———, ed. 2006. Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination. London: Tate Publishing. ———. 2007. ‘Henry Fuseli and Gothic Spectacle’. Huntington Library Quarterly 70 (2): 289–310. ———. 2009. William Blake: Seen in my Visions: A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures. London: Tate Publishing. ———. 2017. ‘Drawing after the Antique at the British Museum, 1809–1817: “Free” Art Education and the Advent of the Liberal State’. British Art Studies 5. ———. 2020. Making the Modern Artist: Culture, Class and Art-Educational Opportunity in Romantic Britain. New Haven, CT and London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Myrone, Martin and Amy Concannon. 2019. William Blake. London: Tate Publishing.

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Polanyi, Karl. 2001. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Times. Boston: Beacon Press. Quinn, Malcolm. 2012. Utilitarianism and the Art School in Nineteenth-Century Britain. London: Routledge Riding, Jacqueline. 2018. ‘1832: Shot out of the Water?’ In Hallett et al. 2018. Roach, Catherine. 2016. ‘Rehanging Reynolds at the British Institution: Methods for Reconstructing Ephemeral Displays’. British Art Studies 4. ———. 2019. ‘The Ecosystem of Exhibitions: Venues, Artists, and Audiences in Early Nineteenth-Century London’. British Art Studies 14. Rosenthal, Michael. 1999. The Art of Thomas Gainsborough: A Little Business for the Eye. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. Shannon, Mary. 2019. ‘Artists’ Street: Thomas Stothard, R. H. Cromek, and Literary Illustration on London’s Newman Street’. In Romanticism and Illustration, edited by Ian Haywood, Susan Matthews and Mary Shannon, 243–66. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Smith, Greg. 2002. The Emergence of the Professional Watercolourist: Contentions and Alliances in the Artistic Domain, 1760–1824. Aldershot: Ashgate. Solkin, David, ed. 2001. Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780–1836. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. ———. 2008. Painting out of the Ordinary: Modernity and the Art of Everyday Life in Early Nineteenth-Century England. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. ———, ed. 2009. Turner and the Masters. London: Tate Publishing. Stefanis, Konstantinos. 2013. ‘Nathaniel Hone’s 1775 Exhibition: The First Single-Artist Retrospective’. Visual Culture in Britain 14 (2): 131–53. Taylor, Charles. 1991. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP. Todd, Janet. 2005. ‘Ivory Miniatures and the Art of Jane Austen’. In British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by J. Batchelor and C. Kaplan, 76–87. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Vaughan, William. 1993. ‘“David’s Brickdust”: and the Rise of the British School’. In Reflections of Revolution, edited by Alison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest, 134–58. London and New York: Routledge. Waterfield, Giles. 2015. The People’s Galleries: Art Museums and Exhibitions in Britain, 1800–1914. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. West, Shearer. 1991. ‘“Half-History” Portraits and the Politics of Theatre’. Art History 14 (2): 225–49. Whitley, William T. 1930. Art in England, 1821–1837. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Wright, Amina. 2020. Thomas Lawrence: Coming of Age. London: Philip Wilson Publishers.

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11 Portraiture: Commerce and Celebrity Peter Funnell

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he 1790 Royal Academy exhibition has frequently been seen as a transitional moment in the history of British portrait painting.1 It was the last exhibition to which Sir Joshua Reynolds contributed. Reynolds, founding president of the Academy and the most influential portrait painter of the preceding decades, sent in seven works, the most ambitious of which was a large, allegorical portrait of the celebrated singer, Mrs Billington as St Cecilia (fig. 11.1). Regarded as a valedictory moment in Reynolds’s career – he was to die in February 1792 – the exhibition is also seen as the moment of

Figure 11.1  Joshua Reynolds, Mrs Billington as St Cecilia, 1786–9. Oil on canvas. Gift of Lord Beaverbrook. The Beaverbrook Art Gallery (Fredericton, New Brunswick).

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arrival of Thomas Lawrence, the painter who would eventually succeed Reynolds as President of the RA and who, by and large, dominated portrait painting in the following four decades. The first part of this chapter will focus on the oil portrait through the careers of Lawrence and his contemporaries while other media, such as sculpture and the miniature, will be explored in a wider discussion of portraiture and celebrity. Notable among the twelve portraits that Lawrence submitted to the 1790 RA was his portrait of Queen Charlotte, a portrait that in its ‘frankness and particularity’ revealed a new approach to royal portraiture by an artist who was very young – then only twenty – to receive such a prestigious commission (Albinson, Funnell and Peltz 2010, 88). But it was Lawrence’s portrait of the comic actress, Elizabeth Farren, Later Countess of Derby (fig. 11.2), that most struck contemporaries and that was contrasted to Reynolds’s Mrs Billington. Grand and elevated in character, Reynolds’s portrait of Billington fulfilled his notion of portraiture as rising above ‘particularity’ and exemplifies the aspect of his female portraits that cast women in mythological or allegorical roles. By contrast, Lawrence’s portrait of Farren, which hung very close to the Reynolds in the Great Room of the Academy, appears fresh and immediate, its subject set in a summer landscape wearing fashionable contemporary dress and regarding the viewer directly. The contrast between the two paintings, and the sense of a succession, was

Figure 11.2  Thomas Lawrence, Elizabeth Farren, Later Countess of Derby, 1790. Oil on canvas. Bequest of Edward S. Harkness, 1940. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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relished by contemporary critics. According to one, Lawrence’s painting was ‘completely Elizabeth Farren; arch, careless, spirited, elegant, engaging’ (cited in Hallett 2014, 438). The English Chronicle thought Lawrence’s picture ‘far superior’ to that of Reynolds while the Public Advertiser agreed, noting that ‘there is now a young artist eminently qualified to take [Reynolds’s] place’ (cited in Hallett 2014, 438). The contrast between Reynolds’s and Lawrence’s portraits at the 1790 RA has become an art historical commonplace and a key event in the periodisation of British portraiture between an eighteenth-century ‘golden age’ and the Romantic period. But the episode still invites consideration. It alerts us to a shift towards something new in portraiture while at the same time revealing continuities with the previous generation of Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, both in terms of style and in strategic approaches to the practice of portrait painting. What is new about Lawrence’s portrait of Farren can be described in terms of its seeming modernity. Marcia Pointon has identified ‘modernity’ as a way of describing changes in British portraiture of this period, as a move away from a primary concern for rendering ‘likeness’ towards a preoccupation with execution and effect: ‘a growing gulf between image and referent’ (Pointon 2001a, 105). By the early nineteenth century, Pointon asserts, there was ‘an all-enveloping fetishization of surface detail in which texture and substance is dwelt upon for its own sake’, a ‘glorification of an explicitly contemporary material world’ (Pointon 2001a, 106). This is, of course, evident in Farren’s white silk and muslin, the fox fur trim and fur muff and the ‘soft and sinuous kid gloves’ (Albinson et al. 2010, 98). As to continuities, pictorially Lawrence’s Farren owes much to the type of fulllength female portrait, showing fashionably dressed women walking in an outdoor setting and placed close to the picture plane, that Reynolds had developed in the mid1770s. It also compares to portraits of the same decade by Gainsborough, such as his Mrs Thomas Graham of 1775–7 (National Galleries of Scotland), which likewise celebrates richness of costume detail. But it is what Lawrence takes from Reynolds’s example in terms of professional management and ambition that is also important here. Mark Hallett has shown how Reynolds’s practice as a portrait painter was fundamentally directed by his response to the advent of public art exhibitions at the Society of Arts in the early 1760s and especially the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768. Reynolds, Hallett writes, ‘began opening up his practice to the exhibition space in ever-more explicit and inventive ways’ (Hallett 2014, 156). This was manifested both in Reynolds’s attentiveness to the visual impact his works would have when displayed in these new situations but also his choice of the men and women whose portraits he submitted for exhibition in terms of topicality and celebrity. Reynolds’s strategy of forging his art with an emerging culture of celebrity is most clearly demonstrated by his portrait of Lawrence Sterne painted in 1760, the same year as the first tentative Society of Arts exhibition and just as Sterne’s fame as the author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy was reaching its zenith with his presence in London in the spring of that year. Painted during Sterne’s London visit, the portrait has been called ‘a “joint business venture of Sterne and Reynolds”, bringing benefits to both’ (cited in Hallett 2014, 136). Thirty years later, it is clear that Lawrence was attentive to the older artist’s example. That of Farren is very much in the vein of Reynolds’s celebrity portraiture, showing an actress who was then at the peak of her fame but who also drew wider social notoriety for her liaison with the man who had commissioned the portrait, the Earl of Derby.

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There was another commercial factor that, along with the emergence of public exhibitions as a showcase for artists’ works, conditioned the practice of portraiture during this period: the proliferation of the reproductive engraving. Again, Reynolds was highly alert to the importance of prints made after his portraits, both financially profitable in their own right as well as spreading his reputation beyond the studio and the exhibition through their purchase and display in printsellers’ windows. The portrait of Sterne was quickly engraved in mezzotint by Edward Fisher and a headand-shoulders detail formed the frontispiece to Sterne’s Sermons of 1760, something announced only a day after Reynolds had finished painting his portrait in an advertisement in the Whitehall Evening Press (cited in Hallett 2014, 136). Reproductive engravings after Lawrence’s portraits were to become an essential feature of his practice although production of the print after Farren appears to have been a slightly more delayed and protracted affair: it was only published on 25 February 1791.2 Again engravings both promoted and fed upon the notability of sitters and the public image their portraits projected. Portraiture and celebrity, embracing the worlds of politics, literature and the theatre, will form the subject of the second part of this chapter, where case studies will focus on Charles James Fox, Lord Byron and Sarah Siddons.

The Oil Portrait Throughout this period, artists protested about the absence of state encouragement for, in comparison to portraiture, the academically more esteemed genre of history painting. The support that there was for grand-scale historical or mythological painting came largely from the monarchy and was dominated by what Henry Fuseli derisively called ‘the manufactory in Newman Street’ of Benjamin West, Reynolds’s successor as President of the Royal Academy (Roberts 1907, 22). Commercial imperatives largely determined production of the visual arts during this period and the lives of its practitioners, with portrait painting the leading genre. Pointon has written that a ‘savagely competitive world of commercial enterprise, a life of toil, insecurity and the strain of constant public exposure: these were the material conditions generating discourses of portraiture’ (Pointon 1993, 36). The highly competitive nature of the practice of portrait painting during this period is recorded in the Diary of Joseph Farington in which he discussed Lawrence’s prices with him. As Farington wrote on Sunday, 29 May 1796: Lawrence I breakfasted with. We had much talk about his lowering his prices in consequence of Hoppner continuing to paint ¾ pictures for 25 guineas. He said He had determined to reduce his to Beechy’s prices, viz: 30 guineas for a ¾ &c &c. The statement which has been made in the Telegraph of the prices of him, Hoppner & Beechy is a good plea.3 (Farington [1796], 562) This comparison of their prices introduces Lawrence’s two principal competitors, William Beechey and John Hoppner, to whose careers I shall return shortly, as well as indicating that such matters were considered sufficiently newsworthy as to feed into the contemporary press. The period also witnessed the growth of an influential newspaper review culture, again focused on the annual Academy exhibitions. Portrait painting was by far the dominant genre at RA exhibitions and attracted a considerable

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number of artists. Pointon has calculated that from 1781 to 1784 portraits constituted between 34.7 per cent to 49.3 per cent of works exhibited as compared to history paintings (including battle pictures and literary subjects) at 15 per cent in 1781 and 15.9 per cent in 1784 (Pointon 1993, 38). She also estimates that there were at least 111 known portrait painters active in London during that decade (Pointon 1993, 40). Towards the end of the period under consideration here, an appendix to a parliamentary Report from the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures published in 1836 enumerates portraits exhibited against other genres for the ten years from 1824 to 1833. It remained the principal genre with portraits accounting for generally over 500 exhibits each year from 1828, with ‘historical and poetical works’ contributing only about a quarter of this number out of just upwards of 1,200 exhibits in all (Pointon 2001a, 94). The Report was very much aimed at exposing the privileged position held by the Academy and its forty full Academicians in what was by then an institutionally more complex and much larger art world: Benjamin Robert Haydon gave evidence that there were some 2,000 professional artists working in London at the time (‘Parliamentary Papers: Report from the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures’ 1836, 55). The Select Committee’s Chairman, the reforming MP for Liverpool, William Ewart, accused the Academicians of being a ‘clique of portrait painters’ amid claims that the annual exhibitions were commercially driven, advertising showcases for their work (cited by Pointon 2001a, 94). As well as suggesting the number of practitioners, especially portraitists, active during this period, these figures also testify to the number of subjects or sitters represented in the exhibitions. Not all, of course, were notable or celebrated individuals and the vanity of those deemed less suited to being portrayed either in terms of social station or physical appearance is a familiar trope in both verbal and graphic satire of the time. Although London was very much the centre of the portrait business, portrait artists enjoyed a flourishing trade in the regions either from a base in London or within other urban centres. Artists who became significant players in the London art world still retained a strong client base in their region of origin. James Northcote, for example, enjoyed early and continued patronage during his London career from families from his native west country. He also ‘early established his role as a portrait painter of naval officers and dockyard officials’ with his work at his native Plymouth and at Portsmouth (Simon 1995–6, 22). And Beechey, although trained as a student at the Royal Academy chose to practise in Norwich between 1782 and 1787 finding ‘himself in the immediate receipt of so many commissions in that town and neighbourhood that he was induced to take up his abode there altogether’ (cited in Roberts 1907, 18). But he continued to send works to the Royal Academy, visited London on occasion, and shared art world gossip with London contemporaries, before returning there permanently in 1787. With the death of Gainsborough in 1788, the decline of Reynolds and the departure from the scene of other competitors – Gilbert Stuart’s flight to Ireland because of financial difficulties, for instance, and George Romney’s troubled mental state – the market was open to Beechey and Hoppner until Lawrence’s triumph of 1790. Thereafter the three dominated the field. Their careers and patronage bases took different courses during this period and they are presented as very distinctive artistic and masculine personalities. And the commissioned oil portrait was very much the preserve of male artists. Famously the Academy had included two women artists at its foundation, Angelica

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Kauffmann and Mary Moser, and recent research has shown that in the early 1800s between five and ten per cent of exhibits at the annual exhibitions were by women. But these tended to be works in other media and genres; the Academy excluded women from its formal teaching and was constitutionally an institution dominated by men.4 Of the three leading portrait practitioners, Beechey was characterised unfavourably in 1795 by another rival; John Opie, comparing him to the other two painters, remarked that Beechey’s ‘pictures were of that mediocre quality as to taste & fashion, that they seemed only fit for sea Captains & merchants: whereas Lawrence & Hoppner had each of them a portion as it were of gentility in their manners of painting’ (Farington [1795], 289–90). Contrary to Opie’s estimation, Beechey enjoyed a long and highly successful career, his annual receipts frequently reaching a respectable £2,000 or so in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Key to this success was the patronage of the royal family from around 1793 and his position as the principal painter of the court of the ailing George III. At their best Beechey’s portraits are intimate, sympathetic and unshowy, such as the series of six portraits of the king’s daughters commissioned in the late 1790s by the Prince of Wales, for two of whom Beechey had also acted as drawing master. A review in the Monthly Mirror during this period – May 1796 – again compares him to Lawrence and Hoppner and praises the reserve and ‘chaste’ aspect of Beechey’s work. ‘Beechey has fewer eccentricities than his competitors’, it states, ‘for he never distorts his figures for the sake of extravagant attitude – he is less fantastic in his design and less exuberant in manner, in short, he has more nature than the other two’ (Roberts 1907, 50). And the stylistic characteristics of Beechey’s approach were fused with those of his personality, conjuring traits of straightforwardness, honesty and manly amiability. ‘The leading features in Sir William Beechey’s character’, according to his Times obituary, ‘were a genuine simplicity of mind and manner, united with a frankness and cheerful urbanity which placed everyone at ease who approached him’ (Roberts 1907, 14). In anecdotes of the elderly Beechey related by younger painters – and he lived until 1839 – this is further compounded with an ‘old school’ ruggedness of language and demeanour reckoned at odds with the gentlemanly behaviour of later times. These comments on Beechey provide a useful touchstone for considering the careers of Hoppner and Lawrence and how characterisations of their art and personalities were also conflated: we can note Opie’s use of the word ‘gentility’ to describe their portrait styles. Hoppner was brought up at court, the son of Germans who served in that of George II, was a member of the Chapel Royal Choir as a boy and was given an allowance by George III. Court and society connections helped him to establish a position in the late 1780s as likely successor to Reynolds and Romney, both of whom influenced his portraiture, and he responded to Lawrence’s success at the 1790 RA with strong showings at the following two years’ exhibitions dominated by portraits of royal and noble sitters. By 1793 he had succeeded Reynolds as Portrait Painter to the Prince of Wales and, in the words of John Wilson, ‘became image-maker to the Carlton House set’ (Wilson 1992, 55). He declared himself in 1795 to be ‘the best Painter in England’ according to Farington and, Wilson has argued, was considered by contemporaries as superior to Lawrence in the later 1790s and early 1800s. This success is borne out by his earnings, recorded as £2,200 in 1798, when he raised his price for a three-quarter length to 30 guineas, reaching £3,000 by 1802 (Wilson 1992, 72). He was by all accounts handsome and a good conversationalist, a clubman, and

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on occasion used his connections with prominent politicians such as George Canning to argue for the interests of the RA of which he was made a full Academician in 1795. The years immediately after his 1790 triumph saw Lawrence produce portraits of striking originality. At the 1792 RA these included the intense portrayal of the teenage Etonian Arthur Atherley (Los Angeles County Museum) and the emotionally charged full-length rendition of Emma Hamilton as La Penserosa (Abercorn Heirlooms Settlement). Portraits like these are characterised by a vivid use of colour and dashing handling, with passages of richly impasted white paint. Together with exaggerated anatomical forms and striking backgrounds, notably in the highly atmospheric portrait of John, Lord Mountstuart (Private collection), these are works that operate at a heightened emotional register. For some contemporaries they bordered on artificiality and ostentation: the overly ‘fantastic’ or ‘exuberant’ which, as we saw, the Monthly Mirror contrasted with Beechey’s works or, in the words of the radical critic who wrote as ‘Anthony Pasquin’, ‘the glossy, glowy offending appearance which characterise all that Mr Lawrence executes’ and that ‘is evidently his vice’ (cited in Albinson et al. 2010, 89). A troubled period in Lawrence’s life from the mid-1790s to around 1805 contributed to a protracted decline in his practice and Hoppner’s dominant position during these years. There were several factors. Lawrence became enmeshed in fraught relationships with two of the daughters of his friend, the actress Sarah Siddons. The melodramatic correspondence that records this episode includes Lawrence writing of his ‘uncontroulable feelings, and the stings of bitter anguish,’ and Siddons condemning ‘this wretched madman’s frenzy’ and complaining of Lawrence ‘flying off in ANOTHER worldwind’ (Knapp 1904, 79–85). These years saw the start of financial difficulties, and the fear of debt, that were to dog him throughout his career. There is also evidence of an underlying mental anguish that contemporaries would have classified as male hysteria or ‘hypochondria’. Farington recorded the onset of this on 6 December 1795, writing that Lawrence had complained that occasionally ‘His spirits are affected, so as to raise the most melancholy ideas in his mind’ (Farington [1795], 426). But this affliction is most extensively recorded in an exchange of letters between Lawrence and the radical author William Godwin. Lawrence had turned to Godwin in confessional mode to describe his condition. Godwin responded that he had perceived ‘something extraordinary passing in your mind’: It showed itself principally in a sort of listlessness, which might almost at first sight have suggested the idea of paralytic affection, but might easily be supposed to be disconsolateness & dissatisfaction, arising from some cause, not of a physical, but an intellectual nature.5 Lawrence’s state of mind during this period perhaps reflected the pressures generated by the practice of portrait painting that Pointon identifies. In Lawrence’s case they may also seem to be at one with the heightened sensibility and highly strung aspect of his portraiture at this date. Also clear is the contrast his behaviour must have presented to the much more stable masculine demeanour of his rival Hoppner. The two men appear, in addition, to have belonged to very different political circles during the 1790s. Although Michael Levey is probably correct in seeing Lawrence as broadly apolitical, his close relationship with Godwin is evident from their correspondence, and he made

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drawings of him on two occasions, one as a witness with Thomas Holcroft at the trial of their fellow radical John Thelwall in early December 1794 (National Portrait Gallery, London). Hoppner’s anti-radical views are more certain and he was closely identified with reactionary circles and publications. As Farington recorded on 25 November 1797, Hoppner ‘had dined lately with Canning and suggested the necessity there is for answering the opposition papers in a better way than is done at present’. Their conversation then turned to the Anti-Jacobin, a journal edited by Hoppner’s close friend, the conservative William Gifford and, as Farington goes on, ‘which is supported by the Treasury and Canning & his Eton friends write for it’ (Farington [1797], 928).6 Hoppner himself is known to have published in March 1797 in The British Critic, a conservative, anti-radical High Church review established in 1793 (Wilson 1992, 96). But success as a portraitist required a degree of political distancing and, in the years after 1800, Hoppner and Lawrence often shared a similar patronage base. Both painted leading figures in government. Hoppner’s portrait of William Pitt of 1805 (Private collection) achieved a phenomenal success: he is said to have received commissions for twenty copies of the portrait even before it was exhibited (Wilson 1992, 239–41). Unlike Lawrence, Hoppner also continued to benefit from the patronage of the Prince of Wales and his circle. Lawrence’s emergence and dominant position from the middle of this decade was partly owing to Hoppner’s declining health – he died relatively young in 1810 – and depended upon two different strands of patronage that reflect significant shifts in the upper strata of contemporary society. He continued, for example, to enjoy the friendship and support of members of the landed aristocracy such as the 1st Marquess of Abercorn, who had commissioned La Penserosa and who manifested what David Cannadine has identified as a ‘crucial period of renewal, re-creation and re-invention’ of the landed aristocracy (Cannadine 1994, 10). Lawrence, Cannadine has written, was ‘the ideal artist to record, to celebrate, and to assist an elite in the process of remaking and re-presenting itself’ (34). But Lawrence also benefited from the support of new men of wealth such as his early patron and friend, John Julius Angerstein, and the banker, Sir Francis Baring. Like Baring, Angerstein’s fortune was inextricably linked to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the fiscal military state that sustained Britain’s war effort, both men acting as loan contractors to government. Lawrence’s group portrait of Sir Francis Baring, 1st Baronet, John Baring, and Charles Wall vividly records the drama of high finance during this period.7 Lawrence’s later career was marked by phenomenal success at home, as the principal portraitist to both the royal family and the political and social elite, and a growing reputation abroad where he was much admired by artists such as Eugène Delacroix. His international career was promoted by the Prince of Wales’s commission to paint the allied rulers and commanders who had secured victory over Napoleon. Travelling across Europe between 1818 and 1820, he produced a series of monumental portraits that eventually formed the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle and constitute his greatest achievement. That of Pope Pius VII impresses by its combination of grandeur and empathy towards the ageing and frail pope.8 By this time Lawrence had finally assumed the patronage of the Prince of Wales who became George IV in 1820, the year Lawrence himself was made President of the Royal Academy. Lawrence produced the most widely known portraits of the increasingly corpulent monarch of which numerous copies were made, mostly by Lawrence’s studio assistants. Second only to the king

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as Lawrence’s most important patron in the 1820s was Robert Peel, Home Secretary in the governments of Lord Liverpool and the Duke of Wellington and himself later Prime Minister. Peel owned no fewer than fifteen portraits by Lawrence, some of family members but most notably portraits of his political colleagues. These formed the nucleus of Peel’s ‘Statesmen’s Gallery’, which recorded the principal political allies of his career. Together they assert what Peel regarded as the historical distinction of this group of men. Tending towards plainness and simplicity, and showing their sitters in the black male costume of the period, they also reflect a change in political manners that Paul Langford has identified as a shift from ‘the statesman as courtier and courted’ to ‘the statesman as orator and legislator, discreet in manner, unpretentious in appearance’ (Langford 1997, 118). If Lawrence’s male portraits necessarily have an air of gravity, those he painted of women in the 1820s demonstrate that dwelling upon ‘texture and surface substance’, and ‘glorification’ of materiality, that we saw Pointon remark upon earlier in this chapter. His full-length of Frances Anne, Marchioness of Londonderry and her Son, Viscount Seaham (The Marquess of Londonderry) is remarkable for its depiction of her red velvet dress and her extraordinarily opulent jewellery, including giant amethysts given to her by Emperor Alexander I of Russia. This and other portraits of women of the 1820s betoken an age of luxury that was epitomised by the extravagant behaviour and spending of the monarch himself but was also notable in the sophisticated metropolitan tastes of men such as Peel. But while Lawrence was outstanding in the rendering of texture and substance, his portraits are also distinguished by intelligence and sympathy. His portrait of Princess Sophia (fig. 11.3), George IV’s sister, again features richness in its painting of textiles: her velvet dress, the elaborate shawl draped behind her, and Sophia’s expensive jewellery. But it is also an insightful portrait of a woman whose personal life had been difficult and constrained by the dictates of her position.

Portraiture and Celebrity A crucial aspect of portraits in general, and indicative of their subjects’ celebrity, was their replication through copying, something that is especially apparent in the medium of portrait sculpture. As Ludmilla Jordanova has argued, the copy should be regarded as ‘the work that the portrait does in the world’, disclosing networks of allegiance and admiration. We have seen how Lawrence’s oil portrait of George IV was much copied in his studio as was Hoppner’s Pitt. Hoppner was not the only artist to profit from the demand for portraits of Pitt. The sculptor Joseph Nollekens is said by his biographer, J. T. Smith, ‘to have made no less a sum by him than 15,000l.’, £4,000 from his statue at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the rest from busts for he ‘also executed at least seventy-four busts in marble, for almost everyone of which he had one hundred and twenty guineas; and there were upwards of six hundred casts taken at six guineas each’ (Smith 1949, 231–2). From ancient times, sculpture fulfilled the role of memorialising the famous and, as such, busts in particular were much replicated. Copies often had little to do with the artist’s studio. As John Gage has recorded, an English traveller to Rome in 1817, ‘noted that, because sculpture was so cheap there, plaster casts of busts of King George III, Fox, Pitt, Nelson and others were shipped from London to be copied in marble, and sent back to England at a total cost of £22 each’ (Gage 2001, 36).

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Figure 11.3  Thomas Lawrence, Princess Sophia, 1825. Oil on canvas. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022. The multiplication of busts was central to Nollekens’s practice as it was to his successor as the leading portrait sculptor of the period, Francis Chantrey. If Nollekens profited from sculptures of Pitt, it was for his busts of Pitt’s great political rival, Charles James Fox, that he was best known. He made two busts of Fox during the sitter’s lifetime both of which are rich in political and personal associations. The first was made for the Whig grandee and Fox’s closest political friend, the 4th Earl Fitzwilliam, was exhibited at the 1791 Academy, and was a key work in Nollekens’s career. It is shown in Lemuel Abbott’s portrait of Nollekens which, according to Smith, hung above the chimney piece in Nollekens’s modelling room, and shows him ‘leaning with his right elbow upon the bust of the Hon. Charles James Fox, the execution of which brought him both fame and profit’ (Smith 1949, 42) (fig. 11.4).

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Figure 11.4  Lemuel Francis Abbott, Joseph Nollekens, c. 1797. Oil on canvas. © National Portrait Gallery, London. Fitzwilliam’s commission was originally modelled for a temple of political friendship at Wentworth Woodhouse, the Yorkshire estate of the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, of whom Fitzwilliam was heir and successor. A statue of Rockingham by Nollekens was surrounded by pairs of busts of his closest allies, one of a number of sculptural precedents of the period for Peel’s Statesmen’s Gallery. As so often, the bust was much replicated, the first at Fitzwilliam’s request for Fox’s sometime admirer Catherine the Great. A further version was ordered by Fitzwilliam as a gift for Elizabeth Armitage, to whom Fox became attached in 1783, and eventually married in 1795. This was installed at the country home, St Anne’s Hill House in Surrey, which the couple shared and where Fox himself built his own modest temple to political friendship. As David Wilson has pointed out, further replicas of this bust are still to be found in the ancestral homes of Whig contemporaries while Nollekens’s second bust, showing him with ‘short hair in the manner of a Roman Republican’, was completed in 1801 for the 5th Duke of Bedford for a Temple of Liberty at Woburn Abbey. This itself ‘was intended to honour Fox as the great champion of civil liberty and justice and the opponent of tyranny and oppression’ (Wilson 2003, 75).9 Again, some fifty versions of this bust were made and are in collections across the world, from India to the United States. A potent ‘cult of Fox’ emerged after his death whose purpose was ‘to boost the morale of the Whig party during their almost unbroken exile from political power from the turn of the century to the Reform Bill’ (Wilson 2003, 75). Busts and statues remained the most potent manifestation of this, although it also included the proliferation of Fox clubs and dinners and the giving of relics such as locks of Fox’s hair.

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The breakthrough portrait by Francis Chantrey was of his early mentor in the 1790s, the radical intellectual John Horne Tooke. The bust was exhibited at the 1811 Academy where it greatly impressed Nollekens and helped form the foundation of Chantrey’s career. He later reckoned that the bust brought him £12,000 of commissions. Horne Tooke had advised Chantrey that he should ‘avoid even the appearance of a leaning towards any party in politics . . . to thrive and stand well in the world’ (Yarrington et al. 1991, 99). As Chantrey’s assistant Henry Weekes later observed, ‘noone knew what were his politics’, and the young man who had attended meetings of the radical Society for Constitutional Information in the 1790s became the sculptor to high Tory governing circles (Potts 1981, 22).10 Like his painter contemporaries, Chantrey’s career was also based on the pursuit of contemporary celebrity and notability. As Alex Potts has written, Chantrey ‘arranged his affairs so that a considerable number of commissions for portraits of prominent figures came his way. Not least among his tactics was a carefully staged assault on the social circles in which such people moved’ (Potts 1981, 24). These ranged across the artistic and radical groups with whom he mixed in his early London years, through scientific and medical circles, to the ‘upper echelons of landed aristocracy, and royalty’ (Potts 1981, 24). His membership of the Freemasons, for instance, led to contacts with influential patrons and ‘played a significant role in his social and professional life’ (Yarrington et al. 1991, 252). His approach to busts developed accordingly; Chantrey creating a larger and grander format with his 1823 bust of the Duke of Wellington, commissioned by Lord Liverpool and appropriate to the great figures of the establishment he sculpted in the 1820s. Similarities between the careers of Chantrey and Lawrence are clear, and they shared patrons and subjects including Abercorn, Liverpool, Aberdeen and Peel, and, like Lawrence, he enjoyed a degree of intimacy with them as well as their patronage. Both artists coincided in making portraits of the literary figure so venerated in such circles, Sir Walter Scott. Chantrey made three busts of Scott. The first in 1820 was done on his own initiative and later given by him to Scott (Abbotsford), the second for the Duke of Wellington, and the third was based on the 1820 bust but with further sittings in 1828 and subsequently sold to Peel. As usual many replicas were made, about forty-five plaster casts from the first version authorised by Chantrey and ‘disposed among the poet’s most ardent admirers’, but also, as he complained to Peel, ‘pirated by Italians; and England and Scotland, and even the colonies, were supplied with unpermitted and bad casts to the extent of thousands’ (Yarrington et al. 1991, 136). Peel had originally wanted a portrait by Lawrence of the novelist, but instead Lawrence painted him as a commission for George IV, beginning like Chantrey in 1820 and finishing with sittings during Scott’s visit to London in November 1826. It was Scott, at the time of Byron’s flight from England in 1816, who remarked that the poet had ‘Childe Harolded himself, and outlawed himself, into too great a resemblance with the pictures of his imagination’ (cited in Jones 1999, 110). The blurring of Byron’s own identity with that of his protagonists is, of course, well known and was something he himself encouraged and reflected upon in the Preface to The Corsair when, in words that Scott echoes, he draws a comparison between himself and ‘the beings of his imagining’ (McGann 1980–93, vol. 3, 149). Byron’s preoccupation with the way he looked, in terms of his physical appearance and dress, was matched by his close engagement with how he was represented in portraits, especially in the years from around 1809 until his departure from London. Both Christine Kenyon

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Jones and Annette Peach have examined in detail how Byron shaped his public image through portraits and their engravings, cultivating a Byronic ‘look’ that continues to influence those who embrace Byronic characteristics and behaviour up to the present day.11 As Jones has written, ‘the existing state of visual Byronism is a complex social construction, built up by many hands over nearly two centuries’ (Jones 1999, 132). Two of the portraits that forged Byron’s image for later generations – that by George Sanders of 1807–8 showing him with his page Robert Rushton and Thomas Phillips’s famous portrait in Arnaout or Albanian costume of 1814 – were in fact little known publicly during Byron’s lifetime. Two portraits that did establish Byron’s contemporary image in the years after the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in March 1812 when he was transformed, in Fiona MacCarthy’s words, into ‘the first European celebrity of the modern age’, were those by Richard Westall and Phillips’s ‘cloak’ portrait, both executed in 1813 and exhibited in London in 1814 (MacCarthy 2002, x). Westall’s portrait (fig. 11.5) was connected to his commission from John Murray for illustrations to Childe Harold and is closely identified with the hero of the poem. It has also been regarded as the epitome of the Romantic poet, its melancholic pose intensified by the rocky background and stormy sky, and celebrates Byron’s appearance with its full red lips, curly black hair and long neck revealed by the open shirt collar that was to become so familiar in other portraits of Byron and their many imitations. Peach suggests that Byron may have contributed to ‘the romanticizing of

Figure 11.5  Richard Westall, Lord Byron, 1813. Oil on canvas. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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the portrait’ and appears to have been happy to sanction Charles Turner’s mezzotint which intensifies its romanticisation to the extent that, as David Piper remarked, ‘it shows, fairly repulsively, the process of apotheosis under way . . . as if the original were not Byronic enough, the eyes have dilated and are now turned upwards’ (Peach 2000, 44). Phillips’s ‘cloak’ portrait (fig. 11.6), of which there are four contemporary versions by the artist, and numerous copies and engravings, ‘complemented and confirmed the impression created by Westall’s portrait’ in its emphasis on the same facial characteristics and highly contrived costume details again with an open-necked white shirt with large collars and cuffs (Peach 2000, 57). Byron certainly involved himself in the portrait’s creation, requesting an alteration to his nose in a letter to Phillips on 6 March 1814. He also took strongly against an engraving of it that Murray had intended should be used as a frontispiece to a collected edition of his poems, insisting on its ‘abolition’ (Peach 2000, 56). An earlier, well-documented episode when Byron demanded that an engraving and its plate should be destroyed concerns that by Henry Meyer after a miniature by Sanders. As Byron wrote to Murray, who had again commissioned it, ‘I have a very strong objection to the engraving of the portrait & request that it may on no account be prefixed, but let all the proofs be burnt, & the plate broken.’ In the event Murray sent the plate to Byron to destroy himself – ‘I had not courage to violate your Lordship even in effigy’ – but kept a single proof of the engraving (Peach 2000, 39).

Figure 11.6  Thomas Phillips, Lord Byron, 1814 (after a portrait of 1813). Oil on canvas. Newstead Abbey.

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Referring to his bust by Bertel Thorwaldsen, Byron reflected on the distinction between portraits made for public and for private purposes, writing that ‘a bust looks like putting up pretensions to permanency – and smacks something of a hankering for public fame rather than private remembrance’ (Jones 1999, 122). Byron was much drawn to the ostensibly intimate or private form of the portrait miniature. As early as 1809, prior to his departure to the Mediterranean, he was commissioning a collection of miniatures of his friends from his days at Harrow, whom he described as his ‘Theban band’ and with some of whom, as Fiona MacCarthy has persuasively argued, he probably had homosexual relationships. As he wrote to William Harness, ‘I am collecting the pictures of my most intimate Schoolfellows’ and requested him to sit for his portrait ‘since the resemblance may be the sole trace I shall be able to preserve of our past friendship & present acquaintance’ (Byron to Harness, 18 March 1809; cited in MacCarthy 2002, 88 and Jones 2002, 111). Robert Dallas recalled seeing these miniatures assembled in Byron’s London rooms, ‘by capital painters . . . elegantly framed, and surmounted by their respective coronets, to be exchanged’ (MacCarthy 2002, 88). The rituals of the exchange or giving of miniatures was essential to the social function of the form as were narratives of ‘receiving, wearing and holding’ (Pointon 2001b, 67). In the case of miniatures of Byron himself, their affective nature played into sensational and melodramatic episodes. As he was well aware, the miniatures he commissioned and versions of them proved highly desirable among his admirers during the period when his relationships with women were at their most complicated. The Sanders miniature of 1812, whose engraving Byron so disliked, was stolen from John Murray in January 1813 by Lady Caroline Lamb with whom he had a famously tempestuous affair. ‘Car L has been forging letters in my name and hath thereby pilfered the best picture of me, the Newstead Miniature!!!’, Byron complained, and it was only recovered by the intervention of his confidante and Lamb’s mother-in-law, the worldly Lady Melbourne (cited by Peach 2000, 38). Although their affair had ended in the summer of 1812, Caroline Lamb ‘continued to importune Byron for portraits and mementos’ and was closely involved in the execution of a miniature by James Holmes in 1813 (cited in Peach 2000, 47). This miniature, showing Byron in Renaissance-style costume, became the object of further intrigue. It was originally given to Lamb by Byron but returned by her in November 1813 for, as she said, Byron to give ‘to some new favourite of the moment’ (cited in Peach 2000, 47). This was Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster with whom Byron had recently had a flirtation as a guest at Aston Hall in Yorkshire. Lady Webster’s highly emotional letters requesting the miniature, agonising over its non-arrival at Aston and, when in her possession, fears over its discovery by her husband add narratives of concealment to those of wearing and holding. Writing of Reynolds’s famous portrait of Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse (RA 1784, Huntington), Gill Perry has described how the worlds of art and theatre during this period ‘enjoyed a symbiotic relationship, both fuelling and fuelled by celebrity culture’ (Perry 2001, 111). Both were subject to similar issues of professional status and to intense scrutiny by public and press alike. The example of Siddons’s portraits returns us to some of the issues and artistic personalities with which this chapter began. Reynolds’s celebrated portrait of her followed the pattern of that of Sterne earlier in his career. It enjoyed a prime position and overwhelmingly favourable comment at the 1784 Royal Academy. Siddons herself was involved in planning the portrait’s engraving while Reynolds was still painting it and later delighted in distributing the prints among

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her friends and admirers. She also physically re-enacted the portrait at Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee at Drury Lane in 1785, ‘wheeled in as part of the pantomime procession, seated on her tragic throne and disposed in the posture of the Tragic Muse, just as Reynolds had painted her’ (West 1991, 114). From her triumphant return to the London stage in late 1782 until her official retirement in 1812, no one dominated the theatre to the extent of Siddons and, until her death in 1831, she remained a phenomenon in terms of public interest and enthusiasm. As William Hazlitt wrote, ‘to have seen Mrs Siddons was an event in everyone’s life’ (cited in Asleson 1999, 41). Her power as a tragic actress – apotheosised in Reynolds’s portrait – was legendary and brought forth extremes of emotion in her audiences that are axiomatic to accounts of the period’s cultivation of sensibility. Fascination with Siddons extended into her private life, her house subject to invasion by fanatical admirers and, as with Fox and Byron, keepsakes of her – letters, locks of hair and so on – were much in demand. These contributed to ‘a sort of fetishistic admiration that made her the object of obsession’ (West 1999, 20). But, as Perry suggests, portraiture in all its forms was a central medium in feeding this obsession. Robyn Asleson has documented how Siddons was ‘adept at orchestrating her own public image’, both in her appearances on and off stage and, especially, how it was shaped through portraits. Siddons herself later recalled that as ‘an ambitious candidate for fame’ much of her time ‘was employed in sitting for various pictures’. In Asleson’s words ‘Siddons went to extraordinary lengths to accommodate the artists who applied to her’ and determined ’to make time for their appointments, no matter how inconvenient’ (Asleson 1999, 46). After 1784, Reynolds’s portrait of Siddons remained the benchmark for theatrical portraits in its fusion of portraiture and history painting. Hoppner responded with his ambitious portrait of the comic actress, Dorothy Jordan as the Comic Muse (Royal Collection Trust) exhibited in 1786 while Beechey ventured, unsuccessfully in the view of contemporaries, to occupy similar ground to Reynolds with his large, emblematic full-length of Sarah Siddons with the Emblems of Tragedy of 1793 (National Portrait Gallery, London). But it is again Lawrence who stands out in the field of theatrical portraiture. His portrait of Farren challenged Reynolds in ways discussed at the start of this chapter while his portrait of Emma Hamilton as La Penserosa is an intriguing response to Reynolds’s Siddons, eliding the conventions of portraiture with history painting very much in the way that Reynolds had advocated. A significant extension to this were Lawrence’s four, extremely large experimental portraits of Siddons’s brother John Phillip Kemble that he called his ‘half-history’ portraits and which, showing Kemble in roles such as Cato or Coriolanus, also speak to what Boyd Hilton has characterised as Kemble’s ‘statuesque authoritarianism’ (Hilton 2006, 33). It was Lawrence who was most closely associated with Siddons and her family both professionally and personally. As the critic in the Times wrote in 1804 ‘this Artist appears to be perpetually employed in tracing and retracing the features of the KEMBLE family’ (cited in Asleson 1999, 82). Lawrence had known Siddons, and had drawn her portrait, since his childhood days in Bath and, as we have seen, became enmeshed in a disastrous relationship with her daughters in the late 1790s. Two of Lawrence’s most developed oil portraits of Siddons reflect what Shearer West has called Siddons’s ‘multifaceted individuality’ and her ‘diverse manifestations as goddess, queen, mother, work of art, bluestocking, businesswoman, strolling player, and chaste beauty’ (West 1999, 35). As with Byron’s portraits, notions of the public and private again come to bear. Lawrence’s portrait

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Figure 11.7  Thomas Lawrence, Sarah Siddons? as Mrs Haller in ‘The Stranger’, c. 1796–8. Oil on canvas. Tate. Photo: Tate. of c. 1796–8, (fig. 11.7) demonstrates for Shearer West a slippage that Siddons herself cultivated between her stage roles and her private persona. Often thought to show her in one of her best-known tragic roles – as the adulterous Mrs Haller in von Kotzebue’s The Stranger – Lawrence has ‘managed to evoke something of the guilt and grief associated with Mrs Haller’s adultery, but he may have intended to allude to the personal trials of Siddons herself . . . well known to Lawrence, who was her intimate acquaintance’ (West 1999, 6). This image of vulnerability contrasts with his grandiose 1804 full-length portrait (see fig. 12.4 here in McPherson, next chapter), for which she reportedly ‘sat to Lawrence . . . last night by Lamplight, ’till 2 o’clock this morning’, an episode which in itself fuelled unsupported rumours of an affair between painter and actress (Farington 1804; cited in Asleson 1999, 83). Instead, showing Siddons at a late point in her career and in the act of performing a reading rather than acting, Lawrence produced a work that reinforced Siddons’s determined respectability: ‘cold and daunting in its formality’ with its ‘insistence on Siddon’s regal stateliness’ (cited in Asleson 1999, 85). It further demonstrates the ways that, over the preceding decades, artists had assisted in transforming the morally problematic image of the actress through portraits that assumed the status of history painting. Theatrical portraits during this period thus became a key site for resolving the relationship between portraits and more elevated types of art: in Perry’s words, ‘whether to class them under the headings of vanity and commerce with the worst tendencies of portraiture, or to emphasise those intellectual and imaginative aspects which linked them to historical art’ (Perry 2001, 113).

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Notes   1. See for example Wilson (1991, 243–4).   2. This was engraved by Charles Knight although the same engraving was published under Francesco Bartolozzi’s name the following year.  3. Farington had recorded on 27 October 1793 that Lawrence was then charging forty guineas for a three-quarter length.   4. The literature on the position of women artists during this period is of course extensive. For an interesting recent discussion see Myrone (2020).  5. William Godwin to Lawrence, 20 February 1996, Royal Academy of Arts Archive, LAW/1/76: an undated draft is MSS, Abinger c.3, ff. 18v-19r, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford: the correspondence and Lawrence’s hypochondria are discussed in Albinson et al., 6–8.   6. George Canning (1770–1827), prominent and charismatic Tory politician and prime minister.   7. See Funnell, ‘Lawrence Among Men: Friends, Patrons and the Male Portrait’, 1–25, and catalogue entries in Albinson et al. The painting, and a mezzotint reproduction by Edward McInnes in Princeton University’s Graphic Arts Collection, may be consulted at: (last accessed 14 May 2022).  8. The portrait may be consulted at the Royal Collection Trust: (last accessed 14 May 2022).   9. On the Woburn temple see Penny (1976, 96 ff.). 10. See Barrell (2013) for an important discussion of the sculptor Thomas Banks’s radical associations. 11. The subject of the final chapters of MacCarthy and of a related exhibition ‘Mad Bad and Dangerous: The Cult of lord Byron’ (National Portrait Gallery, London, 20 November 2002 – 16 February 2003).

Bibliography Albinson, Cassandra A., Peter Funnell and Lucy Peltz. 2010. Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power & Brilliance. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. Asleson, Robyn. 1999. ‘“She was Tragedy Personified”: Crafting the Siddons Legend in Art and Life’. In A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and her Portraitists, edited by Robyn Asleson, 41–95. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum. Barrell, John. 2013. ‘Thomas Banks and the society for Constitutional Information’. In Living with the Royal Academy: Artistic Ideals and Experiences in England, edited by Sarah Monks, John Barrell and Mark Hallett. Farnham: Ashgate. Cannadine, David. 1994. ‘The Making of the British Upper Classes’. In Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain, 9–36. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. Farington, Joseph. 1978–84. The Diary of Joseph Farington. Edited by Kathryn Cave, Kenneth Garlick and Angus Macintyre. 16 vols. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. Gage, John. 2001. ‘Busts and Identity’. In Return to Life: A New Look at the Portraits Bust, edited by Penelope Curtis, Peter Funnell and Nicola Kalinsky, 36–48. Leeds: Henry Moore Institute. Hallett, Mark. 2014. Reynolds: Portraiture in Action. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. Hilton, Boyd. 2006. A Mad, Bad & Dangerous People? England 1783–1846. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Knapp, Oswald, ed. 1904. An Artist’s Love Story Told in the Letters of Sir Thomas Lawrence, Mrs Siddons and her Daughters. London: George Allen.

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Jones, Christine Kenyon. 1999. ‘Fantasy and Transfiguration: Byron and his Portraits’. In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, edited by Frances Wilson, 109–36. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Langford, Paul. 1997. ‘Politics and Manners from Sir Robert Walpole to Sir Robert Peel’. Proceedings of the British Academy 94: 103–25. MacCarthy, Fiona. 2002. Byron Life and Legend. London: John Murray. McGann, Jerome J. 1980–93. Byron: The Complete Poetical Works. 7 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP. Myrone, Martin. 2020. Making the Modern Artist: Culture, Class and Art-Educational Opportunity in Romantic Britain. London: Paul Mellon Centre for British Art. ‘Parliamentary Papers: Report from the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures’. 1836. Peach, Annette. 2000. ‘Portraits of Byron’. Walpole Society 62: 1–144. Penny, N. B. 1976. ‘The Whig Cult of Fox in Early Nineteenth-Century Sculpture’. Past & Present 70 (February): 94–105. Perry, Gill. 2001. ‘The Spectacle of the Muse: Exhibiting the actress at the Royal Academy’. In Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780–1836, edited by David H. Solkin, 111–25. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. Pointon, Marcia. 1993. Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in EighteenthCentury England. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. ———. 2001a. ‘’Portrait! Portrait!! Portrait!!!’ In Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780–1836, edited by David H. Solkin, 93–109. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. ———. 2001b. ‘“Surrounded with Brilliants”: Miniature portraits in Eighteenth-Century England’. The Art Bulletin 83 (1) (March): 48–71. Potts, Alex. 1981. ‘Chantrey as the National Sculptor of Early Nineteenth-Century England’. Oxford Art Journal 4 (2) (November): 17–27. Roberts, W. 1907. Sir William Beechey, R.A. London: Duckworth and Co. Simon, Jacob. 1995–6. ‘The Account Book of James Northcote’. Walpole Society 58: 21–125. Smith, J. T. 1949. Nollekens and his Time. London: Turnstile Press. West, Shearer. 1991. The Image of the Actor: Visual and Verbal Representation in the Age of Garrick and Kemble. London: Pinter Publishers. ———. 1999. ‘The Public and Private Roles of Sarah Siddons’. In A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and her Portraitists, edited by Robyn Asleson, 1–39. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum. Wilson, David. 2003. ‘Nollekens and Fox in the temple: The Armistead bust’. The British Art Journal 4 (3) (Autumn): 65–79. Wilson, John. 1991. ‘The Romantics 1790–1830’. In The British Portrait, edited by Roy Strong, 243–97. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club. ———. 1992. ‘The Life and Work of John Hoppner (1758–1810)’. PhD diss., Courtauld Institute of Art. Yarrington, Alison, Ilene D. Lieberman, Alex Potts and Malcolm Baker. 1991–2. ‘An edition of the ledger of Sir Francis Chantrey RA at the Royal Academy, 1809–1841’. Walpole Society 56.

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12 Convergence and Dissonance: Romantic Theatre and the Visual Arts Heather McPherson

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ver the past decade there has been a growing interest in a wide spectrum of modes of visuality that co-existed and competed for attention during the Romantic period, ranging from illustration to the spectacle of the sublime, from waxworks to panoramas to theatrical portraits.1 This chapter examines the complex nexus of affinities and rivalries that linked the visual and performing arts and interrogates their symbiotic but deeply conflicted relationship. Both were prominent players in the burgeoning visual culture of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London. As popular modes of cultural consumption and entertainment, they catered to and were shaped by the public’s growing fascination with visual spectacle, exhibition culture and celebrity, but diverged in fundamental ways. The tensions between drama as literary medium and as stage spectacle that permeated Romantic theatrical criticism is a glaring example of that divide as evidenced in the writings of William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The pantomime, which relied on extravagant scenic effects and stage tricks, was widely attacked by critics for transforming the stage into a tawdry spectacle and debasing public taste (D’Arcy Wood 2001, 19). As theatre became more visual in the late Georgian era, that criticism was increasingly levelled against more traditional dramatic productions at the patent houses. The enlargement of the stages at Drury Lane and Covent Garden after 1780, in conjunction with the heightened emphasis on elaborate sets and staging, also contributed to changes in acting style, as gestures and dramatic attitudes supplanted the face in registering emotion (West 1991a, 120–2; Meisel 1983, 50).2 That shift is encapsulated in the stately classical or academic style of acting associated with John Philip Kemble, in particular. Artists like Joshua Reynolds, George Romney and Thomas Lawrence, who frequented the theatre and had close personal ties to the stage, were attracted to actors as subjects and the opportunities they offered for elevating portraiture and expanding its expressive parameters.3 The celebrity of theatrical stars like David Garrick, Frances Abington, Sarah Siddons and Kemble intensified the appeal of their portraits at the Royal Academy Exhibitions and promoted the careers of both artist and performer. In his Discourses, however, Reynolds maintained an anti-theatrical stance and clearly spelled out the dangers of mixing genres and applying theatrical principles to the practice of painting, noting, ‘If a Painter should endeavour to copy the theatrical pomp and parade of dress and attitude, instead of that simplicity, which is not a greater beauty in life than it is in Painting, we should condemn such Pictures as painted in the meanest style’ (Reynolds 1975, 240). In their portraits, both Reynolds and Lawrence liberally

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incorporated elements of costume, gesture and lighting: elements that were reminiscent of the stage. Despite his uneasiness regarding the unnaturalness and ostentatious display of the stage, Reynolds repeatedly turned to the theatrical model and utilised allegorical and artistic allusions to align portraiture with history painting, notably in his magisterial Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1784). In reassessing the affinities and differences that demarcated painting and the theatre, the lynchpin is the culture of visuality – the heightened emphasis on visual spectacle and scenic effects and performance that was articulated across different modes of visuality and modes of looking.4 The visual and performing arts were impacted by broader shifts in cultural production and consumption, notably the push for professionalisation, the expanding urban public and the advent of celebrity culture, which helped propel the rising status of artists and actors. The high-profile careers of Reynolds and Garrick, which overlapped both personally and professionally, are emblematic of the convergent, at times contentious, relationship between the visual and performing arts, the centrality of performance as a cultural paradigm and the expanding role of images and the media (McPherson 2017, 17–54). Scenic design is a revealing example of the convoluted connections between the artistic and theatrical establishments. Long dominated by foreign artists, scene painting was generally held in low regard, and viewed as a professional trade or mechanical science, rather than as a liberal art.5 Late eighteenth-century scenography was dramatically transformed from decorative backdrop to essential production component when Garrick hired Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg as set designer for Drury Lane Theatre in 1772 (Baugh 2020, 43–56). Working from small three-dimensional models, Loutherbourg unified theatrical effects and introduced innovative designs and technologies, such as moving sets and backlit transparencies, that accentuated visuality through enhanced lighting and scenic illusion (D’Arcy Wood 2001, 40–2; Baugh 2020, 43–56). Loutherbourg, who also exhibited at the Royal Academy, raised stage design to a new artistic level. His miniature special-effects theatre, the Eidophusikon (1782), which was a popular sensation, provided a catalogue of scenographic tropes that would stimulate scenic innovation for decades (Baugh 2020, 43–56). Spectacular staging and eye-catching scenery continued under Kemble’s management at Drury Lane and, later, Covent Garden. William Capon, who shared Kemble’s passion for authentic antiquarian and Gothic decor, designed elaborate three-dimensional scenic units. The rising status of painters and set designers fostered interplay and reciprocity between the worlds of art and theatre, as the taste for topographical sets and topographical and sublime landscape paintings at the Royal Academy demonstrates (West 2014, 300). The growing emphasis on scenic effects, which was denounced by critics but embraced by the public, exacerbated the tensions between drama as a literary medium and as stage spectacle. Although the connections between the visual and performing arts in the Romantic period have long been recognised, the broader cultural significance and complexity of their relationship have been re-examined in recent decades and are coming into sharper focus. The venerable ut pictura poesis (or sister arts) doctrine, which has been widely utilised in comparative analyses of painting and literature, is highly problematic because of its inherent literary bias due to the privileged position of poetry and the tendency to see images as mute signs.6 The hybrid nature of theatre as a performativebased idiom, in which the visual and the verbal are coextensive, makes the sister arts

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doctrine doubly untenable as a critical model. Further complicating matters, the parallels or points of convergence linking painting and the theatre are theoretical and metaphorical, as well as direct or practical, as the case of set design illustrates. Both acting and painting were deeply influenced by rhetorical and physiognomic traditions and were charged with conveying complex narrative and expressive content through gesture, body language and facial expression. The visual and performing arts also shared a common critical language and aesthetic vocabulary in which terms such as performance and spectacle were applied to acting and painting alike. In the critical literature, the relationship between the visual and performing arts is frequently characterised in terms of ‘theatricality’ (or ‘anti-theatricality’) without historically contextualising or qualifying the terms in light of the contested position of the stage in the Romantic period and the long-standing anti-theatrical prejudice.7 An alternative model for conceptualising the synergies and tensions between painting and theatre would be to re-envisage the relationship as a paragone, or comparative debate, grounded in differing modes of visuality and temporality. Although both were fundamentally concerned with visual display, performance and engaging the spectator through the powers of art and illusion, as visual modes of expression, they differed generically and experientially in fundamental ways. One of the key distinctions between painting and theatre is the effect of time or duration on visual and spatial perception. In his Laocoön (1766), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing focused on the dichotomy between the arts of time and space, succession and simultaneity, in drawing distinctions between painting and poetry as modes of representation (Mitchell 1984, 98–115). Lessing asserted that the painter’s moment was unitary and without duration. In his writings, the painter and Academician, Henry Fuseli, examined the rhetoric of visual representation and the dramatic model in history painting. In his Fourth Lecture on Painting, Invention Part II, he divided the genre of history painting into three distinct branches of invention: the historical (which shows or informs); the dramatic (which inspires or moves); and the epic (which astonishes while it instructs), which are useful in conceptualising the differences between painting and the stage. In Fuseli’s schema, the dramatic, which is primarily concerned with exhibiting character and the conflict of the passions, ‘raises itself above historic representation by laying the chief interest on the actors’ (Fuseli 1830, 6–8). His probing interrogation of the collateral relationship between portraiture and history painting, in which he argued that portraiture was primarily concerned with the depiction of character, whereas history painting showed the characters and powers of the being in action, is especially relevant to the hybrid genre of theatrical portraiture (discussed below). Fuseli’s introduction of the dramatic as a distinct category of painting was a significant theoretical move that attested to the growing significance of the theatrical model for history painting at the Royal Academy (West 1991b, 228). In his own artistic practice, Fuseli repeatedly portrayed spectacular dramatic subjects drawn from Shakespeare, in particular Macbeth. His frenzied depiction of Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers (1812), painted the year Siddons retired from the stage, focuses on the duelling actors and their powerful conflicting emotions (fig. 12.1). Though not a specific portrait of Siddons, it was doubtless inspired by her galvanising interpretation of Lady Macbeth, the tragic role with which she was most indelibly linked, and in which she appeared for her final curtain call.8 Traditionally titled Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth, the painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy

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Figure 12.1  Henry Fuseli, Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers, 1812. Oil on canvas. Tate. Photo: Tate. in 1812. Fuseli depicts Act II, Scene 2, the pivotal moment in the play when Lady Macbeth seizes control and commands her terrified husband to hand over the daggers. The dramatic confrontation is so powerfully evoked that we envisage Lady Macbeth seizing the daggers, though her quivering husband still holds them, precipitating the action forward in time. The explosive energy, dynamic poses and gestures and laserlike focus on duelling passions through exaggerated physiognomic expression are hallmarks of Fuseli’s hyperbolic style of painting. This rapidly painted, sketch-like grisaille, and Fuseli’s large-scale paintings for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, are emblematic of the foregrounding of the actor in Fuseli’s dramatic canvases and his seamless fusing of Grand Manner painting and imaginary stage elements. Another crucial consideration in assessing how perception operates differently in the visual and performing arts is the distinction between sequential and nonsequential imagery. As an entity, the individual elements of a painting can be perceived simultaneously in a single glance, though individual elements can be examined more fully when viewed sequentially. Conversely, a theatrical performance unfolds in real time and is necessarily experienced as a succession of temporal moments that are stitched together into a synoptic impression that relies on visual memory. Rudolf Arnheim has argued that our perception of images is essentially spatial, and that the conception of patterns presupposes the simultaneous presence of all components. He further observes that a painting’s composition is held together by dynamic forces within the spatial simultaneity, so the viewer’s gaze moves in a time sequence that is not related to the painting’s structure (Arnheim 1978, 1–12). Conversely, on the stage, a dramatic performance unrolls continually, creating a constant tension

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between the motion and mutability of the actor and the fixed positioning of the spectator and the static set that frames the action. At public exhibitions, like those held at the Royal Academy, where individual paintings vied for attention and dialogued with one another, it is the spectator whose gaze shifts selectively and oscillates as he or she moves through the display space (De Bolla 2003, 35). Although the temporal distinction between theatre and painting is highly significant, it is not absolute. As Marvin Carlson and Joseph Roach have convincingly shown, despite the ephemeral nature of performance, an individual actor’s dramatic singularity and fame can live on after death, across time and space, through collective memory and the phenomenon of ‘ghosting’: the echoing and recycling of earlier performances or surrogation, which creates genealogies of performance; as well as through visual imagery (Carlson 2001; Roach 2007). The obvious test case in investigating the affinities and tensions between painting and the stage is theatrical portraiture, which challenges generic distinctions by blurring the boundaries between the aesthetic and the performative.9 A hybrid subgenre that coalesced in the second half of the eighteenth century in conjunction with the rise of the actor and celebrity culture, the theatrical portrait played on the actor’s fluid, overlapping identities on and off stage as private individual, public figure and stage character, expanding the expressive possibilities of portraiture by offering greater latitude for invention and historical and dramatic allusion. As Shearer West has shown, theatrical portraits are complex coded constructions, influenced by various factors including critical canons, aesthetic doctrines and commercial motives, intended to evoke rather than accurately record an actor’s performance (West 1991a, 7–25). Ranging from modest, genre-like tableaux, such as Zoffany’s, to Lawrence’s monumental ‘half-history’ pictures (discussed below), they were widely disseminated as prints and illustrations. Theatrical portraits, as we shall see, also speak to the difficulties of translating diachronic stage performances into paint and of fixing the actor’s elusive image. Thomas Beach’s John Philip Kemble as Macbeth and Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth (1786), which depicts the dagger scene, is emblematic of the challenges that artists confronted in transcribing the dramatic action and passions unleashed on the stage in a static reified image (fig. 12.2). Beach portrays Siddons and Kemble in close up, three-quarter view, showcasing Siddons’s Van Dyck costume and elaborate coiffure, topped by a large black hat, and the actors’ anguished expressions and eloquent hand gestures. Frozen in stop action, their belaboured expressions fail to telegraph the conflicting emotions and feverish intensity of the murderous couple. Siddons, who turns away, awkwardly brandishing the daggers, is the dominant figure, as she was on the stage. In her remarks on the role, she emphasised Lady Macbeth’s resolve and decisiveness in the dagger scene (Campbell 1834, 2: 20–1). Siddons had a low opinion of the painting, with which critics concurred, faulting Beach for failing to capture and pedestrianising Siddons’s majesty and sublimity as Lady Macbeth. The reviewer for the Morning Post and Daily Advertiser cuttingly remarked, ‘This is a very miserable picture of that inimitable actress’ (Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 10 May 1786, 2). In his ambitious theatrical portraits, Lawrence takes a diametrically different approach. Eschewing particularities and fussy stage business, he dramatically silhouettes a solitary transcendent, often contemplative, actor against a minimal background, seamlessly fusing stage charisma and painterly brio.10

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Figure 12.2  Thomas Beach, John Philip Kemble as Macbeth and Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth, 1786. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Garrick Club, London. John Philip Kemble as Cato (1812), the last of Lawrence’s experimental ‘half-histories’, portrays the actor, life-size, in one of his most celebrated classical roles, as the embodiment of stoicism and masculine virtue (fig. 12.3).11 Kemble as Cato, the most realised of his monumental theatrical portraits, elides the aesthetic and hierarchical distinctions between portraiture and history painting. In a letter of 1798, Lawrence referred to Kemble as Coriolanus (1797), the first in the series, as ‘a sort of half-history picture’ (West 1991b, 225). An avid theatre-goer and gifted amateur actor, Lawrence was an intimate friend of both Kemble and Siddons. His close personal ties and shared interests gave him an insider’s knowledge of their evolving acting styles and unique insights into

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Figure 12.3  Thomas Lawrence, John Philip Kemble as Cato, 1812. Oil on Canvas. National Portrait Gallery, London. Photo: Hugh Kelly; © Joseph Friedman, Ltd. their public and private personas.12 Lawrence considered Joseph Addison’s Cato, which Kemble revived in 1811, his ‘finest and most penetrating performance’ (Albinson et al. 2010, 208–10).13 The politically charged play celebrates the famous orator and stoic statesman’s final days and his ultimate sacrifice for the Republican cause. Lawrence spoke of the painting of Cato as a generalised portrait, modelled on Kemble, and critics perceived it as infused with history, and as more than a portrait.14 The picture represents the climactic but static, reflective moment when Cato, realising that he cannot repel Caesar’s troops, soliloquises on Plato’s Phaedon and the immortality of the soul, foreshadowing his suicide, which is intimated by the gleaming dagger at his side.

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Kemble/Cato is seated in a massive curule chair, attesting to his antiquarianism and interest in historical authenticity, against a generalised theatrical backdrop, recalling the majestic seated pose in Reynolds’s Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse, which Lawrence would apotheosise in 1823, as ‘a work of the highest epic character, and indisputably the finest female portrait in the world’ (Williams 1831, 1:430). Kemble’s obliquely angled, commanding pose literally fills the space, accentuating his monumentality and bringing him closer to the viewer. Contemplative and devoid of action, the figure of Cato brings to mind William Hazlitt’s barbed reference to Kemble as ‘the very still-life and statuary of the stage . . . an icicle upon the Bust of Tragedy’ (Hazlitt, The Examiner, 5 May 1816). In picturing Kemble as the epitome of political virtue and heroic masculinity, Lawrence subsumed the actor into the lofty realm of history and philosophy. The picture’s complex layers of meaning and associations with liberty and political virtue were rooted in the present as much as in the classical past, especially the invasion threat that infused it with a patriotic subtext. Kemble/Cato can also be envisaged as a countertype to the debased public image of Kemble as a tyrant and enemy of the people that tarnished his public reputation in the wake of the Old Price Riots. As a dramatically staged representation of an actor in character, Lawrence’s ‘half-history’ picture clearly qualifies as ‘theatrical’; however, it could equally be construed as ‘anti-theatrical’ due to the absence of action and its statue-like stasis. Kemble as Cato is a single unified image of a tragic hero that, like a soliloquy, freezes the action on stage. As in a cinematic close-up, the emotional intensity is diffused – the face becomes an opaque screen, and the living actor is metamorphosed into a timeless classical effigy. Lawrence’s particular regard for Kemble as Cato is demonstrated by the fact that he borrowed it temporarily from the Earl of Blessington to make a copy and never returned it. Kemble/Cato reigned in the place of honour over the fireplace in Lawrence’s reception room at 65 Russell Square, and was only reclaimed after the painter’s death (West 2012, 16).15 Lawrence first laid eyes on Siddons in 1781 in Bath, where she was performing, when he was twelve years old. An artistic prodigy, he made drawings of the young actress as Zara in The Mourning Bride and as Euphrasia in The Grecian Daughter before she was famous, which were later engraved. In the 1790s, he painted an intimate half-length portrait of Siddons, which exists in multiple variants, one of which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1797 (Garlick 1989, 264, No. 715 (a)–(d).16 Lawrence’s most ambitious artistic homage is the statuesque full-length of Sarah Siddons (1804) (Garlick 1989, 264–5, No. 715 (e); fig. 12.4). Commissioned by her close friend, Caroline Fitzhugh, it is a belated response to Reynolds’s Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse and a feminine counterpart to his ‘half-history’ portraits of Kemble. Slightly smaller and more vertical in format, it represents the legendary tragedienne in private character at the end of her career. Siddons stands regally, illuminated against a red backdrop, with a Shakespeare folio and a volume of Otway plays beside her, and a column inscribed ‘Shakpere’ at the far right, as if engaged in a dramatic reading. Appointed preceptress to the royal princesses in 1783, Siddons gave command readings at court. After her retirement from the stage, she presented public readings at the Argyll Rooms in 1812–13, and entertained guests with dramatic readings from Shakespeare at her home at No. 27 Baker Street. Posed in front of a red curtain that invokes the stage, she stares out fixedly, as if addressing an invisible audience. Wearing an elegant black empire-line dress, adorned with a matching red coral necklace, bracelets and earrings, and coiffed à l’antique, her monumentality and aura

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Figure 12.4  Thomas Lawrence, Sarah Siddons, 1804. Oil on canvas. Tate. Photo: Tate. Acquisition presented by Mrs C. Fitzhugh, 1843.

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of authority are reinforced by her embonpoint. Although depicted in private character, her dress recalls the costume she wore for Lady Macbeth in the letter scene, blurring the distinction between sitting for her portrait in Lawrence’s studio by lantern light and appearing on stage, just as her dramatic readings from Shakespeare would. Siddons’s biographer, James Boaden, describes the almost supernatural effect of the readings in which a light irradiated her head (Boaden 1827, 2:391). Lawrence’s brilliant palette and the scenographic lighting, illuminating Siddons from the front like footlights, leaving the background in shadow, enhance the sculptural effect. The low vantage point adds to the stately majesty of her towering figure (Asleson 1999, 83–5).17 In his diary, Farington recounts that Siddons posed in Lawrence’s studio until two o’clock in the morning, which created a scandal and led to rumours of a romantic relationship (Farington 1978–84, 2; 198–206). Unlike Kemble as Cato, which was widely acclaimed, Siddons’s portrait was deemed a failure when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1804. The portrait’s mixed reception can be attributed to Lawrence’s conflicting mandate of painting a conventional feminine full-length of Siddons, whom he had idolised since his teens, and evoking the power and sublimity of her acting. However, Siddons, in a letter dating from 1809 to her daughter-in-law, Harriet, praised the portrait, as ‘more really like me than anything that has been done before’.18 The portrait correlates with contemporary descriptions of Siddons’s dramatic readings after her retirement, which were simply staged without props. These intimate solo readings pierced the proscenium wall, giving spectators the illusion that she was acting for each of them alone. Lawrence depicts Siddons offstage in a fashionable private setting, domesticating the Tragic Muse. Conflating the domestic and the theatrical, he represents Siddons in a stage-like setting, with a brilliantly patterned carpet and a classical chaise longue behind her. Unlike other portraits of Siddons that highlight her charismatic presence and the extraordinary expressiveness and malleability of her features, here her melancholic face is oddly inexpressive and distant except for her glowing dark eyes. By the early 1800s, Siddons had grown ponderous and her body bore the marks of multiple pregnancies and poor health. In contrast to Kemble as Cato, the subtext of the portrait is deeply personal and theatrical, rather than public and philosophical. Ultimately, Lawrence’s novel attempt at melding offstage intimacy and tragic sublimity doesn’t quite coalesce as either a private commemorative tribute or as a public effigy of a theatrical deity. In assessing Lawrence’s innovative symbiosis of portraiture, history painting and theatre, Isabella Wolff (1803–15), his most complex, intricately layered female portrait, warrants close attention (Albinson et al. 2010, 212–15) (fig. 12.5). Rather than a public portrait of a celebrated performer, it is an intimate private tribute to his closest female friend and muse that was commissioned by Clarissa Hill, the sitter’s sister. I contend that it should be viewed as a brilliant obverse example of Lawrence’s ‘halfhistories’. In the portrait, Lawrence seamlessly interweaves artistic and historical allusions with personal feelings in an elaborately staged meditative composition, investing Mrs Wolff with the historical gravitas and timeless aura of a sibyl or muse (Garlick 1989, 24–5; 286–7, No. 838 (a)).19 Rather than embedding the sitter in the stream of history or invoking a dramatic text, as he does in Kemble as Cato, the portrait is a purely invented conceit and a painterly tour de force, whose long gestation and suspension of movement arguably evoke the passage of time and duration and reflect Lawrence’s indelible admiration for the sitter. Not coincidentally, he began working on

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Figure 12.5  Thomas Lawrence, Isabella Wolff, 1803–15. Oil on canvas. W. W. Kimball Collection, The Art Institute of Chicago. Wolff’s portrait around the same time he was painting the full-length of Siddons, the reigning Tragic Muse. The two portraits, though, dramatically different in composition and effect, resonate on many levels. Dressed in a luminous empire-line white satin gown and wearing a bejewelled turban-like head covering (a linen cap overlaid with Indian silk), Isabella Wolff is the epitome of modern Regency elegance.20 Her gleaming white dress is embellished with a brightly patterned Oriental shawl that snakes around her. Seated at a reading desk

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in a niche, she is dramatically silhouetted against a red velvet backdrop. The gallery of antique casts at Sherwood Lodge, Battersea, visible behind her at far right, enhances the classicism of her dress and her sibyl profile pose, her head resting on her right hand.21 Her eyes lowered, she is absorbed in the large tome in front of her, which is open to an image of Michelangelo’s Delphic Sibyl from the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Wolff’s pose, loosely based on the Erythraean Sibyl, is the living embodiment and counterpart to the illustration she is contemplating, creating a mise en abyme. I would like to suggest that this portrait, more than Kemble as Cato or the 1804 full-length of Siddons, is a multivalent pictorial response to Reynolds’s Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse, which Lawrence revered and equated with artistic excellence. Both are complex intertextual compositions, interpolated with references to the Old Masters, notably Michelangelo, and art and connoisseurship more generally, and both transcend the particularities of portraiture by transporting their female subjects to the loftier realm of history and allegory, though they operate somewhat differently. Although Reynolds frequently intertwined artistic and allegorical references in his female portraits, Lawrence generally did not, relying instead on his brilliant draftsmanship and virtuosity with paint to embellish and elevate his sitters. Isabella Wolff’s portrait, like the subject herself and Lawrence’s sustained relationship with her, remains an enigma. Though untrained, she was one of Lawrence’s key interlocutors on art whose opinion he valued highly. Virtually nothing is known about the portrait’s genesis or Lawrence’s precise intentions. The elaborately constructed background and the complex nexus of references are highly unusual (Albinson et al. 2010, 212; 214–15).22 Lawrence made at least three drawings of Mrs Wolff, including a chalk study of her head in profile (c. 1810), which has been linked to an intimate drawing of her with her son, Hermann, known today through a lithograph (1830) (Albinson et al., 164–6). In addition, there is a smaller bust-length depiction of Mrs Wolff (c. 1803), also in profile, facing left, probably painted during the same sittings, but turbanless (Garlick 1989, 287, No. 838 (b)).23 In comparing the drawings and the bust-length oil to the finished portrait, the difference is striking – they are attractive studies of a stylish modern woman rather than timeless evocations of a classical muse. In circling back to the problem of representing time or duration in theatrical painting discussed earlier, there is one other possible strategy – namely, depicting a figure from different points of view simultaneously on the same canvas. Lawrence experimented with that approach in his rapidly sketched, unfinished depiction of Emilia, Lady Cahir (c. 1803–4), a virtuoso triple portrait of stunning immediacy (Albinson et al., 193–5).24 The heads portray different expressions or moods of the sitter, though the third is only lightly drawn in pencil. This lively spontaneous multifaceted portrait, suggesting different dramatic moments occurring in succession, also has a theatrical subtext. It was painted during a house party at Bentley Priory where Lawrence was appearing opposite Lady Emilia in private theatricals. On the canvas, Lawrence inscribed in pencil: ‘Painted by Thomas Lawrence in a fit of folly’, intimating that her extraordinary beauty had unhinged him, and possibly alluding to the heightened theatrical ambiance in which it was painted (Albinson et al. 2010, 195).25 Although he is primarily remembered as a portrait painter, George Romney’s lifelong fascination with Shakespeare and the theatre is manifested in hundreds of drawings as well as paintings (Dixon 1998). Throughout his life, he sketched continuously, even when attending the theatre. Romney, who had hoped to make his mark as a history

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painter, was commissioned to produce three paintings for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery: The Shipwreck from The Tempest (1790), Cassandra Raving from Troilus and Cressida (1792) and the allegorical composition, The Infant Shakespeare Attended by Nature and the Passions (c. 1791–92), and gave a fourth, a version of Shakespeare Nursed by Comedy and Tragedy, to Alderman Boydell (Dixon 1998, 42). In November 1786, Romney and his friend and patron, William Hayley, attended the dinner given by the Boydells that launched the Shakespeare Gallery, which Romney was instrumental in instigating (Kidson 2002, 195–6). For the gigantic visionary shipwreck scene (Act I, Scene 1), which was the first and most ambitious of the canvases, Hayley was the model for Prospero, and Emma Hamilton, a frequent model and muse in the 1780s, posed for Miranda. In the painting, Romney amalgamates different scenes that occur sequentially in the play, the shipwrecked sailors struggling in the foreground, and Prospero and Miranda watching the storm at far right (Dixon 1998, 46). As the numerous preparatory studies show, Romney, like a set designer and director, reconceived the dynamic thrusting composition around a central vortex, regrouping the sailors and repositioning and modifying the poses of Prospero and Miranda at the right, and Ferdinand leaping overboard at the left. Romney frequented the theatre and belonged to the Unincreasables, an intimate literary and dining club whose members attended plays regularly and met to dine and to read or discuss plays. He was a friend of the actors Thomas Sheridan and John Henderson and the playwright Richard Cumberland (Dixon 1977, 1:44–5; West 2002, 131–2). Although closely associated with the theatre, his aesthetic was rooted in the expression of the passions and antique sculpture. Romney also painted theatrical portraits of leading actors, beginning with Mrs. Yates as the Tragic Muse (1771), who had appeared as the Tragic Muse in Garrick’s Jubilee ode (1769). In the 1780s, he painted theatrical portraits of Henderson as Macbeth Act I, Scene 3 (1780?), Dorothy Jordan as Peggy in the Country Girl (1786–7) and of Siddons. Henderson appeared as Macbeth in fall 1780 and sat for Romney five times, though the portrait may have been completed later (Pressly 1993, 225–7).26 Romney made detailed drawings of Henderson’s features and facial expression, including three close-up studies of his mouth (Dixon 1977, 2:384–5; 498).27 In 1783, Siddons sat for Romney for a fulllength portrait as the Tragic Muse before she sat for Reynolds or Gainsborough. The portrait, which was modelled on a classical statue, remained unfinished and was later cut down to a half-length (Asleson 1999, 64–9). Although Siddons never posed again for Romney, she inspired his most original performance-based picture. In Siddonian Recollections (c. 1785–90), Romney represented Siddons in the guise of Tragedy in three life-size expressive heads, strung diagonally across the canvas, that evoke the full gamut of tragic emotions she embodied on stage – terror, despair, violence and death – that ultimately lead to catharsis (Hughes 1987, 128–39; West 2002, 140) (fig. 12.6).28 The eerily lifelike heads, which are indebted to Charles Lebrun’s illustrations of the passions, are fragmentary recollections or transcriptions of Siddons’s stage performances, encapsulating temporality and memory. The painting also reflects Romney’s fascination with the representation of the passions and classical tragic masks, which he drew repeatedly. Rather than depicting Siddons in a specific role, such as Lady Macbeth, Romney attempted instead to transcribe the phenomenology or mechanics of her acting. The individual heads evoke powerful emotional states – vignetted expressive masks that would be stitched

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Figure 12.6  George Romney, Siddonian Recollections, c. 1785–90. Oil on canvas. Princeton University Art Museum, Museum purchase, Surdna Fund y1992-13 together in remembering a performance, constituting a sort of semiotics of tragic acting (West 2002, 140; McPherson 2017, 119). The masklike head at the upper right, which probably represents terror, resembles Romney’s studies of expressive heads depicting terror or horror, with its tightly clenched eyebrows, agonised gaze and contorted mouth. The flowing serpentine locks accentuate the sublime effect. The central head, which closely resembles Siddons and is more difficult to decode, perhaps represents fear. Romney’s artistic response to the dynamics of Siddons’s acting, in which her face becomes a flickering chalky screen, projecting her emotions sequentially, is, to my knowledge, unique. Siddonian Recollections should be interpreted as an ambitious attempt at synthesising theatrical portraiture and physiognomic analysis and evoking the temporality of performance by combining the têtes d’expression (expressive heads) in a single image that transcribes different moments in time. More than any of his artistic colleagues, Romney arguably probed the visual boundaries and points of convergence and dissonance between the visual and performing arts in his theatrical drawings and in Siddonian Recollections in particular. Similarly, in his theatrically infused paintings of Emma Hamilton enacting a variety of roles, including Cassandra and Miranda for the Shakespeare Gallery, and subjects ranging from Bacchantes to Medea to St Cecilia, he obsessively pursued what could be termed an intermedial exchange between painting and performance (West 2002, 152). From 1782 to 1786, when Hamilton was Lord Greville’s mistress, she posed repeatedly for Romney, turning

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his London studio into an intimate performance space in which they collaboratively explored the relationship between the visual and performing arts, painting and statuary, the static and the temporal that Lessing had interrogated in his Laocoön (West 2002, 151–2). After she moved to Naples, Emma Hamilton carried that intermedial exchange forward in her famous attitudes in which she re-enacted poses drawn from ancient art, including works from her husband, Sir William Hamilton’s celebrated collection, blurring the boundaries between the aesthetic and the performative. Seamlessly transitioning from one pose to the next, using minimal props, she reflexively transformed herself into a living sculpture that, like Romney’s art, stretched aesthetic and temporal boundaries (Touchette 2000, 123–46; West 2002, 148–51).

Notes  1. See Thomas (2008); D’Arcy Wood (2001); Haywood, Matthews and Shannon (2019); De Bolla (2003); West (2014); Baugh (2020).  2. Kemble and Siddons were viewed as aesthetic objects and often compared to ancient sculpture.   3. On portraits of actors and heightened dramatic expression, see Wind (1986, 34–50).   4. On the culture of visuality and different scopic regimes, see De Bolla (2003, 14–71).   5. On scene painting, see Rosenfeld (1981); West (2014, 286–303).   6. The classic formulation is Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (1958). The grounds of comparison and critical arguments have been reframed, notably by Wendorf (1990), in relation to portraiture and biography, and Mitchell (1986), who characterises the contested relationship between word and image as ‘a war of signs’.  7. See West (2002,131–58). West notes that ‘theatricality’ should be considered as both generic and historically specific (131).   8. See McPherson (2000, 299–333). Fuseli depicted Garrick and Mrs Pritchard in the Dagger Scene in an earlier watercolour (c. 1766).   9. See West (2002, 131). Specifically, in reference to Romney’s complex associations with the theatre. 10. The only exception is Kemble as Rolla (1800), which depicts the climax of Act V, when Rolla rescues Cora’s child. A pugilist posed for the athletic figure of Kemble/Rolla. 11. I am indebted to West (1991b), the most illuminating discussion of Lawrence’s ambitious theatrical portraits. 12. On the impact of Lawrence’s relationship with the Kemble family, see West (2012, 1–25); Burnim (1981, 160–201). Lawrence painted or sketched Kemble a dozen times and made over fifty portraits of members of the Kemble family. 13. The portrait was commissioned by Lord Mountjoy, an admirer and patron of Kemble and Lawrence, for 400 guineas. 14. West (1991b, 240, 242) notes the shift towards historicity. Lawrence’s biographer, D. E. Williams, insisted that it was a history painting rather than a portrait. 15. West notes that Lawrence often took back portraits and kept them in his studio. 16. Although the portrait is often associated with the role of Mrs Haller, it was painted before Siddons appeared in it. 17. Asleson links the portrait to Siddons’s command readings, and notes that it was painted at a time of crisis when Siddons had temporarily ceased acting and was contemplating retiring from the stage. 18. Folger Shakespeare Library Yc 432(14). Siddons distributed prints to family members and it served as the frontispiece to Boaden’s biography, who admired the portrait.

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19. She was married to Jens Wolff, the Danish Consul in London, from whom she separated in 1810. There was speculation of a romantic relationship between Lawrence and Mrs Wolff. 20. See Levey (2005, 195–8), who cites fashion historian Aileen Ribeiro regarding the head covering. 21. Levey (1979, 196) related the head-on-hand pose to Veronese’s Dream of St. Helena (c. 1570) in the National Gallery, London. 22. Lawrence was a leading collector of drawings by Michelangelo. Wolff’s pose has also been compared with the personification of Night from the Medici Chapel, of which Lawrence owned a small maquette. Her contemplative profile can also be compared to Michelangelo’s drawings of ideal heads. 23. The painting is at Croft Castle, Herefordshire. 24. Lawrence sometimes exhibited sketches of unfinished portraits in his studio which revealed his genius at rapidly capturing expression. 25. Lawrence wrote to his sister that he found Lady Cahir bewitching. The sitter tried to claim the undelivered portrait after Lawrence’s death. 26. The original portrait is lost. It was engraved in 1787. The small version in the Folger, attributed to Romney, is painted over an engraving. John Romney, the artist’s son, suggested it was inspired by a public reading in 1785. 27. The drawings, which appear to be sketched from life, are in the Folger Shakespeare Library, b5.21, b7.69. According to Dixon, they were originally part of the same sheet. 28. Although the picture is often linked to Macbeth in the literature, there are no direct references.

Bibliography Albinson, A. Cassandra, Peter Funnell and Lucy Peltz, eds. 2010. Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power & Brilliance. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Arnheim, Rudolf. 1978. ‘Space as an Image of Time’. In Images of Romanticism: Verbal and Visual Affinities, edited by Karl Kroeber and William Walling, 1–12. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Asleson, Robyn. 1999. ‘“She was Tragedy Personified”: Crafting the Siddons Legend in Art and Life’. In A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and Her Portraitists, 41–95. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum. Baugh, Christopher. 2020. ‘Scenography and Technology’. In The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730–1830, edited by Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn, 43–56. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Boaden, James. 1827. Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons. 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn. Burnim, Kalman. 1981. ‘John Philip Kemble and the Artists’. In The Stage in the Eighteenth Century, edited by J. D. Browning, 160–200. London: Garland. Campbell, Thomas. 1834. Life of Mrs. Siddons. 2 vols. London: Effingham Wilson. Carlson, Marvin. 2001. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. D’Arcy Wood, Gillen. 2001. The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860. New York: Palgrave. De Bolla, Peter. 2003. The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. Dixon, Yvonne Romney. 1977. ‘The Drawings of George Romney in the Folger Shakespeare Library’. 2 vols. Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland. ———. 1998. ‘Designs from Fancy’: George Romney’s Shakespeare Drawings. Washington DC: Folger Shakespeare Library. Farington, Joseph. 1978–84. The Diary of Joseph Farington. Edited by Kenneth Garlick and Angus D. Macintyre, 16 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale UP.

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Fuseli, Henry. 1830. Lectures on Painting Delivered at the Royal Academy. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley. Garlick, Kenneth. 1989. Sir Thomas Lawrence: A Complete Catalogue of the Oil Paintings. Oxford: Phaidon. Hagstrum, Jean H. 1958. The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haywood, Ian, Susan Matthews and Mary L. Shannon, eds. 2019. Romanticism and Illustration. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Hughes, Alan. 1987. ‘Art and Eighteenth-Century Acting Style. Part III: Passions’. Theatre Notebook 41 (3): 128–39. Kidson, Alex. 2002. George Romney 1734–1802. London: National Portrait Gallery. Levey, Michael. 1979. Sir Thomas Lawrence. London: National Gallery. ———. 2005. Sir Thomas Lawrence. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. McPherson, Heather. 2017. Art and Celebrity in the Age of Reynolds and Siddons. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP. ———. 2000. ‘Masculinity, Femininity, and the Tragic Sublime: Reinventing Lady Macbeth’. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 29: 299–333. Meisel, Martin. 1983. Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in NineteenthCentury England. Princeton: Princeton UP. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1984. ‘The Politics of Genre: Space and Time in Lessing’s Laocoön’. Representations 6 (Spring): 98–115. ———. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 10 May 1786. Pressly, William. 1993. A Catalogue of the Paintings in the Folger Shakespeare Library: ‘As Imagination Bodies Forth’. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Reynolds, Joshua. 1975. Discourses on Art. Edited by Robert R. Wark. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Roach, Joseph R. 2007. It. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Rosenfeld, Sybil. 1981. Georgian Scene Painters and Scene Painting. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Thomas, Sophie. 2008. Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History Spectacle. New York: Routledge. Touchette, Lori-Ann. 2000. ‘Sir William Hamilton’s “Pantomime Mistress”: Emma Hamilton and Her Attitudes’. In The Impact of Italy: The Grand Tour and Beyond, edited by Clare Hornsby, 123–46. London: The British School at Rome. Wendorf, Richard. 1990. The Elements of Life: Biography and Portrait-Painting in Stuart and Georgian England. Oxford: Clarendon Press. West, Shearer. 1991a. The Image of the Actor: Verbal and Visual Representation in the Age of Garrick and Kemble. New York: St. Martin’s Press. ———. 1991b. ‘Thomas Lawrence’s “Half-History” Portraits and the Politics of Theatre’. Art History 14 (2) (June): 225–49. ———. 2002. ‘Romney’s Theatricality’. In Those Delightful Regions of Imagination: Essays on Romney, edited by Alex Kidson, 131–58. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. ———. 2012. ‘The Professional and Personal Worlds of Artists and Actors: Thomas Lawrence and the Siddons Family’. Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film 39 (2) (Summer): 1–25. ———. 2014. ‘Manufacturing Spectacle’. In The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737–1832, edited by Julia Swindells and David Francis Taylor, 286–303. Oxford: Oxford UP. Williams, D. E. 1831. The Life and Correspondence of Sir Thomas Lawrence. 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley. Wind, Edgar. 1986. Hume and the Heroic Portrait: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Imagery. Edited by Jaynie Anderson. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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13 Sound and Vision in Blake’s London James Grande

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he relationship between the arts underwent a profound transformation in the Romantic period. Under the influence of German idealist philosophy, music – elite instrumental music, in particular – took up a newly elevated position, celebrated for its purported power to convey the universal and ineffable.1 In a famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (1808), published in 1810, E. T. A. Hoffmann claimed that ‘Beethoven’s instrumental music unveils before us the realm of the mighty and the immeasurable’ and ‘the pain of infinite yearning’: ‘Only in this pain [. . .] do we live on as ecstatic visionaries.’ For Hoffmann, this was art that went beyond vulgar representation to access instead sublime obscurity: ‘Beethoven’s music sets in motion the machinery of awe, of fear, of terror, of pain, and awakens that infinite yearning which is the essence of romanticism. He is therefore a purely romantic composer’ (1989, 97–8). For Samuel Taylor Coleridge, perhaps the most important conduit of German idealism in Britain, music occupied a place at the apex of the arts precisely because of its liberation from the local and specific: ‘The generic how superior to the particular illustrated in Music, how infinitely more perfect in passion & its transitions than even Poetry – Poetry than Painting’ (2002, 58). As part of this shift, Romantic writers aligned music with poetry in its ability to reach beyond mimesis. As M. H. Abrams writes in his classic study The Mirror and the Lamp, Romantic aesthetics displaced the long-standing tradition of ut pictura poesis (‘as is poetry, so is painting’, from Horace’s Ars Poetica): ‘In place of painting, music becomes the art frequently pointed to as having a profound affinity with poetry. For if a picture seems the nearest thing to a mirror-image of the external world, music, of all the arts, is the most remote’ (Abrams 1953, 50). These positions were far from fixed, however, and recent scholarship has focused instead on the often fluid relationship between the arts. For example, Thomas Tolley has argued that the success of Haydn’s music in Britain was based on its use of programmatic effects, which appealed to an audience trained in attentive looking (2001). In a similar vein, Deirdre Loughridge has shown how listening practices and ways of thinking about music were influenced by new optical technologies (including the magnifying glass, peepshow, shadow-play and magic lantern), creating a hybrid ‘audiovisual culture’ (2016, 10–11).2 This chapter examines the relationship between the arts in the work of the poet, painter and printmaker William Blake (1757–1827). While Blake is most often thought about in relation to visual culture, Robert Essick has suggested that ‘Blake may be our noisiest poet, at least in the number and variety of human utterances he names [. . .] Sometimes the noises cluster together and overwhelm all other senses’ (1989, 173).3 The present chapter explores this soundworld, asking how music figures in Blake’s work and

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how we might think about Blake as both a writer of songs and a mediator of the popular music culture of Romantic London. Blake strenuously resisted the contemporary elevation of music and poetry above visual art, writing in his Descriptive Catalogue of 1809, shall Painting be confined to the sordid drudgery of fac-simile representations of merely mortal and perishing substances, and not be as poetry and music are, elevated into its own proper sphere of invention and visionary conception? No, it shall not be so! Painting, as well as poetry and music, exists and exults in immortal thoughts. (1988, 541)4 For Blake, who here defines poetry as ‘sounds of spiritual music and its accompanying expressions of articulate speech’, poetry, painting and music all have the potential to become visionary arts. His work suggests a highly complex relationship between the arts and the human senses, one shaped by his unorthodox religious beliefs, his experience of London life, and the unique method of printmaking that created the illuminated books.

The Voice of the Bard Accounts of the poet singing his own songs are a staple of Blake biography, linking the performance of his work to specific places and audiences. The engraver and antiquarian John Thomas Smith described how in the early 1780s he ‘often heard’ Blake ‘read and sing several of his poems’ at the salons or ‘conversaziones’ hosted by the bluestocking Harriet Mathew at 27 Rathbone Place, between Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. According to Smith, Blake ‘was listened to by the company with profound silence, and allowed by most of the visitors to possess original and extraordinary merit’ (Bentley 2004, 30). Silent listening is presented here as the tribute paid to genius, but may of course have been an awkward or embarrassed silence. The same witness gives a more detailed description of how, around this time, Blake wrote many other songs, to which he also composed tunes. These he would occasionally sing to his friends; and though, according to his confession, he was entirely unacquainted with the science of music, his ear was so good, that his tunes were sometimes most singularly beautiful, and were noted down by musical professors. (Smith 2004, 606) There is a tension here between Blake’s inspired tunes – the ‘singularly beautiful’ effusions of untutored genius – and Smith’s categorisation of music as a science: Blake’s melodies, formed in ignorance of the ‘science of music’, must be ‘noted down by musical professors’. This process resembles Thomas Percy and Joseph Ritson’s contemporaneous antiquarian practice of collecting simple ancient airs, although, alas, no transcriptions of Blake’s melodies survive. Writing about Blake’s move to Poland Street, Soho in the mid-1780s, when he was at work on Songs of Innocence (1789), the poet-songwriter Allan Cunningham similarly describes musical composition as integral to Blake’s way of working: In sketching designs, engraving plates, writing songs, and composing music, he employed his time, with his wife sitting at his side, encouraging him in all his

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undertakings. As he drew the figure he meditated the song which was to accompany it, and the music to which the verse was to be sung, was the offspring too of the same moment. Of his music there are no specimens – he wanted the art of noting it down – if it equalled many of his drawings, and some of his songs, we have lost melodies of real value. (2004, 633) For Cunningham, the visual, literary and musical dimensions of Blake’s art are coeval, part of a single creative process – ‘offspring [. . .] of the same moment’ – although his account again emphasises Blake’s inability to record the melodies for his songs. The role of musical imagining as a central part of Blake’s creative process, even a lost component of his art, also appears in his own words and designs. The frontispiece to Songs of Innocence depicts a piper and later copies of Songs of Innocence and Experience show on their final plate (‘The Voice of the Ancient Bard’) a bard playing a Celtic harp, bookending the collection of songs with scenes of musical performance (see figs. 13.1 and 13.2). In 1800, Blake accepted an invitation to live and work under William Hayley’s patronage at Felpham on the Sussex coast, writing that he would

Figure 13.1  Songs of Innocence, Copy G, Plate 1, Frontispiece, 1789. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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Figure 13.2  Songs of Innocence and Experience, Copy Z, Plate 54, ‘The Voice of the Ancient Bard’, 1826. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress, William Blake Archive.

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‘be Poet Painter & Musician as the Inspiration comes [. . .] Rending the manacles of Londons Dungeon dark’ (to George Cumberland, 1 September 1800, Bentley 2004, 95–7). Renewed creativity is here associated with life outside the metropolis and imagined in terms of the unity of the arts (‘Poet Painter & Musician’). During this period, a letter to Hayley from Edward Garrard Marsh, a student at Oxford University and son of the composer John Marsh of Chichester, refers to an unspecified ‘hymn which inspired our friend’ and to Blake’s own fugitive melodies: I long to hear Mr Blake’s devotional air, though (I fear) I should have been very aukward in the attempt to give notes to his music. His ingenuity will however (I doubt not) discover some method of preserving his compositions upon paper, though he is not well versed in bars and crotchets. (Bentley 2004, 120)5 Here, Blake is not only unable to preserve his melodies: for Marsh, his original compositions resist or elude conventional notation. Blake returned to London in 1803, having been indicted for sedition and assault after a scuffle with a soldier who alleged that Blake had uttered pro-French sentiments and damned the King of England. He was acquitted of all charges but had become convinced that the prosecution was part of a larger conspiracy against him. By this point, he was also exasperated with his patron’s condescension and had decided ‘I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoyd [. . .] converse with my friends in Eternity. See Visions, Dream Dreams, & prophecy & speak Parables unobserv’d & at liberty from the Doubts of other Mortals’ (to Thomas Butts, 25 April 1803, E728). Shortly after his return, he gave Hayley a description of turn-of-the-century London which, perhaps surprisingly, emphasises the pace of urban improvement: ‘The shops in London improve; everything is elegant, clean, and neat; the streets are widened where they were narrow; even Snow Hill is become almost level, and is a very handsome street, and the narrow part of the Strand near St. Clement’s is widened and become very elegant’ (to William Hayley, 26 October 1803, E738). By contrast, Blake’s own trajectory was of diminished opportunities and increasing poverty. He and Catherine moved to a pair of rooms at 17 South Molton Street, Westminster, and then, in 1821, to their final residence of 3 Fountain Court, Strand. In these years, Alexander Gilchrist describes Blake taking part in occasions of domestic music-making, around the piano, during his Sunday visits to the Hampstead home of the artist John Linnell: He was very fond of hearing Mrs. Linnell sing Scottish songs, and would sit by the pianoforte, tears falling from his eyes, while he listened to the Border Melody to which the song is set commencing – ‘O Nancy’s hair is yellow as gowd, And her een as the lift are blue.’ To simple national melodies Blake was very impressionable, though not so to music of more complicated structure. He himself still sang, in a voice tremulous with age, sometimes old ballads, sometimes his own songs, to melodies of his own. (1880, 339) This affective response to ‘simple national melodies’ identifies Blake with the contemporary vogue for collections of national airs and melodies.6 Gilchrist’s account suggestively

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links such ‘simple national melodies’ to Blake’s performance of both old ballads and his own songs, ‘to melodies of his own’. The image of Blake singing appears for a final time in George Richmond’s letter to the painter Samuel Palmer conveying news of Blake’s death: He said He was going to that Country he had all His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ – Just before he died His Countenance became fair – His eyes brighten’d and He burst out in Singing of the things he Saw in Heaven[.] In truth He Died like a Saint. (Bentley 2004, 464) Frederick Tatham’s ‘Life of Blake’ presents a slightly different version of this scene, which begins with Blake sketching a portrait of his wife: ‘He then threw that down [. . .] & began to sing Hallelujahs and songs of joy and Triumph which Mrs. Blake described as being truly sublime in music & in verse. He sang loudly & with true extatic energy’ (Tatham 2004, 682). Gilchrist offers another retelling of Blake’s last songs, again based on a description from Catherine Blake, but with a slightly different emphasis: ‘On the day of his death,’ writes Smith, who had his account from the widow, ‘he composed and uttered songs to his Maker, so sweetly to the ear of his Catherine that, when she stood to hear him, he, looking upon her most affectionately, said, “My beloved! they are not mine. No! they are not mine!”’ (1880, 405)7 For Richmond and Tatham, Blake’s deathbed singing (whether real or, more likely, imagined) is an ecstatic, enthusiastic response to things seen in heaven. By contrast, the emphasis in Gilchrist’s retelling is not on spontaneous bursts of song but on a more deliberate process of composition, one that disavows creative ownership and instead channels divine inspiration. Through the descriptions above, singing has become a recurrent feature of Blake biography and hagiography, serving as a fantasy of presence and hermeneutic plenitude: the prophet-bard singing his own, lost songs. Such a response may seem naïve to any modern – let alone postmodern – reader; it is therefore surprising to find traces of it in the opposition between visuality and voice underpinning T. J. Clark’s explanation of why ‘Blake is not a “visual” poet’: Blake’s poems are songs, dependent on the power of word or cadence to evoke, for a moment, the full particular that makes one state of the human present, before, inexorably, the line and argument move on; or improvised epics, likewise carried most powerfully by the timbre of the singer’s voice, always bewildering and repetitive, pushing impatiently forward, impelled by an unexpectedness (a peripeteia) to come. (2015) Song, voice and fullness of meaning are here folded together, in contrast to the (for the art historian Clark, no doubt) more complex signification of the image – despite the impossibility, in an age before sound recording, of separating song from the material,

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visual and textual vehicles of its transmission. Attending to Blake’s poems as songs does not, however, need to lead us back to a model of song as a medium of complete communication, an expression of ‘the full particular [. . .] of the human present’. We need to treat the descriptions of Blake singing with caution, remaining aware of the myth-making involved, the fantasies layered over memories of the original event. At the same time, we should not simply discredit them. We might observe how, in all of these accounts, Blake is unable (but perhaps also unwilling) to preserve the melodies of his songs. According to these testimonies, music lies outside the representational system even of Blake’s mixed-media, ‘composite art’; instead, the music for Blake’s illuminated songs exists only in the initial moment of inspiration.8 These descriptions recall such echt-Romantic tropes as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s figuring of the imagination in the act of creation as a ‘fading coal’.9 However, the music of Blake’s songs also places them firmly within the popular music culture of late eighteenth-century London. Blake’s fled melodies might render him the consummate Romantic artist, but they also point towards the inextricability of poetry, image and song at the turn of the nineteenth century. Songs of Innocence begins with a scene of pure pastoral music: ‘Piping down the valleys wild’, the piper is asked by a child to ‘Pipe a song about a Lamb’, then sing ‘the same again’, then ‘sit thee down and write / In a book that all may read’. As numerous critics have observed, the poem’s transition from song to a scene of writing follows a Rousseauvian trajectory from song to speech to writing, though we might note that here the wordless music of the instrument precedes the human voice.10 The pastoral conventions of this opening song, however, are at stark contrast with later songs that take as their subject elements of the urban soundscape, including the psalm singing of ‘Holy Thursday’, the street cries of ‘The Chimney Sweep’, and the host of voices in ‘London’. These poems are both about and part of this urban soundscape, the simple diction, rhythms and rhymes situating the collection among the street ballads, national airs, lullabies, drinking songs and devotional hymns that formed the staple ingredients of popular music culture. Many of Blake’s poems, like the descriptions of their performance, present us with the image of the lone singer. This figure often appears as a modern incarnation of the ancient bard, ‘Who Present, Past, & Future sees / Whose ears have heard, / The Holy Word’. However, an alternative model existed much closer to hand in the street ballad singer, who sold her or his performance in the form of the ballad sheet. The ballad sheet did not carry any musical notation – the purchaser having learnt the tune by listening to the performance – but contained the words, sometimes the name of the tune and (in many cases) an illustrative woodcut: a combination of text and image that resembles a rudimentary version of Blake’s illuminated songs (see fig. 13.3). Ballads moved between the street and the home, and between individual and communal performance, with the ballad sold on the street becoming a script for domestic performance.11 The street ballad singer represents, then, less a static emblem of musical performance, akin to the pastoral piper or prophet-bard, than an example of the transmission, commodification and portability of popular music, which moved between spaces and modes of performance. This fungibility is also an important dimension of sacred song, which constantly recycled old tunes for new lyrics. However separate they seem, Blake’s songs ultimately belong to this shared culture.

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Figure 13.3  ‘Justices and Old Bailey’ (Roud 300), 1828–9, and ‘Kathleen O’Regan’ (Roud V2123), 1780–1812. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Harding B 17 (153a, 153b).

Audible Visions If Songs of Innocence and Experience can be situated within the popular music culture of London at the end of the eighteenth century, Blake’s prophetic books are much more difficult to assimilate due to their prosodic and structural complexity, as well as their sheer length. While Plate 99 of Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion proclaims ‘The End of The Song’, there is no suggestion that Milton or Jerusalem were ever sung by their author or indeed by anyone else. Despite the ancient association between epic poetry and orality, these works do not even seem to be intended for reading aloud, so dependent are they on the combined media of poetry and illuminated design. Music in these works is not the medium but, instead, part of the subject, appearing in fantastical scenes of musical performance and figuring in Blake’s myth of

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the Fall (see fig. 13.4). In A Vision of the Last Judgment, ‘Poetry Painting & Music’ are ‘the three Powers in Man of conversing with Paradise which the flood did not Sweep away’ (A Vision of the Last Judgment, E559), but in Milton the three arts only survive in ‘Time & Space’ through science, which transforms poetry into religion, painting into ‘Physic & Surgery’, and music into law:   in Eternity the Four Arts: Poetry, Painting, Music, And Architecture which is Science: are the Four Faces of Man. Not so in Time & Space: there Three are shut out, and only Science remains thro Mercy: & by means of Science, the Three Become apparent in Time & Space, in the Three Professions Poetry in Religion: Music, Law: Painting, in Physic & Surgery: That Man may live upon Earth till the time of his awaking, And from these Three, Science derives every Occupation of Men. (Milton, E125)

Figure 13.4  Milton a Poem, Copy D, Plate 18, 1818. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. William Blake Archive.

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These lines point towards the eighteenth-century categorisation of music as a science, controlled by (as Blake saw it) over-complex laws of harmony. In Blake’s mythos, the prelapsarian ear leads vertiginously inwards/downwards and outwards/upwards – the ears are ‘ever-varying spiral ascents to the heavens of heavens’ (Europe, E63), ‘a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in’ (The Book of Thel, E6) – but in the postlapsarian condition the ear becomes ‘a little shell in small volutions shutting out / All melodies & comprehending only Discord and Harmony’: ‘Can such an Ear filld with the vapours of the yawning pit. / Judge of the pure melodious harp struck by a hand divine?’ (Milton, E99). This opposition between harmony and melody is linked to the better-known Blakean dialectic or ‘contrary’ of colour and line: there is a clear connection between his privileging of outline (the ‘bounding line’) in his visual aesthetics and the melodic line in music. In Blake’s mythos, this is ultimately part of the overarching conflict between Urizen and Los, reason and imagination. These contraries (‘Without Contraries is no progression’, E34) pitch fallen nature against inspired imagination: ‘Nature has no Outline: but Imagination has. Nature has no Tune: but Imagination has!’ (The Ghost of Abel, E270). In Jerusalem, harmony is linked to abstraction, law-making, and division: I tell how Albions Sons by Harmonies of Concords & Discords Opposed to Melody, and by Lights & Shades, opposed to Outline And by Abstraction opposed to the Visions of Imagination By cruel Laws divided. (Jerusalem, E229–30) Blake’s annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art similarly link harmony to the reasoning faculty, in opposition to melody and the intuition of the imagination: beside Reynolds’s claim that ‘It is the very same taste which relishes a demonstration in geometry, that is pleased with the resemblance of a picture to an original, and touched with the harmony of musick’, Blake writes, ‘Demonstration Similitude & Harmony are Objects of Reasoning Invention Identity & Melody are Objects of Intuition’ (E659). Or, as he puts it elsewhere, ‘One Species of General Hue over all is the Cursed Thing calld Harmony it is like the Smile of a Fool’ (E662). Blake’s rejection of ‘paltry Harmonies’ (Milton, E142) takes us back to Gilchrist’s account of his preference for ‘simple national melodies’ over ‘music of a more complicated structure’ and his statement in the Descriptive Catalogue for his 1809 exhibition: ‘Music as it exists in old tunes or melodies [. . .] is Inspiration, and cannot be surpassed; it is perfect and eternal’ (E544). The privileging of melody over harmony appears to signal a move away from the community towards the individual, away from Blake as radical bricoleur to the poet as inspired prophet-bard: ‘And in Melodious accents I / Will sit me down & Cry. I. I.’ (E581).12 Alternatively, we might describe this as a shift away from the popular ballad, which invites communal singing, towards the bardic model, in which the bard occupies a position of social prestige and becomes a repository for the oral culture and traditions of the community. Blake’s opposition between melody and harmony recalls Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s argument in his Essay on the Origin of Languages which treats of Melody and Musical Imitation (1781). For Rousseau, poetry, song

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and speech ‘have a common origin’ but later diverged (1998, 318). ‘At first there was no music at all other than melody’, which constitutes a codified form of affect: ‘The sounds of a melody do not act on us solely as sounds, but as signs of our affections, of our feelings; it is in this way that they excite in us the emotions they express and the image of which we recognise in them’ (Rousseau 1998, 318, 323). By contrast, ‘our harmony is known to be a gothic invention’ (Rousseau 1998, 327). As James Chandler has argued, the narrative logic of Rousseau’s essay is to suggest that both language and melodic music, whose origins are coeval, degenerate over time: language into logic, music into harmony. These events form a part of the corruption of the arts [. . .] in the movement from simpler forms of life into advanced commercial society. (2013, 137) Blake’s privileging of melody over harmony allies him with Rousseau’s narrative and rejects what he viewed as the mechanistic nature of contemporary science and philosophy. In the terms of elite music aesthetics it might be seen as reactionary, underscoring his affinities with popular music over the more complex forms that dominated elite music of the day, including Italian opera and newly prestigious forms of instrumental music such as the symphony and string quartet.13 Instead, it identifies his work with simple melodic forms such as the street ballad and congregational hymn, recalling John Wesley’s attempted proscription of vocal harmony and organ music at Methodist meetings: ‘It is harmony’, Wesley writes, ‘(so-called,) which destroys the power of music’ (quoted in Temperley 2011, 214). Blake’s insistence on the primacy of melody not only looks towards simpler musical forms but attempts to communicate, or recover, a different way of hearing: an auditory mode of visionary experience. What in the terms of elite music culture appears as conservative, even primitivist, is at the same time a move towards a progressive, experimental soundworld, at the limits of human hearing. There is some evidence for the place of music in Blake’s visionary experience, including what would today be described as auditory hallucinations. Gilchrist recalls an extraordinary moment during Blake’s apprenticeship to James Basire, Engraver to the Society of Antiquaries, when he was employed in sketching the royal tombs of Westminster Abbey: It was when he was one day thus secluded in the dim vaulted solitude of Westminster Abbey that he saw, as he afterwards records, one of his visions. The aisles and galleries of the old building (or sanctuary) suddenly filled with a great procession of monks and priests, choristers and censer-bearers, and his entranced ear heard the chant of plain-song and chorale, while the vaulted roof trembled to the sound of organ music. (Bentley 2004, 16) This description is a paraphrase of a letter that has since been lost; as Bentley notes, ‘there is no evidence of where Blake “afterwards records” this vision’ (2004, 16). However, the conjunction of Gothic statuary and visionary music is highly suggestive. In a building that symbolises the union of royal and ecclesiastical power (functioning in a similar way to St Paul’s Cathedral in the ‘Holy Thursday’ poems), the audible vision is at once oppressive and liberating to Blake’s ‘entranced ear’.

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In his own words, and for want of an established vocabulary for the audible visionary, Blake straightforwardly describes hearing visions, rooting them in urban experience through detailed reference to London’s topography: I heard in Lambeths shades: In Felpham I heard and saw the Visions of Albion I write in South Molton Street, what I both see and hear In regions of Humanity, in Londons opening streets. (Jerusalem, E180) For Jon Mee, Blakean epic imagines ‘an enlargement of the senses beyond a constricted sense of selfhood’, insisting all the while on ‘the visibility of the visionary world’ (2003, 260, 258). We might extend this to the audibility of the visionary world, while guarding against the language of sublimation traditionally associated with unheard music in Romantic poetry, most famously in Keats’s invocation of the superior sweetness of unheard melodies and Wordsworth’s ‘still, sad music of humanity’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’. The audible visionary in Blake works against sublimation and resists the reduction of music to metaphor. Instead, prophetic utterance is rooted in seeing, hearing and writing in a series of specific, predominantly metropolitan, locations: Lambeth, Felpham, South Molton Street and out into ‘Londons opening streets’.14 The necessary connection between sound and vision is literally spelled out in Blake’s most famous song of urban alienation, ‘London’, through the acrostic ‘HEAR’ in the third stanza: the poem demands that we hear the ‘Infants cry’, the ‘Harlots curse’, the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ (see fig. 13.5).15 We could read this as implying that listening is rooted in the everyday experience of the urban soundscape and forms a necessary prelude to vision. Such a reading might be supported by the similarities between the design for this plate, showing an old man led by a child, and Plate 84 of Jerusalem, which features a similar pair of figures, Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s in the background, and the lines: ‘I see London blind & age-bent begging thro the Streets / Of Babylon, led by a child. his tears run down his beard’ (see fig. 13.6). In these images, London’s spiritual blindness must be placed under the instruction of inspired, childlike vision. However, we should be wary of any reading that turns on a reified distinction between the aural and visual, with the former anchored in sensory experience and the latter floating free of the senses. Indeed, ‘London’ works against such a distinction through its totalising realisation of the city: in Blake’s synaesthesia of the streets, sounds are transformed into nightmarish sights, as the ‘Soldiers sigh’ turns into blood running down palace walls and the chimney-sweeper’s cry drapes ‘Every blackning Church’ in a pall. Throughout his work, Blake consistently privileges extrasensory perception over the corporeal eye: ‘I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it’ (A Vision of the Last Judgment, E566); or, from the 1809 Descriptive Catalogue: A Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour or a nothing: they are organised and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce. He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all. (E541)

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Figure 13.5  Songs of Innocence and Experience, Copy Z, Plate 46, ‘LONDON’, 1826. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. William Blake Archive. By the same measure, Blake’s art attempts to find a ‘stronger and better’ way of hearing than the perishing mortal ear through a ‘minutely articulated’ form of auditory vision. The audible vision is foregrounded again in Blake’s last completed work, Illustrations of the Book of Job (1825), which John Ruskin considered to be in some respects ‘greater than Rembrandt’ (quoted in Rowland 2010, 13). This set of twenty-one engraved illustrations, commissioned by John Linnell and published to widespread acclaim the following year, develops an intensely personal version of the biblical narrative that is closely attuned with the nature of the arts and visionary experience. In the first engraving, Job sits surrounded by his family in the familiar guise of an Old Testament patriarch, the books of law lie open and musical instruments hang in the

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Figure 13.6  Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion, Copy E, Plate 84, ‘Highgates heights & Hampstead . . .’, 1804–20. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. trees: an allusion to Psalm 137 and the Jews in exile by the rivers of Babylon, hanging their harps upon the willows and refusing to ‘sing the Lord’s song in a strange land’ (Psalm 137: 4) (see fig. 13.7). By the final engraving, the books of law have been replaced by scrolls of song and Job and his family are holding musical instruments: the fallen status of music as law has been reversed, underlining Blake’s interpretation of Job as a visionary, David-like figure (see fig. 13.8). Christopher Rowland’s study of Blake’s biblical hermeneutics argues that these engravings depict ‘false religion as a religion dominated by respect for the book and lacking the immediate apprehension

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Figure 13.7  Illustrations of the Book of Job, Copy 1, Plate 1, ‘Job and His Family’, 1826. Collection of Robert N. Essick. William Blake Archive. of God, which comes through vision’ (2010, 4). Blake’s point of departure is Job 42: 5: ‘I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee.’ For Blake, however, an inspired way of seeing must also be an inspired way of hearing. Plate 21 is not a representation of musical performance that contemporary viewers would have been able to straightforwardly ‘hear’; instead, Blake frustrates expectations of musical representation by showing biblical instruments that his audience would not have been able to hear, such as the ram’s horns and ancient harps, and surrounding the central design with competing images, texts and frames, including the pentagonal shape resembling a tent and suggesting pilgrimage. Far from offering a representation of early nineteenth-century musical performance, these plates, like ‘London’, invite the reader to hear in a new and visionary way. In the final plate, the Gothic church and houses are no longer in sight: in looking at this plate, Blake challenges the viewer to hear music not as it is performed in St Paul’s but as it might sound in a transformed state of perception, even in Eternity.

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Figure 13.8  Illustrations of the Book of Job, Copy 1, Plate 21, ‘Job and His Family Restored to Prosperity’, 1826. Collection of Robert N. Essick. William Blake Archive. Tracing music in Blake’s songs and designs appears to lead in opposite directions: towards the ballads, hymns and national melodies that dominated popular music culture of the day, and to the problematising of human hearing and an attempt to represent the auditory vision. But if these approaches to Blake seem to be divergent, they are also linked through what Saree Makdisi has described as Blake’s challenge to the sovereign, rational individual of mainstream, Paineite 1790s radicalism, predicated on Lockean empiricism (2002). Communal song and audible visions undermine the autonomy and integrity of the rational individual. Both are forged in the experience of London, in its associational life, and in the pressures placed on its inhabitants to find new ways of negotiating, communicating and escaping the modern city. In contrast to many of the contemporary debates in aesthetic theory, the arts are not organised hierarchically in Blake’s designs but locked in close and mutually

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constitutive relationship. Through the exchanges and connections between different media and art forms, Blake’s work ultimately attempts to reach beyond the world of urban experience and the human senses to communicate his audible visions.

Notes I am very grateful to the volume editors and to colleagues who read and discussed earlier versions of this essay. In particular, I wish to thank Michael Brown, John Bugg, Esther Chadwick, Oskar Cox Jensen, Jonathan Hicks, Erin Johnson-Williams, Ayla Lepine, Emily MacGregor, Jon Mee, Roger Parker, Carmel Raz and Flora Willson for their advice.   1.   2.   3.   4.   5.

  6.   7.   8.   9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

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15.

See Goehr (1992) and Bonds (2014). For a useful overview of the relationship between the two fields, see Hicks 2019. See also Hurley (2019, 139–46). Subsequent references to Blake’s works will be to this edition, identified by title, ‘E’ and page number. John Marsh met Blake while he was staying at Felpham and set to music a ballad written by Hayley and engraved by Blake; see Marsh (1998, 721). In a letter to Hayley, Blake described Edward Marsh as ‘my much admired & respected Edward the Bard of Oxford whose verses still sound upon my Ear like the distant approach of things mighty & magnificent[,] like the sound of harps which I hear before the Suns rising’ (Bentley 2004, 176). See McAulay (2013), Langan (2005) and Edwards (2015). Keri Davies identifies ‘singing at the point of death’ as part of the ‘customary Moravian trope of the good death’ (2006, 108). See Mitchell (1978). ‘[T]he mind in creation is as a fading coal [. . .] when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has even been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the Poet.’ A Defence of Poetry (written 1821; pub. 1840), in Shelley (2002, 531). See, for example, Barry (1987, 75) and McLane (2008, 215–20). See Jensen (2021). For Jon Mee ‘bricolage is a striking feature of the organization of Blake’s poetry, a feature shared by many whose writing responded to and was shaped by the Revolution controversy’ (1992, 10). Contemporary criticism of Italian opera more often focused on its perceived melodic excess and over-use of ornament; the xenophobic basis of attacks is echoed by Blake’s disparaging reference to ‘the Contemptible Counter Arts [. . .] set on foot by Venetian Picture traders Music traders & Rhime traders to the destruction of all true art’ (Public Address, E580). On spiritual hearing in this period, see Schmidt (2000), especially pages 199–221. While focused on America, Schmidt’s account emphasises the significance of the Swedenborgian sensorium, offering some common ground with the cultural and religious context of Blake’s audible visions. Seminal readings of ‘London’, attentive to the connections between sound and vision, include Thompson (1978) and Hilton (1983, 63–6). For Thompson, ‘“London” is a literal poem and it is also an apocalyptic one; or we may say that it is a poem whose moral realism is so searching that it is raised to the intensity of apocalyptic vision’ (1978, 18). He reads the progression from sight to sound as conveying a sense of increasing immersion, which differentiates the poem from the ‘country gentleman’s convention’ of viewing plebeian London from outside and as spectacle (21). For Hilton the poem is ‘an affirming and selfdeconstructing text, one that implicitly urges the reader to allow his or her eye to wander through its chartered lines, marking its marks, and hearing its “every voice”’ (1983, 65–6).

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Bibliography Abrams, M. H. 1953. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford UP. Barry, Kevin. 1987. Language, Music and the Sign: A Study in Aesthetics, Poetics and Poetic Practice from Collins to Coleridge. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Bentley, G. E., Jr, ed. 2004. Blake Records. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Blake, William. 1988. The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, edited by David V. Erdman, with a commentary by Harold Bloom. New York: Anchor Books. Bonds, Mark Evan. 2014. Absolute Music: The History of an Idea. New York: Oxford UP. Chandler, James. 2013. ‘Smith as Critic’. In The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith, edited by Christopher J. Berry, Maria Pia Paganelli and Craig Smith, 126–42. Oxford: Oxford UP. Clark, T. J. 2015. ‘Blake at the Ashmolean’. London Review of Books, 5 February 2015. See (last accessed 28 April 2022). Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 2002. Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection. Edited by Seamus Perry. Oxford: Oxford UP. Cunningham, Allan. [1830] 2004. Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. In Blake Records, 2nd ed., edited by G. E. Bentley Jr. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Davies, Keri. 2006. ‘Jonathan Spilsbury and the Lost Moravian History of William Blake’s Family’. Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 40 (3): 100–9. Edwards, Elizabeth. 2015. ‘“Lonely and Voiceless Your Halls Must Remain”: RomanticEra National Song and Felicia Hemans’s Welsh Melodies (1822)’. Journal for EighteenthCentury Studies 38 (1): 83–97. Essick, Robert N. 1989. William Blake and the Language of Adam. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gilchrist, Alexander. 1880. Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus”. Vol. 1. London: Macmillan and Co. Goehr, Lydia. 1992. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hicks, Jonathan. 2019. ‘Musicology for Art Historians’. In The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture, edited by Tim Shephard and Anne Leonard, 35–42. Abingdon: Routledge. Hilton, Nelson. 1983. Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hoffmann, E. T. A. 1989. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism. Edited by David Charlton. Translated by Martyn Clarke. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Hurley, Michael D. 2019. ‘Sound’. In William Blake in Context, edited by Sarah Haggarty, 139–46. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Jensen, Oskar Cox. 2021. The Ballad-Singer in Georgian and Victorian London. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Langan, Celeste. 2005. ‘Scotch Drink & Irish Harps: Mediations of the National Air’. In The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry, edited by Phyllis Weliver, 25–49. Aldershot: Ashgate. Loughridge, Deidre. 2016. Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Makdisi, Saree. 2002. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McAulay, Karen. 2013. Our Ancient National Airs: Scottish Song Collecting from the Enlightenment to the Romantic Era. Farnham: Ashgate. McLane, Maureen N. 2008. Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

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Marsh, John. 1998. The John Marsh Journals: The Life and Times of a Gentleman Composer (1752–1828). Edited by Brian Robins. Stuyvesant: Pendragon Press. Mee, Jon. 1992. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2003. Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period. Oxford: Oxford UP. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1978. Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry. Princeton: Princeton UP. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1998. Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music. Vol. 7 of The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Translated and edited by John T. Scott. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Rowland, Christopher. 2010. Blake and the Bible. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Schmidt, Leigh Eric. 2000. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 2002. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Edited by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. New York and London: Norton. Smith, John Thomas. [1828] 2004. Nollekens and his Times. In Blake Records, 2nd ed., edited by G. E. Bentley Jr. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Tatham, Frederick. 2004. ‘Life of Blake’. In Blake Records, 2nd ed., edited by G. E. Bentley Jr. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Temperley, Nicholas. 2011. ‘The Music of Dissent’. In Dissenting Praise: Religious Dissent and the Hymn in England and Wales, edited by Isabel Rivers and David L. Wykes. Oxford: Oxford UP. Thompson, E. P. 1978. ‘London’. In Interpreting Blake, edited by Michael Phillips. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Tolley, Thomas. 2001. Painting the Cannon’s Roar: Music, the Visual Arts and the Rise of an Attentive Public in the Age of Haydn. Farnham: Ashgate, 2001.

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14 Taken By Storm: Multisensory Learning in the Lecture Room Sarah Zimmerman

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n a lecture on 10 April 1812 at London’s Royal Institution, a freshly knighted Sir Humphry Davy staged a demonstration with ‘a miniature volcano’. Sitting in the back of the packed theatre, his assistant Michael Faraday described Davy placing ‘pieces of the metal potassium’ into ‘a pile of earth and stones in the form of a mountain crater’ into which he poured water (Royal Institution 2017). Davy aimed to share his own excitement upon first isolating potassium: ‘when he saw the minute globules of potassium burst through the crust of potash, and take fire as they entered the atmosphere, he could not contain his joy – he actually danced about the room in ecstatic delight’ (John Davy 1836, 1:384). Davy became known for spectacular demonstrations. He burned diamonds to show that they were made of carbon and, most famously, wielded large batteries in order to reveal the properties – sometimes explosive – of chemical compounds. In 1810 he explained to his auditors that lecturing was the perfect medium for teaching chemistry because ‘[t]he Philosophy of Nature, is purely a philosophy of visible and tangible effects’ (Davy 1810, 23).1 Davy caught and held the popular imagination by forcing into visibility the mysterious workings of the natural world, including elements like potassium and gases like nitrous oxide. Public lectures might seem to be primarily an oral medium, but Davy grasped that ‘experimental subjects may impress independent of eloquence’ (1810, 23). This principle proved transferable to a range of topics in the early nineteenth century’s expanding public lecture curriculum, turning the lecture room into a key site for fostering the Romantic era’s rich visual culture while simultaneously hosting debates about the nature of its impact. This space attracted the attention of some of the period’s best-known artists, including James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and Auguste Charles Pugin, who recognised these scenes as feasts for the eye. In a handful of prints they featured the main draw – chemistry demonstrations – at the Royal and Surrey Institutions, while simultaneously revealing how this lavish visual culture included the rooms themselves and the auditors who crowded into them. Their prints also register what made these events controversial as one instance of what Richard Altick famously called ‘the shows of London’ (1978, 366–8). Gillray reminds us that in wartime Britain, scientific experimentation, and in particular demonstrations with nitrous oxide, had become associated with the potential explosiveness of the suppressed movement for political reform. In addition, all of these prints highlight the strong presence of women, who attracted criticism for threatening to reduce educational events to mere entertainment (see for example fig. 14.3). After

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a March 1802 visit to the Royal Institution, Francis Horner mused, ‘[t]he audience is assembled by the influence of fashion merely; and fashion and chemistry form a very incongruous union’ (1849, 109).2 Both the chemistry demonstrations and the women were popularly associated with what Peter de Bolla describes as ‘the emergence of the culture of visuality’ by the mideighteenth century in Britain (2003, 12). This emphasis was long deemed antithetical to the key concerns of Romantic culture, beginning in the period itself. In The Prelude (1805), William Wordsworth famously decried the ‘tyranny’ of the visible world and called vision ‘[t]he most despotic of our senses’, although these poetic pronouncements were continually complicated by his own verse (1979, XI:179, 173). In recent years a new critical consensus has emerged that, as Sophie Thomas puts it, the era’s ‘palpable antagonism between visual display and imaginative endeavour . . . is not simply negative, or combative, but generative’ (2008, 3).3 In the period itself, public lecturers staged substantive arguments about the pedagogical merits of their medium relative to a rival educational culture of print. Practically speaking, these media were inseparable, since as Altick observes, public lectures belonged to ‘the broad stream of urban culture which ran parallel to and sometimes mingled with that of the printed word’ (1978, 1). They nevertheless had passionate partisans who often focused on whether the visual or the verbal better fostered gaining and retaining knowledge. The visual culture of Romantic-era public lecturing has drawn significant attention, both in its own day and in modern scholarship, but the medium was fundamentally audiovisual, and often multisensory. It featured the human voice and visual aids including demonstrations, illustrations and specimens, and lecturers on a range of topics, such as botany, also touted the instructive potential of smell, touch and even taste. Dierdre Loughridge’s explanation of how the period’s audiovisual cultures could produce an immersive experience that seemed almost ‘otherworldly’ helps explain public lecturers’ efforts to engage their audiences in multisensory events that might change their perspectives on and understanding of their subjects (2016, 20). It may initially seem surprising that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of them, since his lectures on Shakespeare are well known for developing critical arguments against staging the plays in favour of reading them, partly because of the visual trappings of modern productions. Scholars have however recently shown just how ambivalent that stance was, and Sophie Thomas has argued that Coleridge’s complaints about the use of scenery and stage illusion actually reflect ‘a strong sense of what form aesthetic illusion . . . should take’ rather than ‘antivisuality as such’ (2008, 4). In treating drama across several series, Coleridge develops a theory about how, in the past, performances of the plays could actually have a greater impact on audiences than reading them precisely because of the theatre’s audiovisual culture. Coleridge developed this line of thinking for the lecture room, and it reflected upon his own experiences of that space, both as a lecturer himself and as an auditor who had delighted in Davy’s multisensory demonstrations.

Rooms with a View: Design, Ornamentation and Lighting In featuring chemistry lectures at London’s Royal and Surrey Institutions, Gillray, Rowlandson, and Pugin chose the most celebrated events at the best-known venues. The Royal’s theatre was purpose-built and the Surrey’s renovated specifically for

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public lectures, so these rooms do not typify the many humbler spaces that hosted the bulk of these events, in rented rooms (including taverns and assembly rooms) and private homes. The examples of the Royal (1799) and Surrey (1808) Institutions are nevertheless valuable for demonstrating the aspirations of public lecturing’s visual culture. Ian Inkster explains that an emphasis on ‘utility and visual demonstration’ was pioneered by ‘science lecturers of the metropolis in the early decades of the eighteenth century’, ultimately culminating in the lushness of Regency culture (Inkster 1980, 84). Despite the Royal Institution’s success, which encouraged imitators in the metropolis (including the London, Surrey and Russell Institutions) and in other cities (such as Liverpool’s Royal Institution), images of its theatre in the early years are rare. Perhaps best known is Gillray’s 1802 cartoon, ‘Scientific Researches! – New discoveries in Pneumatics! – or – an Experimental Lecture on the Powers of Air –’ (fig. 14.1), which features John Coxe Hippisley ingesting nitrous oxide with scatologically comic effects. Gillray situates his viewer in the audience, perched just behind and above the first row of auditors. These women, men and children model appropriate responses of rapt attention, surprise and, for those seated just behind Hippisley, chagrin. We lean forward with Gillray’s auditors, who are captivated by a demonstration underway on a large lecture desk piled high with ‘various bits of chemical glassware’, an air pump and a gas bag (James 2021, 4). Tables like this were purpose-built since, as Sophie Forgan explains, they ‘had to hold a large amount of apparatus, and afford space for numerous experiments’, and ‘[i]t became necessary to . . . partially wrap it around the lecturer so that he could reach all parts of it’ (1986, 102). Gillray understood that the instruments were themselves objects of fascination and offers a tantalising glimpse through a partially opened door of an anteroom filled with a ‘large quality of electrostatic equipment’ (James 2021, 4). Chemistry headlined these events, but it had a supporting cast of ‘living luminaries’, and Gillray includes portraits of well-known figures associated with the Royal Institution (Jennings 1823, 44). A young Davy wields a bellows as Thomas Garnett administers nitrous oxide to Hippisley, who seems to become one with the apparatus, his nostrils pinched and his mouth clasping the tube as he inhales. The auditors ranging around them on semi-circular benches were also on display, and Gillray devotes attention to sartorial details: a snuffbox spills open in response to the demonstration’s explosive results, and men sit surrounded by their walking sticks and hats, brandishing looking glasses. Strings of beads snake around women’s throats and through hair piled high, a fan unfurls, and ruffles run around necklines and hat brims. The hats nearly steal the show, with feathers billowing alongside the plumes of smoke drifting upward from the lecture desk. Men, women and even children clutch pieces of paper, scribbling furiously. Gillray’s framing is tight, but we can discern a few of the room’s distinctive features, including the green-covered cushions on which auditors perched. In his 1809 print of the Surrey Institution, Rowlandson offers a similarly proximate view of a chemistry demonstration from an oblique angle that enabled him to capture the room known as the ‘Rotunda’ (fig. 14.2). Like Gillray, he positions his viewer in the audience, just behind and above the second row of lecture-goers whose jaws drop as they crane their necks upward or peer down from a gallery, watching Friedrich Accum pour liquid into a beaker from a kettle held aloft. In both this print and another one of the Rotunda on which he collaborated with Pugin, Rowlandson includes male

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Figure 14.1  James Gillray, ‘A Lecture on pneumatics at the Royal Institution, London’, 1802. Coloured etching. Wellcome Collection.

Figure 14.2  Thomas Rowlandson after his drawing, ‘A chemical lecture at the Surrey Institution’, 1809 [c. 1810]. Coloured etching. Wellcome Collection.

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auditors whose attention strays to their female companions, underscoring what Gillian Russell describes as these events’ ‘regulated heterosexual sociability’ (2002, 133). Gillray’s and Rowlandson’s close-ups convey an intimate atmosphere, and in the latter’s we are even nearer to the lecture desk, with an excellent view of the beakers and instruments surrounding Accum. These are action shots, with gas billowing, liquid pouring and auditors gasping, exclaiming and writing. We can almost hear it, and everything is in motion. In Rowlandson’s print an auditor in the balcony covers his ears, and in Gillray’s one protects his nose in response to Hippisley’s unfortunate reaction to inhaling gas. These multisensory events aimed to make auditors feel like participants, and the artists position their viewers to feel the same immersion in what Gillray termed ‘Experimental Lectures’. In his contribution to The Microcosm of London (1808–10) Rowlandson, along with architectural artist Pugin, zooms out from the lecture desk to reveal just how much the room’s design and ornamentation contributed to this absorbing experience (fig. 14.3). Rudolph Ackermann’s three-volume Microcosm was ‘one of the most beautiful books of the nineteenth century’, Matthew Sangster observes, with 104 prints featuring Pugin’s ‘elegantly-executed buildings and vistas’ and Rowlandson’s

Figure 14.3  J. C. Stadler after Thomas Rowlandson and Auguste Charles Pugin, Surrey Institution, Blackfriars Road, Southwark, London: the interior of the rotunda, Friedrich Accum lecturing, 1809. Coloured aquatint. Wellcome Collection.

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‘bright, rumbustious men and women’ (Sangster n.d.). Accompanying descriptions celebrate familiar London scenes in copious detail. The building that housed the Surrey Institution, located just south of Blackfriars Bridge, had been converted from a domestic residence to hold the natural history collections of the Leverian Museum. The Rotunda was purpose-built as a display room and subsequently renovated to serve as the Surrey’s lecture theatre (Kurzer 2000, 118). The Microcosm deemed it ‘one of the most elegant rooms in the metropolis’, thirty-six feet in diameter, with ‘nine rows of seats, which rise above each other in commodious gradation’, topped by two galleries, the highest ‘supported by eight Doric columns, of Derbyshire marble’ (Ackermann 1815, 3:157–8). Auditors were ushered into the Surrey Institution through ‘an elegant portico of the Ionic order’ (Ackermann 3:157). At scientific and literary institutions like the Surrey ‘the adoption of a classical style certainly fostered an impression of dignity, antiquity and permanence’ (Forgan 1986, 91). Attractions in their own right, these rooms were specifically designed to foster viewing, since as Marvin Carlson reminds us, theatron means ‘place for seeing’ (1989, 62). The London Institution’s theatre, which was ‘built on a plan nearly similar to that of the Royal Institution’, reflected their shared design aspirations: ‘capable of accommodating about six hundred persons . . . the seats are so admirably arranged as to afford an uninterrupted view of the experiments performed upon the lecture-table, from all parts of the theatre’ (Britton and Pugin 1838, 2:236). The prints of Gillray, Rowlandson and Pugin emphasise those sight lines. Forgan suggests that the Royal Institution’s theatre drew on both ancient models and contemporary operating theatres, which aimed to provide medical students with the best possible view of surgeries (1986, 101). The managers of the Royal Institution were clear about the tone they wished to set architecturally: ‘This theatre will be semicircular, and very lofty; and constructed with rising semicircular seats, according to the excellent models left us by the ancients’ (Royal Institution 1802, 1:12). Operating theatres characteristically featured raked seating, and their use of natural light sources in the ceiling influenced the scientific and literary institutions. John Flint South, surgeon at St Thomas’s Hospital in London from 1841 to 1863, recalled that ‘[t]he general arrangement of all the theatres was the same, a semicircular floor and rows of semicircular standings, rising above one another to the large skylight which lighted the theatre’ (1884, 127). At the Royal Institution sunlight could be admitted or ‘entirely excluded in a moment, by lowering the moveable ceiling of the lantern which communicates the light from above’ (Ackermann 1815, 3:31). Both the Surrey and London Institutions followed suit: at the Surrey ‘[t]he light is received from the dome’, and at the London (fig. 14.4), it was likewise ‘admitted by a circular lantern, placed immediately over the centre of the room’ (Ackermann 1815, 3:158; Britton and Pugin 1838, 2:236). These architectural features were supplemented by candelabras until the advent of gas, and eventually electric, lighting. The early success of the Royal Institution influenced the visual culture even of established, private bodies such as the Royal Academy of Arts (fig. 14.5). In 1805, with an eye to the Royal Institution’s theatre, John Hoppner ‘re-arranged the lecture room so that the listeners would face the lecturer from three sides’, and several years later Anthony Carlisle ‘wondered whether the seating could not be raised in tiers’ (Fawcett 1983, 447). J. M. W. Turner and John Soane made their own changes to the Great Room at Somerset House and developed a rich culture of visual aids, as Maurice

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Figure 14.4  Robert Blemmell Schnebbelie, The London Institution, Moorfields: the interior of the lecture theatre [1820]. Watercolour. Wellcome Collection.

Figure 14.5  After George Scharf, Lecture on Sculpture by Sir Richard Westmacott, 1840. Lithograph. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020.

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Davies explains. For his first, 1811 series, Turner ordered the addition of a bas-relief and ‘regularly referred to Raphael’s tapestry cartoons’ already hanging there (Davies 1992, 21–3). Soane was determined to provide students with the visual aids the Royal Academy lacked, informing them in a lecture, ‘I have . . . never lost any opportunity of collecting casts from the ruins of ancient structures, marble fragments, vases and cinerary urns, as well as every book and print that came within my reach on the subject of architecture.’ He adopted a practice of storing visual aids at his home for students to consult ‘on the day before, and if necessary, the day after the public reading of each lecture’ (2000, 155). He thereby effectively turned his home into an anteroom like the one glimpsed in Gillray’s cartoon, and ‘of course eventually gave his whole house and collections to promote the study of architecture’ (Fawcett 1983, 448). It may seem surprising that the Royal Institution could influence the visual culture of the Royal Academy, but Trevor Fawcett explains that its first president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, preferred a ‘literary mode’ that construed lectures as ‘purely verbal statements read aloud with a minimum of gesture or “performance”’ (1983, 442). By the early nineteenth century, however, ‘[t]he science lecture with its experiments, demonstrations, and displays of natural specimens and mechanical artefacts had become the paradigm’ (Fawcett 1983, 446). Even the Royal Academy had to keep up. One reason that paper illustrations were slow to flourish at the Royal Academy was the challenge of lighting them with what W. T. Whitley describes as ‘the smoky light of the old brass lamps in the Lecture Room’. Available sunlight was admitted by a lantern and four semi-circular windows near the ceiling, but ‘the display of the exquisite water-colours’ of Turner was only fully enabled in 1817 when ‘gas was laid on to the immense bronze chandelier’ (Whitley 1913, 256). Turner and Soane commissioned the production of copious visual aids. Turner had between ten and twenty paper illustrations prepared for each lecture, some on ‘the largest paper made by hand in England’: antiquarian sheets of roughly thirty-one by fifty-two inches. They included perspective diagrams, ‘his own watercolours, prints after other artists’ work, and pieces of sculpture, or at least casts of sculpture’ (Davies 1992, 22–3). He had a worthy rival in Soane, since in his ‘lifetime his lectures were perhaps best known for their illustrations’, many of them watercolours prepared by students (Soane 2000, 6). In close to thirty years of lecturing, Soane ‘amassed some 2,000 display sheets, the majority measuring about four feet by two’ (Fawcett 1983, 447). David Watkin observes that Soane’s ‘huge, meticulously detailed, coloured drawings’ comprised ‘a comparative history of world architecture which was unique in their day’ (Soane 2000, 6). Sophie Read has shown that when Soane offered two popular series at London’s Royal Institution in 1817 and 1820, his performative use of drawings, far from being merely illustrative, was vital in shaping his particular account of his subject (2017). Over time, Turner’s and Soane’s visual aids have accrued additional significance as critical objects in their own right. Even in their own day, however, it must have been clear how much their charm exceeded their pedagogical uses. Take for instance Reflections in a Single Polished Metal Globe and in a Pair of Polished Metal Globes (c. 1810) (fig. 14.6), a paper illustration of ‘reflection and refraction . . . and their relationship to light and shade’ in a trio of ‘reflecting metal spheres’ (Tate Gallery). Turner seems to offer us windows into miniaturised, ghostly worlds of empty, light-filled rooms through which auditors’ imaginations could wander, including Soane’s. He attended the 1812 lecture in which Turner presented this drawing in discussing ‘light and its

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Figure 14.6  Joseph Mallord William Turner, Various Perspective Diagrams, Lecture Diagram: Reflections in a Single Polished Metal Globe and in a Pair of Polished Metal Globes [c. 1810]. Oil and graphite on paper. Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856. Tate. Photo: Tate.

emotive effects’, Helen Dorey explains, noting that both were ‘obsessed with the qualities of light and the contrasts of light and shade’. Dorey speculates that Turner’s lecture and accompanying illustration may have informed Soane’s famous use of ‘large convex mirrors’ in his home ‘to create a variety of reflections in combination with conventional mirrors set into bookcases, doors and ceilings’ (2007, 25). After listening to his colleague and viewing this drawing, Soane may well have been prompted to transform the sight lines he so carefully created in his own home.

Showing and Telling: Demonstrations, Illustrations, and Specimens The Royal Academy’s development of a rich culture of visual aids indicates how adaptable the era’s dominant lecture paradigm of putting ‘principles’ into ‘practice’ proved to be. Kiel Shaub explains that [w]here Davy’s lectures might consist of an experimental demonstration of a chemical principle, or an application of it to the art, say, of tanning hides, lecturers on the fine arts made ample use of drawings, engravings, and other models, for the purpose of illustrating the application of aesthetic principles to products of artistic practice. (2019, 31)

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Showing while telling was popular, and even a quick look at the newspaper advertisements for public lectures reveals a shared vocabulary of demonstrations, illustrations and ‘specimens’. This last term proved especially flexible for making multisensory appeals to prospective audiences. David Duff explains that ‘specimens’ held a rich cache of connotations in the period, at least two of which were relevant to public lecture culture. The term’s ‘specialized scientific meaning’, which is ‘now its dominant sense’, would have held special appeal for a public lecturer on elocution and literature like John Thelwall (2020, 113). Presenting himself as an inventor of a ‘new science’ of spoken language, he sought to attract paying auditors to his London school by promising ‘Specimens of Spontaneous Oratory, and Graphic and Mechanical Demonstrations’ (Thelwall 1810, 10; Morning Chronicle, 29 March 1806). In contrast, when the poet Thomas Moore briefly entertained an invitation to appear at the Royal Institution in 1814, he borrowed the term’s meaning in popular literary anthologies, which featured ‘representative’ examples according to ‘a particular method of selection with a well-developed rationale’ (Duff 2020, 115). Best known for his Irish Melodies (1808–34), Moore envisioned ‘a series of lectures upon poetry and music, with specimens given at the pianoforte by myself’ (Moore 1853–6, 1:331). Thelwall’s focus on the speaking voice and Moore’s combination of verse and song serve as reminders that even though public lectures’ visual culture was one of its greatest draws, the medium was fundamentally audiovisual. Deirdre Loughridge defines audiovisual culture by an ‘interdependency between sight and sound, looking and listening’ and explains how its effects can seem more than the sum of its sensory parts. Loughridge, for instance, focuses on how late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German music culture incorporated ‘optical devices such as magnifying instruments, peepshows, shadow-plays, and magic lanterns’ in order to create ‘the illusion of threedimensional motion in space, and with it a heightened sense of immersion in another world’ (2016, 9). In Romantic-era Britain, public lecturers sought to shape auditors’ thinking by absorbing them audiovisually. Even Davy’s spectacles were enhanced by sound effects. In An Account of Some Experiments on Galvanic Electricity Made in the Theatre of the Royal Institution (1802), Davy recalls with evident satisfaction the audiovisual effects he generated: ‘[w]hen the circuit in the batteries was completed by means of small knobs of brass, the spark perceived was of a dazzling brightness . . . and it was accompanied by a noise or snap’ (1839, 2:211–12). The Royal Institution’s lecture theatre was an ideal site for audiovisual culture because it facilitated hearing as successfully as seeing. The Microcosm of London raves that the room is ‘so favourable to the propagation of sound, that though it is sufficiently capacious to contain one thousand persons, a whisper may be distinctly heard from one extremity of it to the other, and not the slightest echo is distinguishable on any occasion’ (Ackermann 1815, 3:30). An emphasis on acoustical excellence could turn lecture rooms into virtual concert halls, amplifying the medium’s fundamental emphasis on the speaking voice. Even music lectures could best be described as audiovisual, since their ‘musical illustrations’ involved performances with instruments (Kurzer 2000, 136). William Crotch’s popular lecture courses in Oxford and at London’s Royal, Surrey and London Institutions were deemed a ‘happy combination of instruction and entertainment’, presumably because of his performative flair (Kurzer 2000, 136). Crotch relates that when the Royal Institution Managers refused his request for an orchestra before his first, 1805 series because ‘they wished me to

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perform my examples myself’, he secured a piano and harpsichord instead (Irving 2018, 15n.). For an 1806 series he acquired an organ (Kassler 1983–5, 15). The instruments used by Crotch and his fellow music lecturers complemented an emphasis on scientific apparatus that formed a substantial part of public lectures’ appeal, as the prints of Gillray, Rowlandson and Pugin confirm. As the popularity of public lectures grew and the range of subjects treated expanded, the medium became even more strikingly multisensory, engaging smell, touch and even taste. Gillray’s cartoon suggests that those effects could be unpleasant, and Diarmid Finnegan confirms that some ‘[c]hemical lecturers . . . connected with the bodies of their auditors through the creation of curious or repulsive smells’ (2016, 420). Botanists recognised that olfactory effects could also please and used specimens to extend their subject’s increasing popular reach. Dr John Hope was King’s Botanist for Scotland and Superintendent of the Royal Garden in Edinburgh, where his series was ‘the most advanced of its time in Britain’, Henry Noltie explains (2011, 58). Trained as a physician, Hope educated medical students in a three-part series: after sections on ‘vegetation’ and ‘classification’, students were led into the garden for a final a section on ‘demonstration’ (Noltie 2011, 59). In its first two parts, up to 102 students perched on ‘long wooden forms’ in the Great Room (likely designed by John Adams), with its yellow walls and a ‘coombed’ ceiling designed ‘to give greater height and a sense of space’ (Noltie 2011, 41). Hope was renowned for ‘his outstanding use of visual aids’ (Noltie 2011, 58). Paper illustrations, some ‘suspended by cloth loops’, were made by ‘enlarging illustrations from books’, and creating ‘illustrations of Hope’s own experiments’ and ‘large charts showing classificatory schemes’ (Noltie 2011, 80). One illustration (fig. 14.7), used in lectures on the ‘motions of vegetables’, features a pot of Tagetes (marigolds) suspended upside down to demonstrate ‘the different responses of roots and shoots to light and gravity’ (Noltie 2011, 66).4 Surely, however, it does more than that, delighting as least as much as it instructs. When Hope eventually led his students out of the lecture room, his aim ‘was to show living examples, in garden and greenhouse, of plants displaying features, properties, or functions, discussed in the first two parts’ (Noltie 2011, 78). One of his students recognised the popular potential of these tactile activities and in his own lectures reversed the direction of Hope’s pedagogy by introducing the natural world into the theatre of London’s Royal Institution. On the days of his lectures, James Edward Smith sometimes gathered plants in the metropolis’s gardens. He informed his wife in a May 1811 letter of plans to ‘be up early’ to collect ‘specimens’ for ‘an extempore lecture, of a very general nature, on the parts & structure of plants’ (Smith 1811). Smith’s pedagogical aim was clear: he wanted to awaken his auditors’ awareness of the urban nature around them by bringing it into the lecture room, where they could consider familiar plants out of context, encountering ‘specimens’ through sensory experience. Hope had taught Smith that ‘we derive more knowledge from the senses viz. the taste & smell, than from all books together’ (Noltie 2011, 59). In his introductory lecture Smith told his auditors that botany’s ‘very charm consists in the interest it gives to objects always before our eyes, but which it furnishes us with a new sense to admire, to enjoy, and to understand’ (Smith 1832, 1:323). The lecture room provided space for auditors to step out of their everyday lives, and here too the Royal Institution seemed purpose-built to foster the medium’s pedagogical aspirations.

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Figure 14.7  John Bell or Andrew Fyfe, Drawing of an experiment showing the negative geotropism of an inverted shoot of Tagetes under illuminated conditions [c. 1780]. Published with the permission of the Board of Trustees, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. The Microcosm describes its theatre as a green room that could temporarily shut out the sights and sounds of the outside world, allowing auditors to become absorbed in these multisensory events: The floors and seats are painted of a dark green, and the latter are covered with green moreen cushions. The floor of the circular passage, and the stairs belonging to the vomitories, are covered with green cloth, to prevent the footsteps of those who come in or go out of the theatre, from being heard during the delivery of the lecture. (Ackermann 1815, 3:31)

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Muffling the sound of milling auditors could foster immersion in a shared experience. On fair days, the sun shone into this green world, and the atmosphere could be deepened by extinguishing the light ‘by an apparatus no less simple than efficient, – a false ceiling sliding down the lantern, which, passing the windows, darkens the room’ (Britton and Pugin, 2:236). This theatre recalls the ‘green world’ that Northrop Frye finds in some of Shakespeare’s comedies, a space that fosters transformation partly by temporarily removing characters from their everyday lives: the play’s ‘action . . . begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world’ (1957, 182). Auditors at the Royal Institution were invited to feel that they had stumbled into such a space. How, then, might a comparable pedagogical transformation happen in the lecture room? Lecturers were deeply interested in this question, and a number of them addressed it with their auditors. Their pedagogical commentary is illuminating for understanding these events’ particular historical impacts since, as Loughridge argues about audiovisual cultures, ‘interaction between the two perceptual modes has changed over time’ (2016, 9). In making the case for their medium’s pedagogical benefits, Romantic-era lecturers often used print as a foil, even though, as Altick observes, ‘a great variety of public nontheatrical entertainments’, including lectures, ‘ministered to the same widespread impulses and interests to which print also catered – the desire to be amused or instructed, the indulgence of curiosity and the sheer sense of wonder, sometimes a rudimentary aesthetic sensibility’ (1978, 1). Even though their medium was deeply enmeshed with print culture, public lecturers, who needed to attract and hold auditors’ attention, seemed compelled to make their own case, often on the basis of the lecture room’s multisensory spectacles.

Taken by Storm: Lear in the Lecture Room At London’s Royal Institution, lecturers boasted the advantages that their medium offered auditors and themselves. In an 1810 address, Davy argued that ‘the great object of public instruction in a scientific establishment, ought, it is evident, to be, to communicate that kind of information which cannot be gained from books or from private instruction’ (1810, 22). The celebrity chemist favoured lectures over ‘books’ because the former boasted a rich visual culture: ‘[t]he eye is not less succeptible [sic] than the ear; and according to the maxim of Bacon, it is better to imprint things on the memory than words’ (Davy 1810, 23). Lectures had their own means of imprinting that could lastingly shape audiences’ understandings. John Landseer noted that the medium could meaningfully affect lecturers too. In Lectures on the Art of Engraving (1807) he recalls grasping the medium’s rhetorical potential when he initially contemplated his first (and only) 1806 series at London’s Royal Institution. He explains: It immediately occurred that the opportunity of lecturing there would be a more eligible mode than that of printing, of addressing the public: not only because the opinions and principles which I might have the honour to state would be supported by the engraved examples which I should at the same time exhibit, and my sentiments by these means be more clearly and powerfully conveyed; but also because, thus supported, and where the attention of my audience would be so much more attracted towards thoughts and things than toward words, I believed I might venture to read

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what it would have required, without such auxiliary aid, more confidence to print. (Landseer 1807, iv) Landseer attributed a greater gravitational pull to both the ‘things’ he could display and the ‘thoughts’ they helped him articulate, and that ‘confidence’ encouraged him to ‘venture’ more, and thereby to be a bolder critic and a better teacher. As a literary lecturer, Coleridge had comparatively little to show but characteristically much to tell, and he too wanted to change auditors’ minds. In an 1819 letter he expressed his desire ‘to keep the audience awake and interested during the delivery, and to leave a sting behind, that is, a disposition to study the subject anew, under the light of a new principle’ (1956–71, 4:924). In the lecture room Coleridge developed his own comparison of public performances to print in a Shakespeare criticism set against modern productions of the plays in favour of reading them. The Bristol Gazette reported that during Coleridge’s 1813 Lectures on Shakespeare and Education, he celebrated how contemporaneous productions effectively ‘drove Shakespear [sic] from the stage, to find his proper place, in the heart and in the closet’ (1987, 1:563). Coleridge’s antagonism towards the stage is often associated with his critical treatment of stage illusion, but he also objected to a culture of celebrity acting that he found antithetical to Shakespeare’s characters. In his 1811–12 series, Coleridge sneered that ‘[h]e had seen Mrs. Siddons as Lady, and Kemble as Macbeth – these might be the Macbeths of the Kembles, but they were not the Macbeths of Shakespear’ (1987, 1:563). In a rare moment in his 1812 Lectures on European Drama, however, he conceded that in the past actors had been capable of affecting audiences with what he described as an elemental power. In theorising how the best actors could powerfully affect audiences audiovisually, Coleridge indirectly reflected on his own possible impact as a public lecturer and on the medium itself. In notes for the series’ introductory lecture, delivered 19 May 1812, Coleridge suggested that, once upon a time, actors had realised ‘the appropriate, the never-tobe-valued advantage of the Theatre’ and could again ‘if only the actors were what, we know, they have been – a delightful yet most effectual Remedy for this Dead Palsy of the public mind’. Like Hope, Davy and Landseer, Coleridge attempted to distinguish between print and performance by arguing that, at its best, the stage could communicate more effectively than the page: What would appear mad or ludicrous in a book, presented to the senses under the form of reality & with the truth of Nature, supplies a species of actual Experience – This indeed is the grand Privilege of a great Actor above a great Poet ­– No part was ever played in perfection, but that Nature justified herself in the hearts of all her Children . . . There is no time given to ask questions, or pass judgements. He takes us by storm, & tho’ many a clumsy Counterfeit by caricature exaggeration of one or two Features may gain applause, as a fine Likeness, yet never . . . was the very Thing rejected as a Counterfeit. (1987, 1:429) It is a rare moment when Coleridge gives ‘a great Actor’ advantage over ‘a great Poet’, an exception granted only under the dispensation of ‘Nature’. Audience members experienced the events rehearsed as if they lived them: because they were ‘presented to the senses’, they constituted ‘a species of actual Experience’. The spell works because

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there is no time for ‘questions’ or ‘judgements’ to form. We don’t know what hit us, like a ‘storm’ blowing up out of nowhere. In theorising ideal acting, Coleridge references King Lear, and I would argue, borrows a key metaphor from the play. In treating Lear in a subsequent series, he developed his account of what it meant to compare the best performances to a storm: both could be sensorily overwhelming. As he explains in his 1819 Lectures on Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Spenser, Ariosto, and Cervantes, the play was itself like a storm, with ‘its soul-scorching flashes, its ear-cleaving Thunder Claps, its meteoric splendors’ (1987, 2:376). In marginalia to a volume of the plays used in his 1818–19 Lectures on Shakespeare, Coleridge described Lear’s exposure and breakdown during a storm on the heath as audiovisually devastating: What a World’s Convention of Agonies . . . Take it but as a picture, for the eye only, it is more terrific than any a Michael Angelo inspired by a Dante could have conceived, and which none but a Michael Angelo could have executed – Or let it have been uttered to the Blind, the howlings of [convulsed] Nature would seem concerted in the voice of conscious Humanity – . (1987, 2:333) When he says of ‘a great Actor’ that ‘he takes us by storm’ in a lecture that references Lear, Coleridge figures effectively the force with which an audience could be affected by the theatre’s sensory experience. It could be as disorienting as the night on the heath in which Lear finally loses his mental bearings, and as dazzling as a collaboration between Michelangelo and Dante accompanied by the ‘howlings of . . . Nature’ distilled into ‘the voice of conscious Humanity’. Coleridge may also have derived his key figure for impactful performance from his own experience as an auditor of Davy’s 1802 Lectures on Chemistry at London’s Royal Institution. In a familiar anecdote Coleridge explained, ‘I attend Davy’s lectures . . . to increase my stock of metaphors’ (Paris 1831, 92). Coleridge was present when Davy boasted of his subject that ‘[t]he composition of the atmosphere, and the properties of the gases, have been ascertained; the phænomena of electricity have been developed; the lightnings have been taken from the clouds’ (Coleridge 1956–71, 2:782; Davy 1839–40, 2:321). Coleridge’s subsequent figuring of the multisensory experience of the dramatic theatre as a storm would have resonated powerfully in the lecture room, especially with auditors who had experienced Davy commanding the storm with stunning electrochemical demonstrations using ‘what has been called the galvanic battery, or the apparatus of Volta’. In an 1808 lecture Davy referred to Alessandro Volta’s 1800 invention, conceding that ‘[w]hatever is brilliant or impressive in the experiments made in this course of lectures, will be owing to the agencies of this instrument’ (1839–40, 3:281–2). Coleridge theorised as a lecturer what he learned as an auditor: that the multisensory ‘shows of London’, including the period’s public lectures, could carry the immersive force of lightning, rain, wind and thunder.

Notes   1. Davy echoes Count Rumford in the Prospectus of the Royal Institution of Great Britain (1800): ‘Something visible, and tangible, is necessary to fix the attention and determine the choice’ (Royal Institution of Great Britain 1800, 19).

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  2. Attitudes towards women auditors seem to have varied according to the educational cultures of different venues. Their presence in numbers may have drawn negative commentary at the Royal Institution in part because of its early establishment, prestige and prominence. In contrast, women’s learning would not have seemed antithetical to the educational culture of Dissent that was palpable at the London, Surrey and Russell Institutions. For female patrons’ influential presence at the Royal Institution, see Harriet Olivia Lloyd, ‘Rulers of Opinion: Women at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 1799–1812’. PhD diss. (University College London, 2019).   3. Thomas offers an instructive account of scholarship that has revised familiar accounts of Romantic antivisuality (2008, 3–5).   4. Noltie identifies the artist of this watercolour and ink ‘Drawing of an experiment showing the negative geotropism of an inverted shoot of Tagetes under illuminated conditions’ (c. 1780) as either John Bell or Andrew Fyfe (2011, 66n.).

Bibliography Ackermann, Rudolph. 1808–10. The Microcosm of London. 3 vols. London: T. Bensley. Altick, Richard. 1978. The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Britton, John and C. Auguste Pugin. 1838. Illustrations of the Public Buildings of London. 2 vols. 2nd ed. London: John Weale. Carlson, Marvin. 1989. Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1956–71. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Earl Leslie Griggs. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1987. Lectures 1808–19 on Literature. Vol. 5, parts 1 and 2 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by R. A. Foakes. Princeton: Princeton UP. Davies, Maurice. 1992. Turner as Professor: The Artist and Linear Perspective. London: Tate Gallery. Davy, Humphry. 1810. A Lecture on the Plan Which It Is Proposed to Adopt for Improving the Royal Institution, and Rendering It Permanent. London: Royal Institution. ———. 1839–40. The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy. Edited by John Davy. 9 vols. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. Davy, John. 1836. Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy. 2 vols. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman. De Bolla, Peter. 2003. The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. Dorey, Helen. 2007. John Soane & J. M. W. Turner: Illuminating a Friendship. London: Sir John Soane’s Museum. Duff, David. 2020. ‘Literary Sampling and the Poetics of the Specimen’. Studies in Romanticism 59 (1) (Spring): 109–32. Fawcett, Trevor. 1983. ‘Visual Facts and the Nineteenth-Century Art Lecture’. Art History 6 (4) (December): 442–60. Finnegan, Diarmid A. 2016. ‘Lectures’. In A Companion to the History of Science, edited by Bernard Lightman, 414–27. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Forgan, Sophie. 1986. ‘Context, Image and Function: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Architecture of Scientific Societies’. The British Journal for the History of Science 19 (1) (March): 89–113. Frye, Northrop. 1957. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP. Horner, Francis. 1849. Memoirs of Francis Horner, with Selections from His Correspondence. Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers. Inkster, Ian. 1980. ‘The Public Lecture as an Instrument of Science Education for Adults – The Case of Great Britain, c. 1750–1850’. Paedagogica Historica 20 (1): 80–107.

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Irving, Howard. 2018. Ancient and Modern: William Crotch and the Development of Classical Music. 1999. Oxford: Routledge. James, Frank A. J. L. 2021. ‘Instruments from Scratch? Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday and the Construction of Knowledge’. Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society 148: 2–13. Jennings, James. 1823. A lecture on the history and utility of literary institutions. London: Sherwood, Jones. Kassler, Jamie Croy. 1983–85. ‘The Royal Institution Music Lectures, 1800–1831: A Preliminary Study’. Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle 19: 1–30. Kurzer, Frederick. 2000. ‘A History of the Surrey Institution’. Annals of Science 57 (2): 109–41. Landseer, John. 1807. Lectures on the Art of Engraving, Delivered at the Royal Institution. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme. Loughridge, Deirdre. 2016. Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Moore, Thomas. 1853–6. Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore. Edited by Lord John Russell. 8 vols. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans. Noltie, Henry J. 2011. John Hope (1725–1786): Alan Morton’s Memoir of a Scottish Botanist. Edinburgh: Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Paris, John Ayrton. 1831. The Life of Sir Humphry Davy. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley. Read, Sophie. 2017. ‘In, Out, and Again: Reading and Drawing John Soane’s Lectures at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (1817 and 1820)’. PhD diss., University College London. Royal Institution of Great Britain. 1800. Prospectus of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. London: printed by W. Bulwer for the Royal Institution. ———. 1802. Journals of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Vol. 1. London: Royal Institution. ———. 2017. ‘Humphry Davy’s Potassium Volcano’. Video, 3:21. See (last accessed 15 June 2021). Russell, Gillian. 2002. ‘Spouters or Washerwomen: The Sociability of Romantic Lecturing’. In Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain 1770–1840, edited by Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, 123–44. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Sangster, Matthew. n.d. ‘Introduction to The Microcosm of London’. Romantic London. (last accessed 1 June 2021). Shaub, Kiel Steven. 2019. ‘Rethinking the Arts and Sciences: Institutional Movement and Formation of Romantic Discourse’. PhD diss., UCLA. Smith, James Edward. 1811. Letter to Pleasance Smith, 19 May 1811. [Ref No. GB 110/JES/ COR/19/89]. In ‘The Correspondence of Sir James Edward Smith’. The Linnean Society of London. See (last accessed 1 June 2021). ———. 1832. Memoir and Correspondence of the Late Sir James Edward Smith, M.D. Edited by Lady Pleasance Smith. 2 vols. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman. Soane, John. 2000. Sir John Soane: The Royal Academy Lectures. Edited by David Watkin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. South, John Flint. 1884. Memorials of John Flint South. Edited by the Rev. Charles Lett Feltoe. London: John Murray. Thelwall, John. 1810. A Letter to Henry Cline, Esq., On Imperfect Developments of the Faculties, Mental and Moral, as Well as Constitutional and Organic; and on the Treatment of Impediments of Speech. London: Richard Taylor. Thomas, Sophie. 2008. Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle. New York: Routledge. Whitley, W. T. 1913. ‘Turner as a Lecturer’. The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 22 (119) (February): 255–9. Wordsworth, William. 1979. The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850. Edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill. New York: W. W. Norton.

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15 Romanticism, ‘Real’ Illusions and the Transformation of Experience in Modernity Peter Otto

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his chapter examines three developments, each intertwined with the others, which help shape the exchanges between the real, the actual and fiction/ illusion that are characteristic of London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: the emergence of modern technologies of illusion; the proliferation and diversification of viewing/exhibition spaces; and the multiplication, democratisation and commercialisation of spectacle. The panorama provides an important example of these developments, particularly in the years between 1793, when the world’s first permanent panorama rotunda was opened by Robert Barker (1739–1806) in Leicester Square, and 1829, when the ‘Colosseum’ was opened by Thomas Hornor (1785–1844) in Regent’s Park, as the hub of an entertainment complex. During this period, the moving panorama, peristrephic panorama, and Diorama put the panoramic illusion into motion, while the immersive realities of the static panorama increased in scale, verisimilitude and ambition, to the point where they could become part of a second ‘reality’, in which audiences could be tempted to linger, socialise, and in so doing build a rich ‘second life’ as an extension of their first. But the phenomena traced in this chapter are broader and more diverse than these developments alone can suggest. It therefore places the panorama in relation to popular entertainments, such as the phantasmagoria; exhibition halls, such as the Egyptian Hall; and, more broadly, the urban/commercial milieu of London, which by the first years of the nineteenth century had become the largest city in the world, with more than a million inhabitants. On this broad canvas, the chapter sketches some of the metamorphoses that lead ‘the modern subject to know experience not as Erfahrung but as Erlebnis; as the fragmentary moment in which the subject becomes detached from any locatedness within a broader understanding of life’ (Hetherington 2005, 197). The consequent sense of disorientation and loss, influentially described by William Wordsworth (1770–1850) in Book VII of The Prelude, is still commonly used to trope Romanticism as an antimodernity (see, for example, Löwy and Sayre 2001). But, as this chapter will conclude, the exchanges between Romanticism and the milieu in which it emerged are much more equivocal than this suggests, and these equivocal exchanges are a crucial resource if we are to understand the inter-implication of ‘real’, actual and ‘imagined’ realms in modernity, which together shape the worlds within which everyday life is lived and possible futures are opened or closed.

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Figure 15.1  Charles Williams, ‘The Moving Panorama – or Spring Garden Rout’, hand-coloured satirical print. London: Samuel W. Fores, June 1823. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Real, Virtual and Actual Worlds ‘The Moving Panorama–or Spring Garden Rout’, a satirical print etched by Charles Williams (fl.1796–1830), was issued in June 1823 by the radical publisher Samuel Fores (c. 1761–1838) and displayed in his printshop on the corner of Sackville Street in London (fig. 15.1). The crowd in the foreground of the design, stretching from the leftto the right-hand margin, is the ‘Spring Garden Rout’ or unruly assembly mentioned in the title, and the first of the design’s three (moving) panoramas, a term that in this first case refers simply to a comprehensive survey of a subject. Young and old, male and female, metropolitan and provincial, refined and coarse members of the fashionable crowd can be seen, dressed in their finery, who have gathered outside Wrigley’s Great Room at No. 5 Spring Garden, one of the most famous of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century venues for concerts and popular exhibitions. There are in fact two shows on offer in the design, the second and third of our moving panoramas, which in 1823 were also on display in the actual Great Room (fig. 15.2). The supporting attraction, ‘A Fashionable Tour for One Hundred Miles Along the Banks of the Clyde’, which is advertised on the rear wall of the vestibule, offers ‘Views of The Three Falls, Lanark, Glasgow, Greenock, And Ben Lomond in the Distance’. The figures glimpsed through the half-open window to the right are

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Figure 15.2  ‘Great Room, Spring Gardens. Novelty! Marshall’s grand historical peristrephic panorama of the ceremony of the coronation’, Advertisement [1823]. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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climbing stairs leading to the main attraction, ‘Marshall’s Grand Historical Peristrephic Panorama of the Ceremony of the Coronation, the Coronation Procession, And the Banquet of His Most Gracious Majesty King George the Fourth’, which is advertised by a sign to the right of the doorway. Each of these moving panoramas offers a panoramic view (a comprehensive survey) of their subject; but rather than presenting that view from outside what is surveyed, they place their audiences inside it. In the first, the Spring Garden rout are immersed in a space of excited conviviality, indicated by the speech balloons rising above them, which is generated in part by their proximity to the Great Room and its attractions. The pavement beneath them seems to extend beyond the border of the design, out into the actual world where we are standing, as if to include us in the crowd. The second moving panorama, announced by but not visible in the design, was produced by painting the scenery between Lanark and Greenock on a long strip of canvas that, during performances, was drawn slowly across the proscenium. Audiences viewed the passing landscape as if through a window, with music to create atmosphere and a guide to identify landmarks (Hyde 1988, 131). Visual, auditory and cognitive inputs together made it seem that the audience (rather than the canvas) was in motion, ‘travelling along’ the banks of the Clyde (Morning Chronicle, 6 February 1811). As advertised by its title, the third panorama belongs to a kind called peristrephic, invented a few years earlier by Peter Marshall (1762–1826). Like moving panoramas, they were painted on a long strip of canvas, but rather than one slowly unfolding view they presented a sequence of scenes, in this case: the Coronation in Westminster Abbey, the Procession, and then the Banquet in Westminster Hall. Further, rather than being drawn in a straight line across the proscenium, the canvas was ‘stretched in a [concave] semicircle, and moved off slowly upon rollers, so that the pictures are changed almost imperceptibly and without any break between scene and scene’ (Pückler-Muskau 1832, 1:161). Marshall’s ‘Ceremony of the Coronation’ covered ‘10,000 square feet of canvass [sic]’, displayed ‘nearly 100,00 figures’, 500 of which were ‘the size of life’, and was ‘accompanied by A full Military Band’, ‘assisted by a Finger-organ and Trumpets’. The work’s vast size, multiple elements, unfolding narrative, atmospheric music, and the curved surface on which its scenes appeared produced an illusion so ‘imposing’ that, as Marshall boasted, spectators believed ‘themselves present’ at the events it represented (Morning Chronicle, 25 March 1823, 1). Amongst those in the ‘Spring Garden Rout’ who had already seen the show, none disagree: ‘[The king] is positively moving like life, and as large too’, one says; ‘I really thought myself in the Abbey’, reports another. A coronation is supposed to instate a centre able to draw the people into a unified whole. Inside the Great Room during the virtual Coronation and Westminster Abbey during the actual event this seems to be the case. In the Great Room, a semblance of the king draws the Spring Garden rout into orderly assembly before him, while Scotland, relegated to the floor below, rehearses its allegiance and subservience (as supporting act) to him. In the theatre of royalty, the actual king, dressed to play his part in ‘a gigantic fancy-dress pageant’ (Girouard 1981, 27) ‘fashioned after the model of the earliest times’ (Annual Register 1822, 346), achieved a similar effect on a larger scale. Indeed, according to Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), it would be ‘impossible to conceive of a ceremony . . . more calculated to make the deepest impression both on the eye and on the feelings’ than the Coronation of George IV. Under its influence, he added, the people

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had ‘formed for a moment a single great body’ (Lochhart 1837, 2: 233, 236). Robert Huish (1777–1850) and John Galt (1779–1839) were more sceptical. ‘A coronation’, the first wrote in 1831, is ‘a senseless ceremony’ and should not ‘have been performed at a time when the nation groaned under the pressure of poverty’ (Huish 1831, 2:311), while the second dismissed it as ‘the melodrama of earthly grandeur’, acted by ‘“the swinish multitude” . . . in court dresses’ to an audience that, after the final act, ‘rose and became as fluent in their talk as the scattering audience after a stage-play’. The mismatch between show and reality, he claimed, ‘did more to lessen my respect for the tricks of state than any thing I ever witnessed’ (Galt 1842, 369, 370). At first sight, ‘The Moving Panorama – or Spring Garden Rout’ can be aligned with the views of Huish and Galt rather than Scott: coronations, like popular entertainments, it suggests, conjure a virtual reality and fake unity that hide the ‘real conditions of life’ (Marx [1848] 2008, 38). And yet by revealing so clearly the shaping power of illusion, the design evokes a modern world where real, actual and virtual realms are entangled with each other, within which it is Scott rather than Huish or Galt who is most cannily aware of its productive power. The contours of this modern world arguably first become widely visible at the Leicester Square panorama.

Realism The patent for a ‘Contrivance’ first called ‘La Nature à Coup d’ Oeil’ (nature at a glance), granted to Robert Barker in 1787, describes a perceptual environment comprising: a 360-degree painting ‘of any country or situation, as it appears to an observer turning quite round’; a circular building, lit from above, on the inner walls of which the panorama painting is hung; and a fixed viewing platform, entered by spectators from below, with intercepts above and below to hide respectively the upper and lower edges of the painting. With a barrier to keep audiences at a distance from the painting, this would be sufficient, Barker believed, to ‘make [spectators], on whatever situation [the artist] may wish they should imagine themselves, feel as if really on the very spot’ (Barker 1796, 165, 167). Barker’s first circular painting, View of Edinburgh and the Surrounding Country from the Calton Hill, was exhibited in Edinburgh in 1788 and London from 1789–91, in rooms not designed for the purpose. It was followed in 1791 by View of London from the Roof of the Albion Mills, which was shown in a temporary rotunda at No. 28 Castle Street, near Leicester Square. The latter was so successful that Barker, now backed by investors, engaged the Scottish architect Robert Mitchell (fl.1782–1809) to construct the world’s first permanent panorama-rotunda, in Cranbourne Street, with an entrance from Leicester Square. It opened on 25 May 1793 with ‘View of the Grand Fleet, moored at Spithead, in the year 1791’. As is evident from the cross-section published in Mitchell’s Plans, and Views in Perspective (1801), the rotunda included features not mentioned in the patent (fig. 15.3). There were now two viewing circles rather than one, a smaller and a larger, with the former immediately above the latter. Just as significantly, although audiences, as specified in the patent, entered the viewing platforms from below, they could do this only after traversing long darkened corridors and flights of stairs. By distancing viewers from the outside world and disorienting them, this heightened the experience of transport when they eventually stepped from darkness into a second world bathed in light. In the case

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Figure 15.3  ‘A Section of the Rotunda in Leicester Square in which is exhibited The Panorama’. Aquatint from Robert Mitchell’s Plans and Views in Perspective, with Descriptions of Buildings Erected in England and Scotland, London: Wilson & Co., 1801. © The British Library Board 56.i.12. of Barker’s ‘View of the Grand Fleet’, audiences climbed up onto what seemed the poop deck of the Iphigenia, a 32-gun fifth rate frigate, in the middle of the assembled fleet, midway between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. The illusions conjured by Barker’s earlier panoramas were commonly experienced as being ‘the same as nature could impress’ (The Times, 24 April 1789, 4). Inside the new rotunda, this sense of realism was strengthened by a shift in medium from distemper to oils (Corner 1857, 47) and an increase in size of the canvases able to be displayed. The Castle Street rotunda exhibited paintings that covered 1,479 square feet of canvas. Now, in the smaller and larger circles respectively, paintings of 2,700 and 10,000 square feet could be hung. The consequent confusion between actual and virtual realities is suggested by the stories that began to proliferate: while viewing ‘the Grand Fleet’, Queen Charlotte had felt seasick (Corner 1857, 47); ‘Lord Chatham, the First Lord of the Admiralty’, had become ‘proficient in Maritime affairs’ by visiting the panorama twice a week (Morning Post, 5 September 1793, 3); and ‘a Newfoundland dog had jumped into the mimic sea to swim’ (Whiteley 1928, 107). The panorama’s realism underwrites its popularity in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century as a mode of immersive journalism. Although Barker’s View of the Fleet looked back to 1791, when the ‘Royal Navy fleet’ was assembled ‘to exert diplomatic pressure on Russia’ during the Ochakov Crisis (Ellis 2008, 140), in 1794 that event seemed newly topical, given that Britain was at war with France. In hindsight, it was the ideal entrée for the panoramas that, over the next decade, offered mid-stage seats in many of the most important battles of the French Revolutionary (1792–1802) and

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Napoleonic Wars (1803–15). Scenes of conflict were at first collocated or alternated with views of iconic British locations, redolent variously of royalty, recreation, commercial power and/or naval might. In 1799, for example, Lord Nelson’s Defeat of the French at the Nile was displayed alongside View of Margate. After the turn of the century, scenes of foreign conflict and national accord were joined by views of foreign locations, which in number soon eclipsed the local (Oleksijczuk 2011, 2). Virtual-reality journalism is always also virtual-reality tourism, with the power of newsworthy events to draw crowds bolstered by the pull of the often-exotic locales where they occurred. And, conversely, what appears at first to be virtual-reality tourism is often framed by its link to the war against France. These overlaps strengthen the picture gradually being drawn by the Leicester Square panorama, first of a blameless nation at war with France and then also as a powerful actor on the world stage. After the Napoleonic Wars came to an end, this picture broadened again, with Britain now represented as an imperial power with a global empire. Seen in this light, it is reasonable to argue that the Leicester Square panorama, ‘through dense, 360-degree realistic representations of increasingly imperialist subject matter, forged a new public that helped Britain become the largest empire the world had ever witnessed’ (Oleksijczuk 2011, 4). Without dismissing this claim, it is important to add that, because there is no privileged point from which to view the panorama’s 360-degree view, the centripetal force it exerts on audiences is matched, perhaps exceeded, by the centrifugal forces it unleashes. Indeed, even in ‘The Moving Panorama – or Spring Garden Rout’ it is obvious that, when members of the ‘single great body’ formed during the virtual Coronation return to the streets, they become again an unruly assembly, the currents of which are evoked by its disparate gazes and voices. Indeed, one might say that stationary, moving and peristrephic panoramas are media for making the people visible as a multiplicity – today as consumers of a visual entertainment but tomorrow, perhaps, as an assembly less amenable to the status quo. This apparent contradiction forms the subject of the next section of this chapter.

Multiplicity When audiences stepped onto the panorama’s viewing platform, they found themselves in an elevated position at the centre of a virtual reality, the parts of which were visible all at once – or rather would be if they were to spin 360-degrees on a point. This remarkable view-at-a-glance, even if potential rather than actual, recalls the views traditionally ascribed to gods and kings, along with the disinterested, commanding and picturesque views that were valorised, respectively, by Enlightenment philosophers, military strategists and aristocratic taste. This is why panoramas are still commonly aligned with the desire for mastery (see, for example Brewer 2007, 236). The panorama does, of course, democratise the all-encompassing view, but in so doing it multiplies, popularises and so changes it. In contrast to a conventional prospect, viewed from a point set apart from what is seen, the panorama conjures an Umwelt (a milieu) within which the spectator is immersed. Further, while the prospect’s ideal observer stands in solitary contemplation of the timeless nature seen in or through the data of sensory perception, Barker’s panorama rotunda was built to accommodate a crowd, the members of which are engaged in promenade, conversation and observation

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of others. Perhaps disembodied gods can grasp a complex object and its myriad parts in a single view, but for the embodied crowd gathered on the viewing platform, immersed in an illusion not resolvable into a single view, this feat is impossible and perhaps even unwanted. The orientation devices provided by Barker to his customers, free of charge until 1812, were in much greater demand because they reduced the anxieties of immersion while maximising its pleasures. The orientation device accompanying ‘Lord Nelson’s Defeat of the French at the Nile’ (1799) is typical of the genre (fig. 15.4). It comprises an inner circle, which

Figure 15.4  Panorama, Leicester Square, London, ‘Short account of Lord Nelson’s defeat of the French at the Nile: . . . The view of Margate is in the upper circle: open from eight till dusk, 1799’, London: J. Adlard, [1799]. Engraving. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund.

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encloses a ‘Short [textual] Account’ of the conflict; an outer circle, on which the French and British ships are sailing; and the circular space between these domains, traversed by lines of text emanating from the inner circle, each pointing towards and naming either one of the ships or a landmark visible on the horizon. In this environment, the ‘Short Account’ has two referents: the real-world encounter between the British and French Fleet at the Nile and, foregrounded by the radiating lines of text, an anamorphotic representation of that event. When readers/viewers put this device to work, turning the orientation device first this way and then that as they shuttle from text to image and back again, three things occur: the text and its realworld referents are put into irregular rotatory motion; the to-and-fro movement places the locus of reading/viewing at the centre of the design; and the anamorphic diagram flickers into three-dimensional form. When carried into the panorama, a third referent becomes visible, namely the panorama itself, with the inner and outer circles simulating respectively the viewing platform and panorama painting, and the intervening space the faux terrain beyond which the illusion comes to apparent life. In this moment, the orientation device becomes a three-dimensional map of a vast second world; the third level of reference eclipses the first; and the facts gathered by the ‘Short Account’ persist only as hooks on which this virtual reality is hung. The panorama’s modern realism, set free from both an ideal reality and an authoritative point of view, was described by Wordsworth as the ‘absolute presence of reality, / Expressing as in a mirror sea and land, / And what earth is, and what she hath to shew’ (Wordsworth [1805] 1979, 238). As the word ‘absolute’ suggests, panorama audiences occupied a space ‘of open causality, each determination of which is an enactment by the spectator of only one of the [infinite] possibilities it contains’ (Otto 2011, 30–1). Indeed, it can be argued that panorama paintings propose ‘topics’ that become popular to the extent that, like ring-back folders, they are able to hold in loose assemblage a multiplicity of views. While gazing at London from the Roof of the Albion [Flour] Mills (1791), for example, some are likely to have felt that their vantage point, the first building ‘designed to use rotary power from steam’, was a synecdoche for the powers that had made London the centre of a global empire, the fruits of which could be seen all around them. But for others the same building, which boasted ‘a milling capacity fifteen times greater than its competitors’ (Mosse 1967, 49), would have brought to mind the destructive effects of new technologies, which for them was evident in the city around them (Swidzinski 2016). Much the same can be said about ‘View of the Grand Fleet at Spithead’ and the naval panoramas that followed in its wake (Swidzinski 2016, 293–8). The Iphigenia was named after the eldest daughter of King Agamemnon, who was sacrificed by her father so that the goddess Artemis would permit the Greek army to reach Troy. For some, the name was therefore likely to trigger a sense of duty, self-sacrifice and national pride. But for others it would have raised questions about arbitrary power made urgent by Revolutionary France, which had inflamed widespread dissatisfaction with pay and working conditions in the navy and the use of press gangs to recruit sailors. This culminated in 1797, roughly three years after ‘View of the Grand Fleet’ was last shown, in the Nore and Spithead mutinies, which at their height turned ‘the Royal Navy into a floating republic’ (Frykman, 2020, 9).

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Historical contexts like these frame the viewing platform as a contested space and the ‘patriotic sights’ it retails as also ‘sites of dissent’ (Swidzinski 2016, 297); but these advances ought not obscure the wealth of small differences within which these clashing views are legible. The extent of the former is suggested by late eighteenth-century writers on association, such as Archibald Alison, who remarks in Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790) that every man of sensibility will be conscious of a variety of great or pleasing images passing with rapidity in his imagination, beyond what the scene or description before him can of themselves excite. They seem often, indeed, to have but a very distant relation to the object that at first excited them; and the object itself, appears only to serve as a hint, to awaken the imagination, and to lead it through every analogous idea that has place in the memory. (41–2) Although Alison’s scenes are drawn primarily from literature, the relation he is sketching, between passive impression and creative association, is intensified in the panorama, where audiences can watch themselves and others half-creating and half-perceiving the ‘mighty world’ in which they are immersed (Wordsworth [1977] 1982, 1:360). Further, by narrowing the gap between illusion and reality and by demonstrating that perception does not need the presence (or even the existence) of its apparent object, the panorama provided ‘new evidence for the constructed and contingent nature of the real’ (Otto 2011, 24). It therefore emerges as a paradigmatic example of our two modernities – one focused on objectivity, reason, certainty and order, and the other on subjectivity, imagination, reflexivity and uncertainty (Lash 1999). If one adds that, as predicted by Barker, the panorama enabled artists to transport audiences to whatever location they want them to ‘imagine themselves’, we find ourselves deep within the cultural moment engaged by Romanticism. But before developing this last remark, we must turn to the jumble of perception machines to which the panorama belongs.

Imbroglio As Niklas Luhmann (2000) remarks, ‘Art splits the world into a real world and an imaginary world in a manner that resembles, and yet differs from . . . the religious treatment of sacred objects and events. The function of art’, he continues, ‘concerns the meaning of this split’ (142). In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, it is important to add, the distance between religious and artistic versions of this split widened, while conventional accounts of the latter were thrown into disarray as perceptual environments multiplied and imaginary worlds spilled out of the frame, private collection and elite gallery into the wider world, where they began rapidly to proliferate. To begin once again with the panorama, Barker’s virtual worlds soon had doubles, such as ‘View of the Fleet at Spithead, on the 1st of May, 1795’ (1796), which was painted by Robert Dodd (1748–1815) on a canvas ‘one hundred and ten feet wide’ (Oracle, 16 February 1796), and the series of three-quarter views by Robert Ker Porter (1777–1842), each covering approximately 2,550 square feet of canvas, which began in 1800 with the popular Storming of Seringapatam (The Sun, 18 July 1800, 1). Soon after Barker’s patent had expired, full-circle views began to appear, such as Eidometropolis (1802) by Thomas Girtin (1775–1802), covering 1,944 square feet

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of canvas (Anonymous, The Times, 11 September 1802, 1), and a second panorama rotunda was opened, this time in the Strand, by Thomas Edward Barker (n.d.), the elder of Robert Barker’s two sons, and the painter Ramsay Richard Reinagle (1775–1862). These last remarks might seem to presage the history assumed in early accounts of the medium and elaborated in pre-histories of the cinema, which moves from the stationary to the moving and peristrephic panoramas and from there, by way of photography, to the birth of cinema in 1895 (Oetterman 1997; Herbert 2000). But the lineages of virtual-reality machines are more tangled than this sequential, unidirectional narrative suggests; and these tangled lines of emergence strengthen the impression, common in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London, of a rapidly changing world set loose from tradition and natural growth. We can begin to sketch this environment by noting that moving and peristrephic panoramas look back to the ‘Eidophusikon; or, Various Imitations of Natural Phenomena, represented by Moving Pictures’, first exhibited by Philippe de Loutherbourg (1740–1812) in London in 1781 (fig. 15.5), while also looking forward to the Diorama, shown by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851) and Charles-Marie Bouton (1781–1853) in Paris in 1822 and by John Arrowsmith (1790–1849), Daguerre’s brother-in-law, in London the following year.

Figure 15.5  Edward Francis Burney, ‘The Eidophusikon of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, presenting a scene from “Satan Arraying his Troops on the Banks of a Fiery Lake, with the Raising of the Palace of Pandemonium”’, c.1782. Watercolour. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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The Eidophusikon is best described as a mechanical theatre or three-dimensional cinema, performed on a stage 10 feet wide x 6 high x 8 deep (Altick 1978, 121), which typically presented a sequence of five landscapes, accompanied by realistic sound and lighting effects, each of which could be put into motion. In the show’s second season, it concluded with ‘Satan arraying his Troops on the Banks of the Fiery Lake, with the raising of Pandemonium’, a scene drawn from Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton (1608–1674), which in this new context identifies Satan and Loutherbourg as creators of worlds not licensed by God (Otto 2011, 168–9). The Diorama adds yet another type of moving picture, this time conjured by a large semi-translucent canvas, painted on both sides, placed at the end of a darkened passage, which could be illuminated from the front and back. By altering the ratio of reflected to mediated light, night could be made to fall, day dawn, seasons change, and people and objects appear and disappear. Audiences viewed this moving picture through a window in the auditorium’s walls, while seated on a platform that could be turned until the window was aligned with a second passage at the end of which stood another painting. The bill of fare was able therefore to boast two moving scenes, usually a landscape and an architectural interior (Altick 1978, 167). The Eidophusikon and the Diorama, like the static, moving and peristrephic panoramas, drew on, competed with, and influenced developments in longer traditions of art and exhibition. The former, for example, develops Loutherbourg’s work as painter of sublime landscapes and as stage designer at Drury Lane Theatre (1773–81), where he led the transformation of the stage from a ‘rhetorical to a [spectacular] pictorial art’ (Allen 1960, 320). The latter drew on Bouton’s and Daguerre’s expertise as painters and panorama painters, and on the latter’s celebrated ability to construct theatrical illusions, refined during his years as decorator and stage designer for venues in Paris such as Théâtre Ambigu-Comique and as co-chief painter for the Paris Opéra (1820–2). Rather than the straight lines of cause and effect with which we started, the virtualreality machines we have been describing emerge in promiscuous assemblage with each other. Indeed, as our ensemble of environments, technologies, inventors, entrepreneurs and artists expands, their relation to each other and the relation between old and new entertainment technologies can be seen as an imbroglio, in which it is not always clear ‘who and what is acting’ (Latour 2005, 46). To the already tangled lineage of dioramas, for example, we should add two more parents: transparent pictures, which were painted on both sides of a translucent fabric so that, by slowly shifting the primary source of light from one side to the other, the picture could be put in motion (Robinson 2015, 1, 3–5); and magic lanterns, in which a light source, painted slide, a concave mirror and two convex lenses were arranged to project and focus an image, often of macabre or supernatural phenomena. And amongst the parents of the Eidophusikon, we should add eighteenth-century interest in automata, such as those displayed in Cox’s Museum (1772–5) and, later, Merlin’s Mechanical Museum (1783–1808). The Diorama and Eidophusikon are also children of the peep show, which was a stock-in-trade for itinerant entertainers throughout the eighteenth century. Customers peered through a small aperture, often fitted with a convex lens, into a little box in which an ‘other’ world could be seen, conjured by a semi-transparent picture or miniature theatre, probably lit from behind. In this type of family, parents rarely age gracefully. The peep show, for example, appeared in updated and upmarket form, first in Paris (1808) and then London (1821),

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as the Cosmorama – a fashionable meeting place that offered two sets of seven views, each a panorama ‘writ small’ (Altick 1978, 211). The magic lantern underwent a radical metamorphosis to become the phantasmagoria, which was exhibited in Paris in 1792 by its inventor, the magician Paul Philipsthal (17??–1829); further developed by Etienne-Gaspard Robertson (1763–1837), again in Paris; and then exhibited in London by Philipsthal on 5 October 1801 (The Times, 5 October 1801, 1). The show’s special effects were now so sophisticated that, Philipsthal boasted, audiences would see ghosts ‘freely originate in the air, and unfold themselves under various forms and sizes, such as imagination alone has hitherto painted them’ (The Times, 26 October 1801, 1). Making lines of influence still more complicated, all these entertainments spawned doubles or variants of themselves. Soon after the phantasmagoria arrived in London, for example, it was being jostled by Monsieur St Clair’s Phantasmagoria (Morning Post, 21 December 1801, 1), Mark Lonsdale’s Spectrographia (Altick 1978, 218), Mr Moritz’s Phantasmagoria (Morning Post, 28 June 1802, 1) and Monsieur Montpellier’s Skiagraphema, which claimed to be a copy of the original Parisian ‘Phantasmagorie’ (Morning Chronicle, 10 March 1802, 1). Just as significantly, doubles of the phantasmagoria, the panorama, moving panorama, and diorama all appeared in miniature form, which enabled them to step inside the home, now as adult entertainments, talking points, children’s toys and so on (Plunkett 2007). Histories of media usually take as their stepping stones a new medium’s earliest fully developed form, but repetition in the cases I have mentioned is also difference, which turns each copy into an original able to author a new series in time. Further, rather than keeping a respectful distance from each other, in performance entertainment technologies were frequently mixed. The late Georgian stage, as Francesca Saggini (2016) notes, was ‘a site of generic and cultural mongrelization’ (73), but so too were bills of fare at other types of venue. In February 1805, for example, when Schirmer and Scholl performed their ‘Ergascopia’ (another version of the phantasmagoria) in the Lyceum, it was joined by speaking and singing automata, ‘Colossal Aerostatic Figures’, an ‘Optical Ballet’ and, between acts, ‘an artificial Voltigeur; a clever Magician, sagacious Dog, and courageous bird’ (The Times, 19 January 1805, 1). In the course of entertainments like these, each episode is coloured, at least in part, by those with which it has been collocated. And, if we extend Saggini’s remarks on intertheatricality (inter-playfulness) to other media, then the significance of any performance depends in part on entertainments of similar type on offer in other venues, ‘in the one night or during a certain span of time’ (73). Although my imbroglio is getting out of hand, there are more of its elements that should be mentioned, beginning with literature, still one of the most powerful virtualreality machines available. As Edward Young (1683–1765) writes in Conjectures on Original Composition ([1759] 1966), in lines echoed by Barker’s patent, while reading works of genius ‘we are at the Writer’s mercy; on the strong wing of his Imagination, we are snatched from Britain to Italy, from Climate to Climate, from Pleasure to Pleasure; we have no Home, no Thought, of our own; till the Magician drops his pen’ (13). It is hardly surprising therefore that canonical works and popular genres, while actively shaping the new media environment (Gabriele 2016), also provided an archive of imagined scenes and realities that could be remediated. Spectacular scenes from plays by William Shakespeare (1564–1616), such as ‘The Witches in Macbeth’, and from works by Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) and Matthew Lewis (1775–1818) were

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staples of the phantasmagoria, influenced the aesthetics of the Diorama, were common subjects in transparent pictures, and frequently migrated onto the stage. Just as importantly, while the panorama was turning news, travel and history into visual spectacle, literature was developing its own media of public visual display. When Barker’s View of Edinburgh opened in London in 1789, it competed for attention with Thomas Macklin’s ‘Gallery of the Poets’ (1788–97) and John Boydell’s ‘The Shakespeare Gallery’ (1789–1805), both in Pall Mall, where they were joined ten years later by Henry Fuseli’s ‘The Milton Gallery’ (1799–1800). While the panorama summoned places and events from the real world, the literary galleries turned to the empire of imagination, as evoked by a national literature (Gallery of Poets), ‘original genius’ (Shakespeare Gallery) and Paradise Lost (Milton Gallery). The last, like the Eidophusikon, suggesting a parallel between the artist-entrepreneur’s and fallenangel’s dissident world-forming powers. And, of course, all the entertainments I have mentioned belong to the culture of exhibition that made London at this time seem a kaleidoscope of scenes. This included (in addition to the entertainments I have mentioned): pleasure gardens, such as those at Vauxhall and Ranelagh, where audiences could enjoy music, masquerades, vistas, transparent pictures, paintings, illuminations, operas and fireworks; the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy and those seen in printshops such as the ‘Repository of the Arts’, owned by Rudolph Ackermann (1764–1834), or those run by radicals such as Samuel Fores; and George IV himself, whose reign was described in The Times, soon after his death, as ‘a gorgeous pageant on the stage’ that would soon be forgotten (16 July 1830, 2). Spectacular performances of scientific fact, in the laboratory and on the stage (Coppola 2016), along with the views, discoveries and adventure of ballooning (Brant 2017) also belonged to this culture of exhibition. So too did natural history, through spectacular objects and displays at museums such as the Holophusikon (1775–1806), which housed the shells, fossils and menagerie of stuffed animals collected by Sir Ashton Lever (1729–88), and the Egyptian Hall, where from 1812–19 the objects and curios assembled by the antiquarian and showman William Bullock (bap. 1773–1849) were on display (fig. 15.6). And, of course, all this was visible in a city that was the centre of a global empire and home to more than a million people. Its wealth, appetite for innovation and unruly destructive/productive powers ensured that it was itself a moving panorama – a spectacle in its own right.

The Politics of Experience The changing relation between real and imaginary worlds, effected by the proliferation of virtual realities, is registered by changes in the fabric of the ‘real’. First, one sees the emergence of artist-entrepreneurs, such as Barker, Marshall and Daguerre, who engineer virtual-reality machines, the products of which function as commodities sold to a new kind of audience, more interested in novel experience than factual information (Campbell 1987, 89). These twin developments, which establish the foundations for what has been dubbed ‘the experience society’ – Die Erlebnisgesellschaft (Schulze 1992) – are joined by a new kind of space, exemplified by the Leicester Square Rotunda, Wrigley’s Great Room, the Lyceum, the Egyptian Hall and so on, which become better known than any of the spectacles they exhibited

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Figure 15.6  Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, ‘Bullock’s Museum, 22, Piccadilly’, 1810. London: R. Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, June 1, 1810. Coloured aquatint. Wellcome Collection. because they are locales where the gap between real and imaginary worlds has narrowed (During 2002, 215–58). Next, as these magical spaces and their virtual realities multiply, the border between first-order and second-order perceptions becomes blurred and experience framed by ‘a broader understanding of life’ (Erfahrung) is eclipsed by Erlebnis, centred on ‘the unique’, the ephemeral and ‘the sensational’ (Benjamin [1929] 1999, 266). And this in turn contributes to the widespread sense in Europe after the French Revolution that the past had become ‘a foreign country’ (Lowenthal 2015). The most resonant early accounts of this modern reality are provided by William Wordsworth and Karl Marx (1818–83), writing respectively in The Prelude (1805, 1850) and The Communist Manifesto (1848). According to the former, London is productive of blank confusion! true epitome Of what the mighty City is herself To thousands upon thousands of her sons, Living amid the same perpetual whirl Of trivial objects, melted and reduced To one identity, by differences That have no law, no meaning, and no end – (Wordsworth [1850] 1979, VII.722–8)

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The latter describes the same ‘historical drama and trauma’ (Berman 2010, 89), although now as a more global phenomenon: ‘All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newformed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned’ (Marx [1848] 2008, 38). The Prelude is one of the central texts of British Romanticism and the most important poetic influence on liberal humanism; The Communist Manifesto is ‘the high point of the German Romantic influence on Marx’ (Osborne 1998, 198) and the most influential political pamphlet of modern socialism. By dismissing the actual world in which they were written, both repeat in dissident form the logic of negation they critique (Osborne 1998, 192), in order to open a space in which the ‘real’ can be rediscovered and a history linking past, present and the future can be composed. For Wordsworth, this is a history of the self, centred on the imagination, which culminates in a vision of ‘genuine liberty’ (Wordsworth [1805] 1979, 464), while for Marx, it is a history of class struggle, centred on the proletariat, which opens a future where ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ (Marx [1848] 2008, 66). In their desire to uncover, beneath the surfaces of the actual world, the ‘real conditions of life’ (Marx [1848] 2008, 38), Wordsworth and Marx are closer to Huish and Galt than to Scott. And yet during the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the imagination and the proletariat are discovered inside rather than outside what they were meant to oppose, The Prelude and The Communist Manifesto start to seem both nostalgic and, against their overt intentions, fascinated by a modern world brimming with creative energies set free by negation, melting, profanation and rapid change. In the late twentieth century, Wordsworth’s hesitations about the relation between the past and present of his own life make The Prelude a favourite text for deconstruction (de Man 1987). Similarly, during the same period, ‘with the disappearance of the horizon of proletarian revolution, and the retreat to the spirit world of the famous “spectre” of communism’ (Osborne 1998, 190), The Communist Manifesto becomes visible ‘as the archetype of a century of modernist manifestos and movements to come’ and, as such, ‘the first great modernist work of art’ (Berman 2010, 89, 102). These contrary readings foreground a tension between what Berman describes as Marx’s and, we can add, Wordsworth’s ‘solid and . . . melting visions of modern life’ (90). The latter brings them closer to Scott’s canny understanding of the possibilities, for better and worse, of a rapidly changing world where real, actual and virtual realms cannot be disentangled from each other; and Scott in turn takes us a step closer to Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and Thomas Hornor (1785–1844) who, lacking nostalgia, are eager to explore its possibilities. As father of the utilitarian tradition, Bentham is normally aligned with instrumental realism; yet his panopticon idea, developed in 1787 (fig. 15.7), the same year that Barker’s panorama idea was patented, and published three years later as Panopticon: or, The Inspection-House, sets out to shape experience and therefore behaviours through a complex ensemble of spaces, objects and virtual realities (Otto 2011, 19–63). Further, in his notebooks Bentham imagines the panopticon penitentiary within a larger complex – a model of a society, shaped by surfaces, without ultimate grounds. This complex includes a Panopticon Tavern, stocked with popular entertainments such as Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon and ‘a transparent statue of George III illuminated from within’; the Sotimion, to shelter women led astray by the fiction of love; and the Nothotropium,

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Figure 15.7  Willey Reveley, ‘Section of an Inspection House’, c. 1791. Pencil, pen and ink, and watercolour sketch on paper. The Bentham Papers, UCL Library Services, Special Collections 119a/119. [The cells are marked ‘H’ and the source of light ‘M’.]. to accommodate children born out of wedlock – which are all to be built on Panopticon Hill, in the midst of a giant pleasure garden (Otto 2011, 59–63; Semple 1993, 284–308). One is reluctant to classify the Panopticon penitentiary as a work of art even though, like Barker’s panorama or Milton’s Paradise Lost, it transports audiences from an everyday to an extraordinary world, in which they are ‘at the [artist’s] mercy’, with ‘no Home, no Thought, of [their] own; till the Magician drops his pen’. The worldforming imagination this nevertheless suggests appears in more palatable form in Hornor’s Colosseum, where audiences were transported by an ‘ascending room’ onto what seemed the summit of St Paul’s Cathedral, from where a vast panorama of London appeared (fig. 15.8), painted on a canvas fifteen times larger than Barker’s View of London. In contrast to previous panoramas, there were now four viewing galleries, enabling audiences to move around within the illusion, with the second gallery intended also for use as a refectory and the third for music and balls. A fourth gallery, built on the roof of the Colosseum, offered a second panorama of London, against which the realism of the first could be compared. And when audiences were carried back to the ground, they stepped into an assemblage of virtual worlds that included a picture gallery; Swiss cottage; conservatory, nearly 300 feet long, divided into ‘six different compartments, each varying from the others in form, arrangement, size, and contents’ (Britton 1829, 7);

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Figure 15.8  ‘Bird’s eye View from the Stair-Case & the upper part of the Pavilion in the Colosseum, Regent’s Park’. From Graphic Illustrations of the Colosseum, Regent’s Park, in Five Drawings by Gandy, Mackenzie, and other Eminent Artists. London: R. Ackermann and Co., 1 June 1829. Guildhall Library, City of London. ‘subterranean passage, laid out as a series of grottoes’; and ornamental gardens, complete with ‘lofty embankments’ and ‘a winding and artificial valley’ (Anonymous, ‘The Coliseum’ 1827, 3). Further, the panorama’s sociable spaces, already multiplied by these locales, were added to again by a saloon and reading room, with the latter intended to be part of a suite of rooms that would ‘afford to subscribers all the advantages of a club’ (Anonymous, ‘Some account of the Colosseum’ 1829, 36). As the word ‘subscribers’ suggests, far from sparking ‘a nostalgic retreat to Erfahrung’, Erleben could be for some

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‘the precondition for the creation of a rich second life, which [extended] their actual lives into the realm of the virtual’ (Otto 2011, 295). Wordsworth, Marx, Bentham and Hornor are unlikely bedfellows, but for the purposes of this chapter their disagreements, which muddy conventional distinctions between progressive and conservative thought, identify the cardinal points of a still ongoing debate about what to make of a modernity marked by the ‘“lack of reality” of reality’ and the proliferation of ‘other realities’ (Lyotard 1984, 77). In so doing, they anticipate the turbulent modernity of our own time, where the ‘system’s “matter” has changed “phase”’, becoming ‘more liquid than solid, more airlike than liquid, more informational than material’ (Serres and Latour 1995, 121). Experience, once the bedrock of Enlightenment epistemology, has now, as in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, been set adrift, which is to say that it has become newly visible, inside the shifting worlds framed by politics, commerce and art, as a site of human vulnerability but also openness, experiment and change.

Note The research for this chapter was drawn from ‘Architectures of Imagination: Bodies, Buildings, Fictions, and Worlds’, a project supported by the Australian Research Council (DP DP180102604). Thanks to Holly Gallagher for helping to check quotations and references.

Bibliography Alison, Archibald. 1790. Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste. London: J. J. G. and G. Robinson; Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute. Allen, Ralph Gilmore. 1960. ‘The Stage Spectacles of Philip James De Loutherbourg’. PhD diss., Yale University. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Altick, Richard D. 1978. The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP. Anonymous. 1802. ‘Eidometropolis, or, Panorama of London’. The Times, Saturday, 11 September 1802. Gale Primary Sources. Anonymous. 1827. ‘The Coliseum, Regent’s Park’. The Times, Thursday, 2 August 1827. Gale Primary Sources. Anonymous. 1829. ‘Some account of the Colosseum, in the Regent’s Park’. The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Saturday, 17 January 1829. Barker, Robert. 1796. ‘Specification of the Patent granted to Mr Robert Barker . . . called by Him “La Nature à Coup d’Oeil”’. The Repertory of Arts and Manufactures 4: 165–7. Benjamin, Walter. [1929] 1999. ‘The Return of the Flâneur’. In Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 2, 1927–1934, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, translated by Rodney Livingstone, 262–7. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP. Bentham, Jeremy. 1791. Panopticon: or, The Inspection-House . . . in a Series of Letters, Written in the Year 1787, from Crecheff in White Russia, to a Friend in England. Dublin: Thomas Byrne. Berman, Marshal. 2010. All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso. Brant, Clare. 2017. Balloon Madness: Flights of Imagination in Britain, 1783–1786. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Brewer, John. 2007. ‘Sensibility and the Urban Panorama’. The Huntington Library Quarterly 70 (2): 229–49.

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Britton, John. 1829. A Brief Account of the Colosseum, in the Regent’s Park, London. London: Printed for the Proprietors. Campbell, Colin. 1987. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell. Coppola, Al. 2016. The Theatre of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in EighteenthCentury Britain. Oxford: Oxford UP. Corner, George Richard. 1857. ‘The Panorama, with Memoirs of its Inventor, Robert Barker, and his son, the late Henry Aston Barker’. The Art-Journal 3: 46–7. HathiTrust Digital Library. De Man, Paul. 1987. ‘Time and History in Wordsworth’. Diacritics 17 (4) (Winter): 4–17. During, Simon. 2002. Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Ellis, Markman. 2008. ‘“Spectacles within doors”: Panoramas of London in the 1790s’. Romanticism 14 (2): 133–48. Frykman, Niklas. 2020. The Bloody Flag: Mutiny in the Age of Atlantic Revolution. Oakland: University of California Press. Gabriele, Alberto. 2016. The Emergence of Pre-Cinema: Print Culture and the Optical Toy of the Literary Imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Galt, John. 1842. The Provost and Other Tales. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood. Girouard, Mark. 1981. The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Herbert, Stephen, ed. 2000. A History of Pre-Cinema. 3 vols. London and New York: Routledge. Hetherington, Kevin. 2005. ‘Memories of Capitalism: Cities, Phantasmagoria and Arcades’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29 (1) (March): 187–200. Huhtamo, Erkki. 2013. Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Huish, Robert. 1831. Memoirs of George IV, Descriptive of the most Interesting Scenes of his Private and Public Life. 2 vols. London: Printed for T. Kelly. Hyde, Ralph. 1988. Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the ‘All–Embracing’ View. London: Trefoil. Lash, Scott. 1999. Another Modernity, a Different Rationality. Oxford: Blackwell. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP. Lochhart, John Gibson. 1837. Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, & Blanchard. Lowenthal, David. 2015. The Past is a Foreign Country – Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Löwy, Michael and Robert Sayre. 2001. Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity. Translated by Catherine Porter. Durham, NC: Duke UP. Luhmann, Niklas. 2000. Art as a Social System. Translated by Eva M. Knodt. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’ In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Régis Durand, 71–82. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marx, Karl and Frederich Engels. [1848] 2008. The Communist Manifesto. Intro. by David Harvey. London: Pluto Press. Mosse, John. 1967. ‘The Albion Mills: 1784–1791’. Transactions of the Newcomen Society 40 (1): 47–60. Oettermann, Stephan. 1997. The Panorama: A History of a Mass Medium. Translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider. New York: Zone Books. Oleksijczuk, Denise Blake. 2011. The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Osborne, Peter. 1998. ‘Remember the Future? The Communist Manifesto as Historical and Cultural Form’. Socialist Register 34: 190–204. Otto, Peter. 2011. Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality. Oxford: Oxford UP. Plunkett, John. 2007. ‘Moving Books/Moving Images: Optical Recreations and Children’s Publishing 1800–1900’. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 5.

Pückler-Muskau, Hermann Fürst von. 1832. Tour in England, Ireland, and France in the years 1828 & 1829. Translated by Sara Austin. 2 vols. London: Wilson. Robinson, David. 2015. ‘Domestic Transparencies’. The Magic Lantern 2 (March): 1, 3–5. Saggini, Francesca. 2016. The Gothic Novel and the Stage: Romantic Appropriations. New York: Routledge. Schulze, Gerhard. 1992. Die Erlebnisgesellschaft: Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart. Frankfurt: Campus. Semple, Janet. 1993. Bentham’s Prison: A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary. Oxford: Clarendon. Serres, Michel with Bruno Latour. 1995. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Translated by Roxanne Lapidus. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Swidzinski, Joshua. 2016. ‘Panoramic Sites and Civic Unrest in 1790s London’. The Eighteenth Century 57 (33) (Fall): 283–301. Whitley, William T. 1928. Artists and their Friends in England 1700–1799. 2 vols. London and Boston: The Medici Society. Wordsworth, William. [1805] 1979. The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850. Edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill. New York and London: W. W. Norton. ———. [1977] 1982. Poems. Edited by John O. Hayden. 2 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Young, Edward. [1759] 1966. Conjectures on Original Composition. Leeds: Scolar Press.

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Part III Circulations: Print Culture and the Arts

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ovels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries allude to art, to artists and to visual methodologies and techniques with remarkable frequency. This is unsurprising given that, as early as the mid-eighteenth century, ‘Britain was obsessed with visibility, spectacle, [and] display’ (De Bolla 2003, 69); and as David Marshall has observed, ‘literary texts’ of this time ‘were expected to act like paintings and present images and tableaux to the eyes or at least to the imagination, [. . .] transport[ing] the reader into [. . .] the scene being described’ (2005, 6). These tendencies endured, for, as the nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt (1778–1830) strikingly describes, it is ‘a luxury to have the walls of our rooms hung round with them, and no less so to have a gallery in the mind’ (1909, 210). Indeed, if readers lacked paintings on their walls, literature could offer recompense by giving them such a mental depository. Northanger Abbey’s (1803) Catherine Morland, for example, possesses this ‘gallery’ when she says that she never looks at England’s Beechen Cliff ‘without thinking of the south of France’ (Austen 2006, 107). She has not actually been to France, but Radcliffe’s ekphrastic descriptions of it in the Mysteries of Udolpho stimulate for her an inner pictorial life.1 In The Last Man (1826), Mary Shelley’s hero finds not only a mental ‘gallery’, but an artist too: there, in his mind, ‘imagination, the painter, sits, with his pencil dipt in hues lovelier than those of sunset, adorning familiar life with glowing tints’ (1996, 59). Oil covers a canvas and marble stands, but the mind itself is a painter, even without the ‘luxury’ of owning paintings. In this chapter, I emphasise two interwoven strands: first, visual-verbal intertextuality – a term describing a novelist’s allusions to paintings or sculpture – enhances the reading-viewing experience, as it invites new and manifold interpretations of both media. This unsettles the competitive tradition existing between word and image, one that, as W. J. T. Mitchell explores, has gender ramifications, wherein ‘Paintings, like women, are ideally silent, beautiful creatures designed for the gratification of the eye, in contrast to the sublime eloquence proper to the manly art of poetry’ (1986, 110).2 As I show, however, novelists integrate the two modes to invigorate the affective and intellectual vitality in reading and viewing. Visual-verbal intertextuality thus animates relationships between these forms. Whether an image is placed next to the description it illustrates, on the reader’s wall, or exists in the memory or imagination, readers, to take in both, must actively and vitally move their thoughts and eyes, and possibly their fingers and hands, to and fro through the novel’s pages. Daniel Stern claims that vitality has ‘a basis in physical action and traceable mental operations’, and energies, such as movement, ‘force, time, space, and directionality’ create ‘dynamic events’ (2010, 4).3 I suggest that word-image intimacies become ‘dynamic

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events’ when readers, sensorially and intellectually engaged, participate in switchback reading and looking. Second, as I intimated above, visuality offered a deep pleasure during this era, and incorporating the fine arts allowed readers to think with a paintbrush and build a gallery in their own minds. Artistic allusions enhance this enchantment when they link readers by developing a common pictorial, as well as textual, vision. For example, novelists’ frequent references to the painters Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorrain (see fig. 16.1) or to the picturesque and the sublime in conjunction with ekphrastic landscape scenes would have provided a visual vocabulary even for those, like Miss Morland, who had never seen an original or a replicated work. Readers may disparage Northanger’s naïve heroine, but certainly Catherine thinks creatively and imaginatively when she leaps from Radcliffe’s description of southern France – which itself ekphrastically rethinks Claude – to the real English landscape. David Brewer has shown how many readers wanted ‘to imagine characters as in full possession of a deep interiority and a life which extends off-page, despite the patent counterfactuality of it all’ (2005, 3). This extends to readers willingly envisioning characters who possess this interiority not only ‘off-page’ but off-canvas as well. These imaginative acts enable readers to picture a landscape or character from a painting, but also to visualise themselves, through that character, within visual/textual descriptions. To experience art in literature as a ‘dynamic event’, how familiar must readers be with the visual arts? Although this chapter does not focus expressly on readers and their art historical knowledge, one must assume that it varied: some would have had more, some less familiarity with paintings – through European travel, gallery going, fashionable picturesque tours and circulation of prints or acquaintance with other kinds of copies; others would have lacked that contact, but could still imagine, through ekphrastic description, what these artworks might look like. And even if novelists expected readers to possess familiarity with art, they must have acknowledged that readers’ acquaintance with a novel’s visual allusions would be idiosyncratic. Finally, a particular painter, for example Claude, associated repeatedly in literature with the pastoral, tranquil landscapes evident in figure 16.1, would have come to be a ‘picture’ for readers with no literal visual experience of that artist’s work, a phenomenon which democratises the process of viewing-reading.

Integrating Art’s Techniques: Waverley and the Picturesque This era’s novelists consistently incorporate artistic techniques into their prose, often utilising methods such as perspective, harmony and distribution of light and shadow. The Last Man’s narrator, for example, describes how painting offers organisational models useful to him as he, apparently Earth’s last survivor, writes to tell his story but also to keep himself alive: Time and experience have placed me on a height from which I can comprehend the past as a whole; and in this way I must describe it, bringing forward the leading incidents, and disposing light and shade so as to form a picture in whose very darkness there will be harmony. (Shelley 1996, 209) Rendering the ‘darkness’ harmonic counters his suicidal impulses as he strives to find hope in chaos; that is, he ‘bears and embodies the disaster’ (Khalip and Collings 2012,

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Figure 16.1  After Claude Lorrain, Landscape with the Father of Psyche Sacrificing at the Temple of Apollo. Oil on canvas. Indianapolis Museum of Art. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 16.2  Nicolas Poussin, The Empire of Flora, c. 1631. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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para 6), but only because a definite artistic design inspires him to do so. Walter Scott also incorporates compositional ideas from art in his novels for narrative purposes. Responding in 1811 to James Dusautoy, a writer wanting advice about his verses, Scott first praises, and then critiques the work, drawing on a painting metaphor as he remarks that Dusautoy’s ‘idylls’ are ‘a little too wordy’ and ‘too laboured’: There is a perspective in poetry, as well as in painting, by which I mean the art of keeping your landscape, with its attributes, in harmony with your principal figures, and reserving your force of detailed expression for what you mean shall be the most prominent in your picture. (Grierson 1932–7, #2–279) Narrative here becomes a ‘landscape’, as ‘perspective’ in both mediums preserves congruence, while retaining focus. Scott’s novel Waverley (1814) employs visual epistemology to describe how challenges in characterisation overlap in both narrative and the fine arts: Painters talk of the difficulty of expressing the existence of compound passions in the same features at the same moment: it would be no less difficult for the moralist to analyse the mixed motives which unite to form the impulse of our actions. (2011, 6)4 By embracing the visual, he, like other Romantic-era novelists, suggests that it takes more than a logocentric perspective to invoke a character’s, landscape’s or building’s presence. Indeed, visual knowledge offers its own language, giving authors a ‘bilingual’ capacity. If writers participate in the Enlightenment notion that seeing is knowing (Drucker 2014, 21), we can grasp why intertwining the visual and verbal permeate Romantic fiction. Despite this Enlightenment faith, however, both the word and the image are unstable signifiers, perhaps even more so when interwoven. This exciting instability partially arises from using a narrative technique that layers epistemologies of perception, allowing readers to see novelists’ ‘paintings’, a painter’s depiction, and/ or their own imaginative portrait simultaneously. Writers also commonly embed in their works compositional patterns, style and subject matter derived from the principles of the picturesque or sublime. For example, in Waverley, the protagonist enters an avenue, which was straight, [. . .] running between a double row of very ancient horse-chestnuts, planted alternately with sycamores, which rose to such huge height, and flourished so luxuriantly, that their boughs completely over-arched the broad road beneath. Beyond these venerable ranks, and parallel to them, were two walls [. . .] overgrown with ivy [and] honey-suckle. [. . .] The avenue was clothed with grass [. . .] of a very deep and rich verdure. [. . .]. One of the folding leaves of the lower gate was open, and as the sun shone full into the court behind, a long line of brilliancy was flung from the aperture up the dark and sombre avenue. It was one of those effects which a painter loves to represent [. . .]. The solitude and repose of the whole scene seemed almost monastic [. . .]. (2011, 37) Scott achieves this visual-verbal intertextuality in several ways. First, in describing ‘luxuriantly’ flourishing sycamores, ‘overgrown ivy’ and ‘deep and rich verdure’, he

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summons picturesque paintings wherein nature is exuberant and sensuous, light and shadow play with each other, and painterly effects offer energy and repose simultaneously.5 Second, the very mention of a ‘straight’ avenue, bordered by ‘venerable ranks’ of ‘ancient horse-chesnuts’ (2011, 37) demonstrates how Scott collaborates with picturesque theorists. For example, Uvedale Price championed these avenues’ magnificence and advocated for their preservation. Because of their origins in French imperialist landscape architecture, which emphasised rigid geometrical shapes, these ‘venerable’ avenues were too often, as Price argues, destroyed, a ‘fatal consequence’ of fashion – that is, ‘the present excessive horror of straight lines’ (1794, 195–6). Remembering the ‘solemn stillness, the religious awe’ of an acquaintance’s renowned avenue, Price ‘was much hurt to learn’ that ‘a death warrant was signed’ for the trees (194–5). The writers echo each other in using the words ‘venerable’ and ‘straight’, but also in invoking the spiritual wonder these natural ‘hallways’ inspire. Finally, when Scott describes the avenue’s chiaroscuro – that stark contrast between the avenue’s night-like opacity and the brilliant light piercing it – he identifies this visual technique as one ‘a painter loves to represent’ (2011, 37). In doing so, he layers narrative portrayal and a painter’s depiction simultaneously and further suggests that artists working in either word or image are contiguous, both drawing on phenomena from nature, but also striving to describe similar ‘effects’. Scott uses picturesque principles in another instance to articulate his landscapes: Waverley replicates the picturesque exchange between human and non-human, when the stream is ‘received’ into a ‘large natural basin’ and the brook has a lot to say as it travels, ‘murmuring’ while it ‘wandered [. . .] down the glen’ [. . .] (2011, 113). His use of the verb ‘decorated’ – the ‘Mossy banks of turf were [. . .] decorated with trees and shrubs’ – makes the spot’s polish and ornamentation resemble a Humphry Repton garden, though Scott assures us that his character, Flora, has planted vegetation ‘so cautiously’ that it does not ‘diminish [. . .] the romantic wildness of the scene’ (2011, 114). The ornamental picturesque is as fundamental to Scott’s verbal sketch as grammar is to a legible sentence. Waverley’s ‘paintings’ of the avenue and of the brook create a complex overlay of representations that enriches the reading experience and reveals a subtle pedagogical ploy: one that encourages an education in ‘taste’, like that which Catherine receives from the Tilneys, who are educated in a view’s ‘capability of being formed into pictures’ (Austen 2006, 112). De Bolla calls this visual mode, or ‘scopic regime’, the ‘regime of the picture’, wherein ‘what one “sees” or recognises is [. . .] a style, genre, painter’; that is, this mode encourages the eye to ‘compare what one sees with what one knows’ (2003, 17), as when readers or viewers enjoyably recognise a style or painter – ‘Look! that’s a Rembrandt!’ But authors also depend on another way of seeing, one De Bolla calls the ‘regime of the eye’: here, viewers identify with rather than strive to recognise what they see, they learn ‘to look only by looking itself’, and they surrender ‘to the impulse [. . .] to be in the plane of representation [. . .] as if the eye were placed inside the object looking out toward the viewer’ (2003, 17, 18, 25). Picturesque viewing engages both regimes: the viewer/painter/author compares what is seen to what is known, but part of the pleasure arises from the fact that the embodied eye enters into the view, such that he or she can also ‘feel’, rather than merely ‘survey’ the scene (Gilpin 1794, 50; emphasis original).6 Scott’s verbal-visual intertextuality also encourages both modes of seeing – readers recognise that they are looking at a

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picturesque ‘painting’, but they also identify themselves with that scene by placing themselves ‘inside’ it, ‘looking out’ of it, processes which together create a ‘dynamic event’, tripling the pleasures the organic and aesthetic can offer.

Novels’ Allusions to Artists and Art: Waverley and Hartly House, Calcutta Romantic-era novelists also refer to artists, inclusions which impact how readers interpret both novels and artwork: the favourites tend to be Claude and Rosa, but many, such as Mary Shelley and Germaine de Staël, fold into their descriptions Italian and French painters, like Guido Reni, Nicholas Poussin, Raphael and Leonardo. More rarely, however, do novelists allude to paintings, most likely because they want to encourage the reader’s imaginative play. Certainly ‘quotations’ from artists can serve to generalise, specify, clarify and confuse an author’s description, thereby potentiating new knowledge, leading readers to engage imaginatively with both the novelists’ words and the painter’s images. For example, Scott, likening Flora to ‘those lovely forms which decorate the landscapes of Claude’, places her not in a particular painting, but in an ideal landscape, where ‘The sun [. . .] seemed to add more than human brilliancy to the full expressive darkness of Flora’s eye, [. . .] and enhanced the dignity and grace of her beautiful form’ (2011, 114). In a later edition (1829), however, Scott substitutes Poussin for Claude and in so doing alters our conception of Flora. Explaining that Scott’s friend, John Bacon Sawrey Morritt suggested this alteration, Peter Garside ‘rejects’ this change from Claude to Poussin ‘as misinterpreting Scott’s original design’ (2011, L).7 I suggest, however, that this amendment poses positive and lively quandaries for readers aware of the change, since it drives them to determine not only which painting the author might be imagining, but why he would shift from one artist to another, from one style to another. While both painters provide landscapes infused with classical subject matter, the reference to Poussin reveals a shift in how the novel, at the beginning of a later edition, more fully establishes Flora’s character. Reading from the novel’s end to rethink the beginning, we see that Poussin’s broad stylistic characteristics better emphasise Flora’s full life cycle from the first to the last descriptions of her, rather than merely Waverley’s first impression, a fantastical projection of her as his future wife. Alluding to Poussin, then, allows readers to anticipate the woman we know much better by the novel’s end. This painter’s architecture, receding planes and bodies are usually hard, sharp and geometrically delineated (see fig. 16.2, The Empire of Flora); Claude’s figures, however, tend to be smaller and more delicate, more atmospherically and sensuously illuminated, and farther from the picture’s foreground. For example, The Father of Psyche Sacrificing at the Temple of Apollo (see fig. 16.1) soothes the eye’s perusal of fraught subject matter. Both painters choose biblical and mythological subjects, but Poussin treats these with more tension and less serenity than Claude. Poussin populates his intensely clear landscapes with large, heroic and often tragic characters. When Claude depicts the tragic, he tempers it with tranquility, while Poussin provides a seeming harmony undergirded by ‘a sense of unease’ (Lagerlöf 1990, 75); overall, the latter’s stern and dignified figures evoke Waverley’s Flora more than Claude’s softer images and sensually appealing luxuriousness. William Hazlitt offers an encomium on Poussin’s landscapes in his Table-Talk (1821), one which unintentionally endorses Flora’s resemblance to Poussin’s rather

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than Claude’s figures. Analysing Poussin’s general style, Hazlitt finds it abounding with figures ‘full, solid, large, luxuriant, teeming with life and power’ (1909, 205). For him, Poussin’s style embraces ‘pedantry [. . .] stiffness, [. . .] elevation, [. . .] grandeur’, and a ‘unity of character. [. . .] He clothes a dream, a phantom, with form and colour, and the wholesome attributes of reality’ (1909, 206). Hazlitt’s words uncannily describe Flora: her fidelity is to the Jacobites, to ‘the grand principles of justice and truth’, ones that underwrite James III’s ascendancy to the throne, and ones which ‘can only be furthered by measures in themselves true and just’ (Scott 2011, 138) – a position she takes to the poles Hazlitt identifies in Poussin of ‘pedantry’ and ‘grandeur’. She consecrates herself to this cause, eschewing marriage and domestic life, dedicating her existence to ‘one wish – the restoration of my royal benefactors to their rightful throne’; centring her existence ‘on this single subject’, she ‘exclude[s] every thought respecting what is called my own settlement in life’ (Scott 2011, 143). Indeed, she scorns the country life of ‘lettered indolence, and elegant enjoyment of Waverley-Honour’ (Scott 2011, 266). Once the English triumph, she remains faithful to the Catholic cause, choosing to join a Parisian convent (Scott 2011, 344). Having ‘clothe[d] a dream, a phantom’ – in her case, the Jacobite cause – ‘with form and colour’ (Hazlitt 1909, 206), no wonder that she experiences ‘unimaginable bitterness’ when that dream dissolves (Scott 2011, 344). When Scott likens Flora to ‘those lovely forms which decorate the landscapes of Poussin’ (Scott 1972, 176),8 he stimulates one to remember or imagine the artist’s ‘lovely forms’. In referring to a painter’s style, rather than a painting, Scott animates readers’ creativity. Pondering Poussin’s ‘lovely forms’, however, discloses that many of his paintings could offer a fitting example, given that throughout his career and in the genres he masters, his ‘forms’ remain similar: the women’s stateliness and their proximity to the picture plane reveal expressive emotions evincing mobile athleticism and grace. All are clearly modelled and theatrically posed, their gestures dramatic, formal and elegant. Readers, then, determining which Poussin figure Flora most likely resembles, engage ingeniously with such allusions, with the visually knowledgeable participating in the ‘regime of the picture’, to return to De Bolla, bringing acquaintance of explicit paintings to their reading. For example, one might logically turn to a canvas that shares Flora’s name – The Empire of Flora (fig. 16.2) – which portrays a jubilant and victorious nature goddess. This painting, with four semi-nude female figures smoothly enamelled, bathed in golden light and garlanded in pastel robes, features Flora dominating the centre, dancing freely. Indeed, this spring deity ‘ornaments’ the landscape and receives universal tribute, enjoying devotion, as does the fictional Flora, ‘who, like every beautiful woman, was conscious of her own power, and pleased with its effects’ (Scott 2011, 114). Under its surface of decorative beauty and serenity, however, Poussin’s Empire suggests threat. As Pierre Rosenberg explains, the artist’s somber ‘ruminations’ often include a ‘sudden and unexpected, brutal and irrational appearance of death in an idyllic landscape’ (Rosenberg and Christiansen 2008, 239). Rather like Waverley itself, The Empire of Flora is undergirded with conflicted relationships: Ajax falls on his sword, Narcissus loves his own image while Echo longs for him, and Clytie expresses her unrequited desire for Apollo, soaring above in his chariot. The clouds’ darkening, boding presence accentuates subterranean fracases which anticipate the ways that Flora’s hope for a ‘Scottish Spring’ culminates in the Jacobites’ loss at the April battle of Culloden; the passage’s happy reference to ‘lovely forms’, when refracted through

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these paintings or others, underscores the fictional Flora’s tragic end. Thus, those knowing both Poussin and Waverley could create productive connections between the novel and art. And for those unfamiliar with Poussin, Scott’s detailed descriptions could create a ‘dynamic event’, as readers visualise such ‘lovely forms’ for themselves. On occasion, there may also be unnamed paintings lurking in novels; these, cipherlike, divulge more than what the text says directly. The need to code more radical ideas or the desire to intimate but not yet reveal a plot line or conclusion might drive such a method. For example, in Phebe Gibbes’s Hartly House, Calcutta (1789), the protagonist Sophia Goldborne, corresponding from India with an English friend, reports her viewing of the East India Company’s [EIC] ‘troops’ as they perform a military review in which ‘the whole display had, to me, more of a public shew, calculated to please the ladies, than to alarm the enemies of the Company’ (2007, 45). She claims that the soldiers resemble ‘Hercules at the court of Omphale’, who ‘has more gallantry than hostility about him’ (45). Here, Gibbes mentions a Greek myth but neither an artist nor a painting; however, it seems clear that Sophia has an image in mind. Indeed, the fine arts had widely disseminated this adventure, wherein Hercules, having gone ‘mad’ and murdered an ally by throwing him from a high wall, is punished by becoming Queen Omphale’s ‘slave’, forced to dress in women’s clothing and labour by sewing and spinning. Though sometimes accentuating the comic potential of such penances, the visual interpretations more often highlight his sexual prowess, clarifying that he must also ‘labour’ to fulfil Omphale’s carnal desires. Thus, knowing the fable, but especially recalling pictorial depictions of it, would cast an extremely negative light on East India Company mercenaries. Rubens’s Hercules et Omphale (fig. 16.3), for example, provides an apt depiction of Hercules’ labours: there, the queen wears his lion skin, while he holds a distaff and thread. Rubens stresses Hercules’ striking brawn and virility – nearly naked and flexing his formidable muscles – but subordinates him by covering him with Omphale’s scarf, while she, dominant, stands above, tweaking his ear. Other paintings, though, emphasise Hercules’ violence. Following this trend, François Boucher (fig. 16.4) shows the hero’s ferocity, dramatised especially by his forceful grip over Omphale’s breast, one so hard it striates and defines his muscles. And though the queen’s leg straddles the hero’s, suggesting that she maintains some power over him, it’s clear he could easily undercut her mastery.9 Familiarity with these images intensifies the novel’s allusion. In creating a ‘dynamic event’, they link the East India Company soldiers to a Hercules-like figure enslaved to women’s sexual and domestic demands: the spectacle, Sophia says, is ‘calculated to please the ladies’ (2007, 45). Implying through her allusions that the soldiers also intertwine domestic and sexual labours, she says that their ‘great complaisance has removed every idea of terror from my mind, yet the utility of these reviews may be very great; for [. . .] the minds they are intended to influence behold them in a quite different light, and tremble at the idea of their prowess’ (45). Those ‘minds they are intended to influence’ seem, in the myth and paintings’ context to refer less to frightening native Indians than to ‘servicing’ English women in Calcutta hungry for matrimony. Because Sophia, having ‘vow[ed]’ not to seek a rich husband there (6), feels superior to other hopeful brides-to-be (men won’t ‘influence’ her ‘mind’!), she can picture this military review as a labour-intensive seduction where women who ‘tremble’ at the soldier’s ‘prowess’, feel not fear, but the sexual mastery they wield over men. As Tim Fulford

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Figure 16.3  Peter Paul Rubens, Hercules and Omphale, 1606–7. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre. Public Domain.

Figure 16.4  François Boucher, Hercules and Omphale, c. 1731–4. Oil on canvas. Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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argues, Britons disparaged colonialism on the premiss that ‘infections’ – such as the undermining of masculine dominance – ‘were [not] endemic to the British character’, but were threats ‘from without’ (1999, 168). Accordingly, the text employs this selfserving critique of colonialism, picturing ‘nabobesses’ dominating, males emasculated, and true service to the British nation curtailed. I suggest, however, that Hartly House’s allusion to this myth and its associations with such paintings goes further to critique the British themselves, and precisely through covert allusions to its painted versions, which feature violence. That murdering an ally precipitates Hercules’ enslavement recalls the end of Hartly House, wherein an EIC employee rapes an Indian woman and murders her father, though the perpetrator has been welcomed by ‘innocent [. . .] inhabitants with the utmost kindness’ (2007, 158), an instance of the supposed ally turning against those they are ‘intended to influence’ (45). This link exposes colonialism’s destructive potential as more than an ‘other’s’ assault on British gender codes by identifying it as a brutal attack on supposed ‘friends’.

Illustrations in Novels: The Mysteries of Udolpho I have been discussing how novels’ allusions to the fine arts and its technologies can become vibrant occasions for readers, as they recognise or imagine visual scenes and as they move from word to image and back again with celerity. Here I switch to perhaps the most intimate of interactions between the two: book illustrations. These, I argue, spark imaginative interfacing between the two mediums while further breaking down binary oppositions often posited between word and image. The 1803 edition of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) includes four engravings, each one ‘prefacing’ a new volume, thus creating a condition wherein readers see the image before reading the passage and where they must physically traverse back and forth to compare text and illustration. The image shown in figure 16.5 also functions as a frontispiece – that is, an image ‘at the beginning of a book, intended to structure readers’ expectations and interactions with that book’ (Multigraph Collective 2018, 1).10 Dramatising a pastoral moment, it depicts Monsieur and Madame St Aubert and their daughter, Emily, resting in a picturesque setting: Having reached a green summit, shadowed by palm-trees, and overlooking the vallies and plains of Gascony, they seated themselves on the turf; and while their eyes wandered over the glorious scene, and they inhaled the sweet breath of flowers and herbs that enriched the grass, Emily played and sung several of their favourite airs, with the delicacy of expression in which she so much excelled. (Radcliffe 1803, I:25) This illustration becomes a ‘dynamic event’ since it initially moves readers magnetically to the above passage: we see the parents, Emily at her lute, and a glimpse of the valleys and plains receding until they reach the Pyrenees. Yet the image simultaneously shifts the viewer away from that textual passage by subordinating the countryside into a mere backdrop, in strong contrast to the novel, where they contemplate the landscape. The illustration, thus, offers its own interpretation of the novel, since it conspicuously veers from Radcliffe’s tendencies to make nature itself a character rather than a stage set for humans and to encourage enjoyment of such scenes: eyes that ‘wande[r] over the

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Figure 16.5  Frontispiece (Vol. 1), for Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho: a Romance; Interspersed with Some Poetry. Illustrated with copperplates. The fifth edition. London: G. and J. Robinson, 1803. Public Domain, British Library, 1508/384. glorious scene’ (I:25) are, in her novels, virtuous eyes, for the spiritualised universe delights and inspires them. Next, in multiple ways, the illustration counter magnetically moves the viewer from the textual passage it specifically refers to by alluding obliquely to a different paragraph – one forecasting Madame St Aubert’s death: ‘Music and conversation detained them in this enchanting spot, till [ . . .] the gloom of evening stole over the landscape. [. . .] St. Aubert and his family rose, and left the place with regret; alas! Madame St Aubert knew not that she left it for ever’ (I:25). First, the reader, avidly fluctuating between image and text, would note that this frontispiece diminishes a dialogue with the landscape by favouring familial socialising, yet, ironically, it isolates the subjects from each other, a state structurally effected by the triangle, which moves viewers from left to right – Madame gazes at her husband and he gazes to their daughter – and which prevents observers from seeing them as a mutually engaged group.11 Second, the tree trunks’ solid materiality pair father and daughter, thereby forecasting when, after Madame’s death, they will support each other. Third, although

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the mother’s headgear favours the sixteenth-century hoods French women wore, its long white drape and conical shape also resembles a shroud, an allusion to her impending death. Finally, Emily’s vacant gaze into a mysterious fourth wall crystalises her loss even in this living moment. Such verbal-visual intertextuality underscores how an illustration, unlike an exact copy, creates a ‘dynamic event’, wherein the image becomes its own interpreter and offers a vital exchange with that text and with readers. And although the frontispiece, commissioned for Radcliffe, might initially agitate readers because it does not copy the paragraph it primarily alludes to, this word-image configuration propels readers into numerous interpretations. While the engraving energises the reader’s interpretive impulses, it also could be said to offer its own reading of the novel, a conservative one, wherein solving family secrets and finding the truth become the heroine’s responsibility. Alison Conway calls this ‘private interests’, a term defining ‘a new commitment to the domestic and personal life as the origin of social unity and cooperation, a doctrine [. . .] that looks to women to guarantee the integrity of the private sphere’ (2001, 4). Accordingly, this image anticipates the rest of the novel since the lonely human triangle dominating the engraving directs attention to a possible disturbance at the family’s core, for in this volume Emily will, shortly after her mother’s death, covertly observe her father holding a miniature picture – ‘not of her mother’ – that he holds ‘to his lips, and then to his heart, [. . .] sigh[ing] with a convulsive force’ (I:28). Facing St Aubert’s seeming infidelity, Emily ‘could scarcely believe what she saw to be real’ (I:28). However, after completing Udolpho and solving these enigmas, readers – having criss-crossed between image and text – could realise that the illustration both introduces us to several paragraphs in Volume I, and, in its position as a frontispiece, aligns a reader’s outlook with the book as a whole by illuminating that this family and its mysteries structure the entire novel. The illustration, emphasising the gaze both parents direct toward Emily, guides the reader to a particular interpretation: that they look to their daughter to solve these dangerous riddles and reaffirm the family’s ‘integrity’.

Author-Portraits, Characters and Readers: Corinne, or Italy Eric Eisner has documented how the nineteenth-century world ‘participated in a burgeoning culture of literary celeb­­­rity in which readers responded to writers with powerful feelings of fascination, desire, love or horror’ (2009, 1). Thus, such an image, affixed as a frontispiece to their publications, would have supercharged such a ‘dynamic event’ since these images unlock possibilities for interactions among reader, portrait and text.12 Janine Barchas explains that ‘It is not until the early 1760s, only after the novel had successfully established itself as a durable literary genre’, that frontispiece portraits ‘begin to grace the many reprintings of their fictions’ (2019, 1). Authorportraits also helped advertise a book and enabled authors to advertise themselves. For example, Laurence Sterne ‘circulate[d] his portrait as a frontispiece engraving’ to Tristram Shandy (1759) as a ‘strateg[y] for self-promotion’ (Mole 2007, 9). Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen maintains that such visual accompaniments offer a ‘double view of the interpretation of the author-figure: the reader’s view of the author is always over his shoulder as he is engaged in representing his own “self-portrait”’ (2007, 142). And, as Kamilla Elliott remarks, ‘Literary authors [. . .] did not become celebrities by words alone, but through intersemiotic relations between words and images’ (2016, 526).

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A distinct ‘intersemiotic’ intertwining that would intensify a reader’s reaction to both text and author were portraits of writer-celebrities cast, self-reflexively, in the role their heroines play. Here, an author’s and a character’s disembodied voices find corporeal form in portraits that take on what Marcia Pointon has called ‘talismanic’ roles; such ‘Virgil-Wizards’ (1993, 5) lead one into a novel’s ever more secret depths. These magical transferences encourage authors, readers and characters to collapse into one or splinter in surprising ways. Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s Portrait of Madame de Staël as Corinne on Cape Misenum (fig. 16.6) portrays the episode wherein Corinne delivers an improvisation, playing her lyre just as the author does in this painting. The portrait distinctly emancipates itself from the novel by excluding the text’s audience and by offering a tone of joyful triumph.13 Contrastingly, Corinne dramatises the heroine’s melancholy: she asserts that ‘It is as if times gone by are all, in their turn, depositories of a happiness which is no more’, and later in her improvisation, ‘tears flowed from her eyes’ (235–6). Corinne marks the Neapolitan countryside as a place of ‘misfortunes’ and ‘crimes’, one ‘bathed in blood and tears’, one that has no ‘pity for man’ (235–6), or for woman. Pessimistically ending her improvisation – humans ‘have no power’ and their ‘hopes are illusory’ (238) – she becomes ‘deathly pale’ and collapses. Her catalogue of terrestrial catastrophes; her personal dejection and physical breakdown; and her query, ‘What happens when destiny separates us from the man who has the secret of our soul?’ (237), all foreshadow the novel’s tragic conclusion. Antithetically, Vigée-Lebrun’s brightly illuminated and smiling Staël-Corinne pictures her as a visionary priestess gazing up happily to knowledge and truth. Unlike the text’s heroine, who ultimately embraces self-destruction, this portrait takes a heartbreaking

Figure 16.6  Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Portrait of Madame de Staël as Corinne on Cape Misenum, c. 1808–9, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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scene and renders Corinne-Staël victorious for all ‘visual’ time. Consequently, one could argue that the painted Corinne provides a healing antidote to the textual heroine’s tragic toxicity. Altering a female author’s portrait to make her ‘prettier’ – whether the novelist, her relatives or her publisher make the decision – offers historical and aesthetic implications.14 Possessing access to the prettified version, one that visually ‘smooths’ out traces of imperfection or intellectual complexity, necessarily impacts a reader’s relationship to the novel and especially an author who has given her characters the human complications her own portrait lacks. Ironically, Staël rejected Vigée-Lebrun’s portrait and commissioned another, by Firmin Massot (fig. 16.7), one more conventionally flattering, but which loses Vigée-Lebrun’s depiction of the actively turned face and the sibyl-like uptick of the heroine-author’s alert eyes. One could debate why Staël would want such a ‘corrected’ version; surely, more than vanity motivated her, though, like Mary D. Sheriff, we must wonder what Staël made of Massot’s version, which ‘shows nothing of her power’ (1996, 261).15 Conceivably she objected to Vigée-Lebrun’s interpretation of this episode from the novel or perhaps Staël discloses her desire to equate female genius with beauty, since, as Julien North indicates, the two were posited as contiguous (2016, 63).16 However, as Judith Fisher shows while analysing Fraser’s Magazine, male and female portraits were often gendered – hence women writers were painted in domestic settings and/or rendered facile beauties (2006, 120). Vigée-Lebrun, more sensibly, found and conveyed in her portrait that Staël ‘was not pretty, but the animation of her face could take the place of beauty’ (quoted in Sheriff 1996, 244). Nevertheless, Massot’s copy offers a troubling interface with a feminist novel, one which advocates for the creative and brilliant woman artist. His portrait,

Figure 16.7  Firmin Massot, after Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun, Madame de Staël as Corinne, 1810. Chateau de Coppet. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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read alongside Corinne, divulges an unnerving similarity to Lucile, the heroine’s childlike half-sister, whose conventional gender performance contrasts to Corinne’s own agency in the novel and to those that Vigée-Lebrun gives to her subject. Massot’s ‘improvements’ also contradict some trends in Romantic-era painting. For example, Thomas Crow observes in this genre a ‘democratic emancipation of individual thought and feeling’, and a focus on the ‘underlying texture of muscle, fat, and bone in each face’ (2011, 76). Ignoring these criteria, Massot’s version irons Corinne-Staël’s skin, thereby eradicating any ‘underlying texture’; it erases the delicate dark smudges underneath the eyes which suggest a lurking fatigue; it expunges the bent wrist and the bicep’s slight curve – changes eradicating the muscular tone that could support holding and playing the lyre; and it diminishes her teeth and the whites of her eyes, both indicating a corporeal understructure. A portrait, whether true to the author’s actual mien or an ‘improved’ version, ‘has no unproblematic referent; it cannot be explained as a correlative to the text of a subject’s life’ (Pointon 1993, 4). Indeed, the mercurial relationship between subject and representation emerges in Staël’s public declaration: ‘I am not Corinne, but if you like, I shall be’ (Wettlaufer 2011, 127). These statements emphasise the rich indeterminacy of the relation between portrait and subject.

Conclusion When novelists allude to art, artists and artistic styles, such a compression intensifies volatile energies which enhance readers’ imaginative possibilities, whether or not they are familiar with the history of art. In these relationships, each expressive mode draws on and rethinks the other and itself, leading to what I have called a ‘dynamic event’. There are many implications to this intermingling. For example, a novelist’s inclusion of techniques normally associated with the visual arts encourages us to reaffirm narrative and the genre of the novel itself as experimental and even as fundamentally interdisciplinary, since adding art and artists implies that words alone insufficiently embody characters and landscape. Inversely, these inclusions cultivate readers’ complex thought patterns, animating them to think in more than one medium and use multiple senses simultaneously. This underscores the nimble collaborations between artists and novelists and the ways they stimulate each other. Novelists, having wide reception, could render certain artists popular while also increasing print production of visual works. Another potential implication is that authors had pedagogical interests at stake in their desire to inspire readers to educate themselves – if they were not already – in art history, or more broadly, in developing cultural foundations. And for those without the means of studying art, novelists’ inveterate references to the same artists or styles would create a self-referential reality, when those who have never seen these images ‘know’ what the south of France looks like because they have read novels’ descriptions of the artistic works. Such intermediality unifies cultural and national references, while the shaping presence of art in novels multiplies the interpretive possibilities of both literature and the visual arts.

Notes   1. Heffernan defines ekphrasis as ‘the verbal representation of visual representation’ (1993, 3; emphasis original) but here I draw on John Hollander’s concept of ‘notional ekphrasis’ wherein authors imaginatively describe a fictional work of art (I would add landscape scenes) rather than an actual visual representation (1988, 209).

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  2. Mitchell records the competition between the sister arts; I emphasise the productive tension between them. On the relationships between the ‘sisters’, see Thora Brylowe 2019.   3. From this point, I place this phrase in quotation marks, but do not cite it again.   4. Unless otherwise noted, references to Waverley are to the 1814 edition (Garside 2011). Christopher J. Scalia admirably explores the relationship between narrative and visual techniques in Scott, who, he argues ‘evokes theories of painting [. . .] to elevate [. . .] the legitimacy and originality of the novel as a genre’ (2015, 1160).   5. Conversely, Alexander M. Ross diminishes the verbal-visual interaction in Waverley: ‘Such a sight, [. . .] with its ancient trees’ and ‘the shade on the avenue, helps Edward forget the contrasting misery and dirt of the hamlet he has left behind’ (1983, 99, 102).   6. De Bolla acknowledges that ‘more than one regime may operate at a given time’ and that ‘Such interactions often produce conflict’ (2003, 16–17).   7. In contrast, Garside earlier argues that Scott’s inclusion of Poussin could ‘express the artificiality of [Flora’s] historical ideology, rather than its disinterestedness’ (1977, 674).   8. For this quotation see the Centenary edition of 1870–1, ed. Andrew Hook.   9. In contrast, see George Romney’s sketch, Hercules and Omphale (1754 to 1802), which shows Hercules enervated by her seduction. Thanks to Michelle McCarthy-Behler, Reference Librarian at the Frick, for information on Romney’s sketch. 10. For the Multigraph authors, frontispieces ‘are a key site of interaction between text and images; moreover, they use graphic media to gesture both out, to the reader’s lifeworld, and in, to the book’s own pages’ (‘Frontispieces’ 2018, 2). 11. As the engraving reverses the image, Mme St Aubert would originally appear on the right and not the left of the image. 12. Joe Bray discusses how ‘The appearance of the portrait in the novel’ raises ‘troubling questions concerning subjectivity and meaning’ (2016, 183). For Elizabeth Fay, ‘portrait frontispieces in biographies’ offer ‘a complementary approach to understanding the biographical subject’ (Fay 2010, 45). 13. Alexandra K. Wettlaufer discusses portraiture in Staël’s and in Owenson’s novels in relation to issues of national identity (2011, 128). 14. While the desire for ‘prettification’ is generally blamed on women, the portrait genre itself was thought to ‘encourage[e] narcissism’ during the eighteenth century (Conway 2001, 20). 15. Staël disliked Vigée-Lebrun’s portrait and had wanted the beautiful Madame Récamier to pose in her place as Corinne; Vigée-Lebrun, however, insisted on painting the author, since she ‘longed to identify herself with [Staël’s] powers and fame’ (Sheriff 1996, 261, 259–60, 253). 16. Wettlaufer argues that although Romantic notions of genius were defined in ‘feminine’ terms – ‘sensitivity, emotion, intuition, imagination’ – a genius could only be male, thus rendering ‘the exceptional woman of genius [. . .] a man’ (2011, 15). Certainly, Staël was described in masculine terms. As Sheriff reports, ‘Her detractors found her plain at best, manlike at worst. To her enemies she was the monstrous modern hermaphrodite’ (1996, 244).

Bibliography Austen, Jane. 2006. Northanger Abbey. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Barchas, Janine. 2019. ‘Prefiguring Genre: Frontispiece Portraits from Gulliver’s Travels to Millenium Hall’. Studies in the Novel 51 (1) (Spring): 118–44. Bray, Joe. 2016. The Portrait in Fiction of the Romantic Period. New York and London: Routledge. Brewer, David A. 2005. The Afterlife of Character, 1726–1825. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Brylowe, Thora. 2019. Romantic Art in Practice: Cultural Work and the Sister Arts, 1760– 1820. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Conway, Alison. 2001. Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709–1791. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Crow, Thomas. 2011. ‘Classicism in Crisis: Gros to Delacroix’. In Nineteenth-Century Art: A Critical History, 4th ed., edited by Stephen F. Eisenman, 59–85. London: Thames and Hudson. De Bolla, Peter. 2003. The Education of the Eye, Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. Drucker, Johanna. 2014. Graphesis, Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Eisner, Eric. 2009. Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. Elliott, Kamilla. 2016. ‘The celebrity of anonymity and the anonymity of celebrity: picture identification and nineteenth-century British authorship’. Celebrity Studies 7 (4): 526–44. Fay, Elizabeth. 2010. Fashioning Faces: The Portraitive Mode in British Romanticism. Hanover and London: University of New Hampshire Press. Fisher, Judith Law. 2006. ‘“In the Present Famine of Anything Substantial”: Fraser’s “Portraits” and the Construction of Literary Celebrity; or, “Personality, Personality Is the Appetite of the Age”’. Victorian Periodicals Review 39 (2): 97–135. Fulford, Timothy. 1999. ‘Romanticizing the Empire: The Naval Heroes of Southey, Coleridge, Austen, and Marryat’. MLQ 60 (2): 161–96. Garside, Peter. 1977. ‘Waverley’s Pictures of the Past’. ELH 44 (4): 659–82. ———. 2011. ‘A Note on the Text’. In Waverley, by Sir Walter Scott. Edited by Peter Garside. London: Penguin Classics. Gibbes, Phebe. 2007. Hartly House, Calcutta. Oxford: Oxford UP. Gilpin, William. 1794. Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel, and on Sketching Landscape . . . London: Blamire. Grierson, Herbert, ed. 1932–37. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott. London: Constable. E-Text based on The Letters. Transcribed by Takero Sato. Entry number 2–279; 6 May 1811. 12 vols, vol 2, 1808–11. Hazlitt, William. 1909. ‘On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin’. Table-Talk: Essays on Men and Manners. London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne: Cassell and Company. Heffernan, James A. W. 1993. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Hollander, John. 1988. ‘The Poetics of Ekphrasis’. Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 4 (1): 209–19. Hook, Andrew. 1972. ‘Note on the Text’. In Waverley, by Sir Walter Scott. Edited by Andrew Hook. London: Penguin Classics. Khalip, Jacques and David Collings. 2012. ‘Introduction: The Present Time of “Live Ashes”’. In Romanticism and Disaster, edited by Khalip and Collings. Romantic Circles. (last accessed 14 May 2022). Lagerlöf, Margaretha Rossholm. 1990. Ideal Landscape: Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin, and Claude Lorrain. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. Marshall, David. 2005. The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Mole, Tom. 2007. Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Multigraph Collective. 2018. ‘Frontispieces’. In Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation. Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: May 2019. North, Julian. 2016. ‘Appearing Before the Public: Charlotte Brontë and the Author Portrait in the 1830s’. Brontë Studies 41 (1): 60–74. Pointon, Marcia. 1993. Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in EighteenthCentury England. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. Price, Uvedale. 1794. An Essay on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful for the Purpose of Improving Real Land. London: J. Robson. Radcliffe, Ann. 1803. The Mysteries of Udolpho. London: G. and J. Robinson. Rosenberg, Pierre and Keith Christiansen, eds. 2008. Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. Ross, Alexander M. 1983. ‘“Waverley” and the Picturesque’. In Scott and his Influence, edited by J. H. Alexander and David Hewitt. Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies. Scalia, Christopher J. 2015. ‘Walter Scott’s “everlasting said he’s and said she’s”: Dialogue, Painting, and the Status of the Novel’. ELH 82 (4): 1159–77. Scott, Walter. 1972. Waverley (1829). Edited by Andrew Hook. London: Penguin Classics. ———. 2011. Waverley (1814). Edited by Peter Garside. London: Penguin Classics. Shelley, Mary. 1996. The Last Man. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Sheriff, Mary D. 1996. The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Staël, Germaine. 1998. Corinne, or Italy. Translated by Sylvia Raphael. Oxford: Oxford World Classics. Stern, Daniel N. 2010. Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy, and Development. Oxford: Oxford UP. Stougaard-Nielsen, Jakob. 2007. ‘Frontispieces and Other Ruins: Portraits of the Author in Henry James’s New York Edition’. The Henry James Review 28 (2) (Spring): 140–58. Wettlaufer, Alexandra. 2011. Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800–1860. Columbus: Ohio State University.

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17 Mired in Print: Romantic Writers and Caricature Ian Haywood

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he aim of this chapter is to present a new perspective on the Romantic-era visual portrayal of writers and writing. Instead of focusing on the familiar genre of the individual literary portrait and its static iconography of authorship (the carefully placed pen and book, the inspired or ruminative expression, the classical or pastoral setting), this chapter turns to the rumbustious imagery of caricature to locate a more dynamic and collective picture of literary print culture in action. While Georgian caricature’s emphasis on the hostile material conditions of writing undermined the Romantic cult of genius and celebrity, it did so by illuminating the matrices and networks of print within which authors worked, flourished and failed.1 Caricature provides a ‘fuller picture’ of the complex cultural interactions between literary, commercial and political forces which remained wholly outside the visual conventions of portraiture.2 In this sense, visual satire opens a unique window onto the ‘actors, groupings, assemblies, and networks’ that Rita Felski defines as the determining material and ideological contexts for works of art (2015, 11). It could, of course, be argued with some justification that the whole point of a Romantic literary portrait was, in David Higgins’s words, to make the writer ‘stand out from the crowd’ and ‘obscure’ the troubling realities of the marketplace (2005, 5). Perhaps the most pressing case of this exceptionalism and idealisation is Keats, the quintessential poet’s poet who faced an uphill battle against slender means, hostile reviews and snobbish anti-cockneyism. Portraits of Keats show his visionary gaze eyeing up the prize of future fame and his body secluded from the worldly distractions he has transcended. Joseph Severn’s Keats Reading at Wentworth House (fig. 17.1) is a good example of what Sarah Wootton calls a ‘utopia of literary living’ (2006, 3). For Margaret D. Stetz, the ‘look of heightened spirituality, thought, and intensity’ is a guarantee that ‘that there was a creative spark firing the face from within’ (2007, 19). If the generic aim of a portrait was to flatter the sitter,3 the job of the literary portrait was to confirm the ideal of the autonomous genius (West 2004, 87–93). The image of the writer in both paintings and frontispieces to books signified unique ownership over the text, without any reference to the multiple agents (patron, publisher, editor, printer, artist, engraver, binder, bookseller) who actually produced the material object (Calé 2019, passim). For caricature, on the other hand, literary production was permanently and irrevocably enmeshed in the messy contingencies of socio-economics and political power.4 The pecuniary perils of authorship were indelibly fixed by Hogarth’s widely reproduced

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Figure 17.1  Edmund Dyer, after Joseph Severn, Keats at Wentworth Place, 1933. Courtesy of Keats House, City of London Corporation. K/PZ/05/037. ‘The Distrest Poet’ (1740), and this image of an impoverished, embattled and creatively sterile existence in a windy garret soon became an influential stereotype of artistic self-delusion and self-indulgence in the face of pitiless market forces (fig. 17.2). Later caricatures such as Thomas Rowlandson’s ‘Bookseller and Author’ (1784), Rudolph Ackermann’s ‘The Terror of Booksellers’ (1806) and George Cruikshank’s ‘Pursuits of Literature’ (1813) simply refreshed the message for the late Georgian period.5 It is no coincidence that Hogarth’s satirical anti-type of the genteel literary portrait appeared at the very point at which writing was becoming professionalised. The rapid rise of commercial print culture was seen by the political and literary establishment as a threat to cultural standards and social order. Conservative Augustan satirists who favoured the status quo responded with the invention of Grub Street, a mythologised ghetto of hack writers and professional scribblers who were lampooned and memorialised in Alexander Pope’s mock-epic The Dunciad (1728–43). Pope’s debunking of the mass quest for literary fame involved turning the competition for the role of Poet Laureate into an exuberant survey of the contemporary literary scene. To put his mob of pretenders to culture in their place, Pope immerses these ‘Smithfield Muses’ in the grubby materiality of London, including a mock-epic contest to see who can remain submerged in the filthy river Thames for the longest period. Pope configured the collective force of burgeoning print culture as a cultural catastrophe, a swarming contagion or infestation whose sheer numbers threatened an aesthetic breakdown and (by analogy) social and political anarchy (Rogers 2014). It is also worth noting that Pope received some of his own medicine. His Catholicism and very small stature were common satirical targets, and one caricature depicts him with a monkey’s body, leaning on a pile of books and holding a quill pen.6 This grotesque, monsterised parody of the literary portrait was another of his legacies.

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Figure 17.2  William Hogarth, ‘The Distrest Poet’, 1740. Wilhelm Busch Museum. By the late eighteenth century, Pope’s motif of scribbling-mania was adopted by satirists to repel the rising tide of Jacobinism (those radical ideas associated with the French Revolution). Loyalist propaganda characterised radical literary culture as a terroristic fifth column, a sinister infiltration of cultural institutions and genres which simultaneously brainwashed, beguiled and enchanted the public with its incendiary invectives and its siren utopian promises. It was therefore imperative to expose the culprits and bring their nefarious activities into the glare of publicity. Visual satire was an ideal medium for this purpose as its use of fantastical scenarios could drive home the idea of a benignly panoptic state and (hopefully) reassure the loyal public that no Jacobin revolutionary cell would remain undiscovered and unseen. James Gillray set the tone for the campaign with ‘Smelling Out a Rat’ (1790), a dramatic warning to all seditious scribblers that the eye (or in this case the nose) of the state was aware of their furtive creativity (fig. 17.3). This print can be regarded, like Hogarth’s ‘distressed’ poet, as another influential travesty of the literary portrait, though in this case the emphasis is on politics and not poverty. The enormous apparition of Edmund Burke catches the startled Dissenting author, Richard Price, in the act of penning a seditious pamphlet like the one which impelled Burke to compose his famous rebuttal, Reflections on the Revolution in France. The image debunks the autonomy of writing by staging a spectacular encounter between politics and literature. A loyalist interpretation of this dramatic invasion of privacy, which would normally indicate authoritarianism, is that extreme measures were required to save the nation (Barrell 2006, Johnston 2013), but it is typical of Gillray that he also expresses an unease about intrusive state power by giving Burke rather than Price grotesque features. What is not in doubt is the licence of the caricaturist to disrupt and disturb the sacrosanct space of authorship, the hallowed ground inside the gilded frame of the literary portrait.

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Figure 17.3  James Gillray, ‘Smelling Out a Rat: -or- the atheistical-revolutionist disturbed in his midnight “calculations”’. Published by Hannah Humphrey, 3 December 1790. Wilhelm Busch Museum.

Having thrown down the gauntlet to radical writers at the beginning of the highly polarised pamphlet wars of the 1790s, Gillray bookended the decade with his much more elaborate ensemble piece, ‘New Morality’ (1798; fig. 17.4). The print appeared as a fold-out frontispiece in the first issue of the Anti-Jacobin Review (1798–1821), an important, government-backed periodical whose mission was to root out and expose all forms of radical writing (Gilmartin 2007, Ch. 1 and 3; Hill 1965, 56–72, 81–6). The caricature was an illustration of a long, satirical poem from the final issue of the precursor title, the Anti-Jacobin (2: 623–40), which is excerpted beneath the image.7 The poem catalogued the prolific ‘specious bastard brood’ (l.83) of writers and oppositional political figures who were in treasonable cahoots in the loyalist imagination. Gillray added an exuberant subtitle and clearly relished the epic sweep of the offensive. For Richard Cronin, the print documents ‘almost the whole end-of-century world of letters [. . .] It is a magnificently undiscriminating print, joining together the most unlikely associates, and insisting by the ubiquitous liberty caps that all belong to a single party, all are Jacobins’ (2000, 63). On first impression, this seems an accurate assessment, and many of the original reader-viewers may have reacted similarly, delighting in the sheer brio of the scene and Gillray’s ‘evident fascination with the anarchic tumult of the procession’ (Cronin 2000, 63). However, a closer inspection reveals that the image is less ‘undiscriminating’ than might appear. The fantasy premiss of the poem and the print is that the British Jacobins are paying homage to Louis Marie Larevellière-Lépeaux, one of the three Directors of

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Figure 17.4  James Gillray, ‘New Morality, -or- the promis’d Installment of the High-Priest of the Theophilanthropes, with the Homage of Leviathan and his Suite’. First published in the Anti-Jacobin Review, 1 August 1798. Wilhelm Busch Museum.

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the French government. The carnival of disloyal devotees emerges from a boiling, cauldron-like English Channel to pay their respects at the altar of this infidel ‘high priest’ who favoured the deistical philosophy known as theophilanthropy. Here was Edmund Burke’s ‘atheistical fanaticism’ in all its resplendent glory (1969, 292). But the grim and gory destination of this pilgrimage is less significant than the actual sequence and disposition of the procession. The column is headed by the impish newsboys of ‘Sedition’s evening host’, the liberal daily newspapers such as the Morning Chronicle and Morning Post, a clear indication of the importance of print culture in spreading the radical gospel. Romantic authors, notably Coleridge, Southey and Lamb, only appear in the second wave, clustered around the giant ‘Cornucopia of Ignorance’ which spews out phenomenal quantities of radical publications. Behind this literary group is the ‘leviathan’ of political opposition, and in the rear the cheering mob of supporters. This arrangement does indeed confirm that ‘all are Jacobins’, but it is also a cartography of connectedness, interdependency and flows of cultural capital. What unites this army is not simply the Jacobin creed but the material mobilisation of print. Individual authors are subservient to prodigious textual productiveness, the most feared aspect of radical print culture, and the most difficult to snuff out (Haywood 2004, Ch. 1–3). Indeed, many authors are only represented by their works, and though this is a convenient, ‘metonymic’ shorthand in a crowded canvas,8 and though few, if any, radical authors at this time had strong visual identities worth mocking, Gillray reverses the power relations between writer and text. The procession is literally a paper trail connecting all its participants. The key marker or credential of these combatants is to brandish or clutch a text, a potent gesture of defiance, agitation and dissemination which links nearly all the cast including the grim statue of Sensibility, Lépeaux himself, the garish newsboys, the kneeling Southey and Coleridge (who have asses’ heads), John Thelwall astride the Leviathan, and the bevvy of Whig parliamentarians in the billowing brine. Though seen through the distorting, comic lens of caricature, Gillray captures brilliantly the point at which texts are, in Felski’s word, ‘enlisted’ in a cause (2015, 11). Unlike the hallowed stationery of the literary portrait, the texts in Gillray’s fantasia are dynamic, activated and engaged, thrust into the conflictual, swirling limelight of a highly politicised public sphere. It is also significant in this respect that the final satirical lunge of the print is the mobilisation of the original poem in the form of an excerpt beneath the title. This technique of textual animation is a far cry from the high-Romantic, privatised notion of literature in which a text is pictured as a transparent medium of intimate communication between writer and reader. Ironically, Gillray’s materialist aesthetics, in which all texts participate in social and political controversies, were actually closer to the ideals of radical print culture than the Romantic retreat into (illusory) bourgeois individualism (Mee 2016, Ch. 1–3). In addition to its careful choreography, the granular detail of the print also challenges Cronin’s idea that Gillray was ‘undiscriminating’ or scattergun. The selection of Jacobin authors in the original poem was based on actual reviews in the Anti-Jacobin, and this in turn shows that the periodical’s producers had done their homework. As the poem reveals, this thorough research was required in order to immunise the reader against the ‘subtlest poison’ of the Jacobin infiltration of the ‘Arts’, a ‘treacherous current’ which ‘works its noiseless way’ into ‘our own Hearts’ (ll. 367, 376, 450). By drawing on this background, Gillray was able to augment the satirical naming-and-shaming

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of the poem with a profusion of titles and textual references. For Romantic scholars today, the caricature has genuine documentary value, recording which texts were regarded as dangerous and worthy of exposure. The range and variety of titles also anticipates the modern diversification of the Romantic canon. Though Gillray places the ‘wandering bards’ near the front of the procession, and to this extent recognises their special status, they are nearly swept aside by the avalanche of titles spilling from the cornucopia. The satirical intention was no doubt to present Southey and Coleridge as merely elevated hacks (or dunces in Popean parlance), but the inundation motif is a salutary reminder that poetry was, in Felski’s words, ‘embattled, embroiled, and embedded’ within the wider literary matrix of newspapers, periodicals, novels, pamphlets and polemics (2015, 11). Even if we do want to zero in on this core group of Romantic luminaries, there are some interesting surprises. The absence of Wordsworth is striking to modern eyes, especially in light of the fact that Lyrical Ballads was published only two months later, but this is an accurate reflection of his obscurity at this time, at least so far as the reading public was concerned.9 Southey, on the other hand, was already a prominent target of anti-Jacobin satire due to his outspoken protest poems which often first appeared in liberal newspapers and depicted, in highly sentimental language, the downtrodden victims of a war-torn Britain (Stabler 1998). In response to Southey’s ‘The Soldier’s Wife’ and ‘The Widow’, the Anti-Jacobin published a skit called ‘The Friend of Humanity and the Knife Grinder, In Imitation of Southey’s Sapphics’ (November 1797). One month later, Gillray illustrated this parody in a separately issued caricature bearing the same title.10 The poem and print mock both the naïvety of radical compassion for the undeserving poor and the stylistic pretentiousness of Southey’s metrical forms which he declared as ‘Dactylic’ for ‘The Soldier’s Wife’ and ‘Sapphic’ for ‘The Widow’. In ‘New Morality’, Gillray assumed that the viewer knew and appreciated this satirical background as he not only tagged ‘Sapphics’ Southey but added ‘Dactylics’ Coleridge for his role in providing the third stanza of ‘The Soldier’s Wife’ (Southey 1797, 81–3). This scrupulous level of detail about (seditious) poetic collaboration also extended to the other two ‘bards’ of this cabal, ‘Lamb and Co’. Gillray took (or was advised to take) this bare reference in the poem to refer to Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd’s collection of poems, Blank Verse (1798), represented in the print by two squatting frogs reading Verse by Todd & Frog. This might seem a good example of ‘joining together the most unlikely associates’ in Cronin’s evaluation, but in fact Lloyd, though forgotten today, was a close colleague of both Lamb and Coleridge at this time, and this earned him his place in the procession (Pollin 1973; Magnusson 1998, 56–8; Stillinger 1994, 43). His inclusion in Gillray’s rogues’ gallery is a reminder that the landmark Lyrical Ballads emerged from a dynamic, diffuse and contested field of poetic partnerships and print activism. Caricature was the only visual genre which could bring to life this vigorous and congested world of culture and politics.11 The close reading of ‘New Morality’ has been a salutary reminder that some of our most cherished orthodoxies about the political and cultural agency of canonised Romantic authors may need revising. From the caricature perspective, it is Southey who emerges head and shoulders above his peers, firstly for his outspoken Jacobinism and secondly, and ironically, for his renunciation of that same radical past. After the revolution debate of the 1790s, the next time that Romantic authors stepped prominently onto the satirical stage was the controversy over the new Poet Laureate. When

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the now totally forgotten Henry Pye died in August 1813, the appointment of a successor placed the vexed relationship between political patronage and the profession of letters firmly in the public eye. Southey’s candidacy was a gift for the satirists as it seemed to be a spectacular case of opportunism at the best and ideological ‘apostasy’ at the worst. Unlike the 1790s, the fiercest criticism came from radicals like Hazlitt who accused Southey of a shameful, mercenary volte-face. The lamentable transformation from ‘frantic demagogue’ to ‘servile court-fool’ made Southey once again a satirical celebrity (Hazlitt 1817). Byron’s rollicking Vision of Judgement (1822) is the most celebrated literary example of this renewed offensive, but what is less well known is that Southey also suffered the humiliation of being caricatured in the radical press, the same medium from which he first emerged. As we shall see, George Cruikshank and William Hone’s A New Vision (1821) reworked ‘New Morality’ for the highly charged political atmosphere of popular protest sparked by the Peterloo massacre of August 1819 and reignited the following year by George IV’s attempt to divorce his wife, Queen Caroline. The Poet Laureateship was an easy target, as its reputation had never recovered from Pope’s mauling. Indeed, when Walter Scott declined the post in favour of Southey, he remarked that ‘the office is a ridiculous one somehow or other – . . . I should make a bad courtier and an ode-maker is described by Pope as a poet out of his way or out of his senses’ (as cited in Gamer 2016, 106). Within weeks of the vacancy’s announcement, the satirical magazine the Scourge published a pull-out caricature entitled ‘Rival Candidates for the Vacant Bays’ (1 December 1813; fig. 17.5). Interestingly, Southey is not included in the procession of suitors as he was still awaiting confirmation of his eligibility, but the print is important in preparing the satirical ground for his subsequent investiture. The similarities between this cartoon and ‘New Morality’ are striking. Once again, we see an imaginary procession of scribblers proffering their literary wares to their patrons. In this case, the supplicants move from right to left and present their works to a bibulous, mock-epic court comprising the Prince Regent (as Apollo), the Duke of Norfolk (as Bacchus) and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (as Silenus). The caricature mockery of political patronage was not new, but this was the first time that Romantic writers occupied the hapless role of servile suitors. Like ‘New Morality’, authors are identified by textual and verbal signifiers rather than visual celebrity. It is not obvious on first view that Byron, Scott and Tom Moore feature prominently in the print, but this is another indication that the visual fame of writers was still emergent (Mole 2007, Ch. 5; North 2010). Although he is first in line, Byron is only identifiable by the large, florid volume of his ‘Works’ which he carries on his shoulder and which obscures his face, perhaps an intentional deflation of the domineering literary ego which made Childe Harold such a sensation. It is also witheringly appropriate that Byron, who had himself satirised the profession of letters in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), utters a self-mocking pun: ‘Far far from me be such temptation put, / To take a butt of Sack to make myself a butt’. Although the awarding of a butt or barrel of ‘sack’ (wine or sherry) to the Poet Laureate had been discontinued, its satirical utility was too good to abandon, and it soon became a trademark of Southey’s caricature celebrity. Hovering above Byron is an even more apposite ‘butt’ of bibulous humour, Tom Moore. Moore was famous for his Irish anacreontics or drinking songs, and unlike Byron his visage is positively blooming at the prospect of being chosen: ‘My gracious

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Figure 17.5  ‘Rival Candidates for the Vacant Bays’. Published in the Scourge, 1 December 1813. Wilhelm Busch Museum.

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R—g—nt would you wish for More?’ Behind Moore is the unmistakeable figure of ‘Monk’ Lewis, brandishing Tales of Wonder (which Gillray had already caricatured in 1801) and carrying Castle Spectre and The Monk in his hood. The joke is that, just like his notorious anti-hero, Lewis has sold his soul to write (in his own words) ‘for pelf’. Lewis is all but upstaged by the ludicrously ostentatious Scott, resplendent in golden chain-armour and helmet, a skit on the popularity of his medieval and antiquarian romances which, it is implied, he has dashed off for profit.12 He boasts that Rokeby, the book he thrusts forward, has earned him £6,000 for a ‘six weeks scrawl’. The accusation of elevated hackery is reinforced by another visual pun: the huge quill in Scott’s belt is evidence that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword. A further clutch of pens spouting from his helmet echo the mock-halo of the Prince Regent. The carnival of Regency dunces is completed by a sprinkling of now forgotten figures including the poet Lumley Skeffington (immediately behind Byron), the newspaper editor Henry Bate Dudley, and at the rear, the composer Thomas Busby who likens himself to Colley Cibber, hero of the Dunciad. Though Southey is absent from the scene, the print set the stage for his mock-triumphal coronation. The cluttered parade debunked the idea of authorial self-sufficiency by turning the country’s most high-profile act of cultural patronage into a literary hiring fair. What is less clear is which ideology of authorship was being proposed. The satirical logic of the caricatures was typically ambiguous: the Popean legacy was a conservative, elitist position in which an independent income guarded the writer against both political and commercial dependency; on the other hand, professionalism was a credible concept so long as the illusory idea of transcendence was jettisoned. Southey’s appointment as Poet Laureate showcased the reputational perils of patronage and exposed the embarrassing realities of making a living out of writing. The glare of publicity made him the scapegoat for an unstable, socialised definition of writing which the orthodoxy of creative autonomy and (in Michael Gamer’s phrase) ‘artistic purity’ obscured and evaded (2016, 112). As Matthew Sangster has shown, Southey mobilised all his contacts and networks to win the ‘vacant bays’, but there was no place for this kind of literary politicking in available concepts of authorship (2021, 129). Southey’s ‘apostasy’ was an over-determined mythologisation of the tension between individualist and collectivist notions of cultural production. In the caricature record, Southey had simply exchanged one false god for another, Lépeaux for the Regent. He was still an ‘ass’ who was damned by his publications. When his banned Jacobin text Wat Tyler was rediscovered and pirated in 1817, his past came back to haunt him (Haywood 2004, 91–2). Ironically, his attempt to stop publication failed on the grounds that subversive literature had no legal protection. To his critics, this was poetic justice. In Charles Williams’s print, ‘A Poet Mounted on the Court Pegasus’, published appropriately on April Fool’s Day 1817, Southey is presented as a drunken ‘court fool’ who straddles the iconic sack butt, a sorry substitute for Hercules’ fabled Pegasus, the divine reward for choosing virtue over vice (fig. 17.6). The implication is that Southey’s thick skin makes him oblivious to his fall from grace (as Pope puts it, ‘No creature smarts so little as a fool’),13 but the evidence of his catastrophic moral and artistic collapse is strewn all around him. The scene breaks all the rules of the conventional literary portrait. Instead of poise, composure, dignity and an inspired physiognomy, this extrovert Southey resembles the inebriated patrons of ‘Candidates for the Vacant Bays’ rolled into one: all is disorder, profligacy, incontinence and boisterous buffoonery.

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Figure 17.6  Charles Williams, ‘A Poet Mounted on the Court Pegasus’. Published by John Johnston, 1 April 1817. © The Trustees of the British Museum. The overflowing cornucopia of ‘New Morality’ is revived in the leaking butt which spills out a lava of sycophantic verse. The suggestion of urination or verbal diarrhoea (an anticipation of a slightly later slang use of ‘butt’ to mean the backside) derives from the anatomical innuendo of Southey’s spreadeagled posture: not only has he abandoned his dignity, he is also unmanned, his genitalia replaced by a carefully placed money bag, a motif Gillray had used to devastating effect on William Pitt in the wonderful ‘Midas’ (1797). Southey’s textual potency is therefore a meretricious over-generation of formula-driven commodities: scribbling not scribing, excretion not creation. Southey’s career has become a textual flurry and slurry, a drudge’s sludge. The stage devil poking out from behind the gushing barrel brandishes the irrepressible Wat Tyler, a reminder to the viewer that the devil does indeed have the best lines, duly excerpted beneath the title like a mock epitaph. The curtained backdrop adds the finishing touches to this farce: it partially conceals an empty throne, a signifier of vacuous patronage; it parodies a stilted convention of the mainstream portrait; and it puns on the idea that this monumental embarrassment spells the colloquial curtains for Southey’s tattered credibility. Only three years later, however, the ‘old formalities’ of Southey’s public office dragged him into the satirical limelight once again.14 Instead of merely penning annual tributes such as the obsequious ‘Birthday Ode’ depicted in the Williams print, the death of George III in 1820 required Southey to pull out all the patriotic stops. The result was the Vision of Judgement (1821), a threnody which imagined the deceased king’s apotheosis and entry into heaven. The preface to the poem attacked Bryon

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and the ‘Satanic School’ (Southey 1821, xxi), so it is hardly surprising that the exiled Byron retaliated the following year with a delightful parody of the same title. These events are a familiar part of Romantic literary history, but the special value of caricature is that it brings two new perspectives to bear on the episode. The first is the publication of an earlier parody in William Hone and George Cruikshank’s bestselling mock-newspaper, A Slap at Slop (1821). Unlike Byron’s text, which had a very small circulation in John Hunt’s short-lived periodical the Liberal, Hone and Cruikshank’s ‘A New Vision!’ reached a much wider readership, and in this sense, it was able to make more of an impact. The second new angle on the Southey-Byron spat is Charles Williams’s ‘A Noble Poet – Scratching up His Ideas’ (1823), a caricature which debunked Byron’s celebrity and recast him in the role of the distressed poet, a victim of writer’s block and pecuniary embarrassment. Hone and Cruikshank re-energised Southey’s satirical fame by relocating him within the mise en page of a popular satirical periodical where he was hemmed in by oppositional discourses and unable (pun intended) to turn over a new leaf. A Slap at Slop belonged to a phenomenally successful series of satires which Hone and Cruikshank produced in the wake of the Peterloo massacre. Perceiving a gap in the market, they unleashed a powerful new genre: the illustrated satirical pamphlet. For just a shilling – the same price as a single, uncoloured caricature print – the middleclass public could purchase a ferociously satirical text accompanied by around a dozen finely crafted woodcut illustrations. The new formula was a runaway success. Beginning with The Political House that Jack Built (1819), a string of titles lambasted the government’s draconian repression of political and civil liberties. The Queen Caroline affair was a satirical gift which boosted sales even further.15 By 1821, the pressure of radical grievances was so intense that Hone and Cruikshank expanded the satirical pamphlet format into the more compendious broadsheet newspaper. A Slap at Slop’s four pages could encompass a wide range of causes and a variety of caricature vignettes of different sizes and complexity. When Southey’s risible tribute to George IV was published, the paper’s response was a spirited parody of the text, accompanied by a clever reworking of Williams’s print (fig. 17.7). Instead of trying to directly illustrate the text, which inverts ‘New Morality’ by cataloguing dozens of establishment villains who are obstructing political reform, Cruikshank’s wood-engraved ‘A New Vision!’ shows Southey and his master George IV as a pair of street performers. Drawing on a well-established verbal pun on the word ‘sackbut’, which was an early version of the trombone, Cruikshank converts the iconic Laureate wine cask into a barrel organ which churns out Southey’s obsequious melodies. Dressed like a court jester with a Jacobin-cockaded birretta, Southey sings his Apollo’s praises while his flowing verses are caught by an upturned crown serving as a chamber pot. This scatological motif is echoed on the other side of the scene as the literally elevated king prances on the peg leg of a figure whose head and shoulders are immersed in a large slop pail. This is most likely John Sewell, President of the secretive Constitutional Association or ‘Bridge Street Gang’, which launched legally dubious prosecutions against radical authors (Haywood 2013, Ch. 6), but there is also a secondary intimation of Hone and Cruikshank’s arch enemy ‘Dr. Slop’ or John Stoddart, editor of the ultra-loyalist New Times which A Slap at Slop was designed to parody. The Laureate duo are unaware that their ‘chamber’ music is now being performed for a radical audience, though perhaps Southey’s rather glum expression hints at the

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Figure 17.7  William Hone and George Cruikshank, ‘A New Vision!’ From A Slap at Slop, August 1821. Wilhelm Busch Museum.

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extent of his subservience. Unlike his carefree cocksureness in Williams’s print, he is not even allowed to revel in his turncoat tergiversations. The glory days of Carmen Triumphale are well and truly past, and the court minstrel must play the party tune. Hone and Cruikshank’s ‘new vision’ of Southey marked the most extreme satirical deformation and defamation of the conventional literary portrait. Unlike previous caricatures which reframed the author in a satirical landscape, A Slap at Slop abolished the unitary frame altogether and embedded the author’s image in a matrix of periodical print genres including adverts, tidbits, trivia, fillers and light verse. This carnivalesque vaudeville of complaints and causes resembles a radical music hall in which Southey keeps some distinctively zany and dubious company, including a royal cuckoo clock, an ad for A Vicious Want of Judgement by the ‘Royal Order of Turncoats’, a loyalist torture chamber run by the Bridge Street Gang, and a shackled ‘free-born’ Englishman. Though seen through a satirical lens, this panoply of politics and print illuminates the circuits of influence, commerce and power which an author’s professional existence relied upon. The imbroglio of the Vision of Judgement was the climactic moment in Southey’s satirical career. The irony of being hoisted with his own petard was plain for all to see: in the court of satirical opinion, his ‘vision’ of royal apotheosis was ‘judged’ to be his nemesis. But as a coda to this episode, we need to recognise that Byron was not allowed to escape scot-free either, at least in the caricature world. Though he was ensconced in exotic Italy, the formidable tentacles of visual satire entwined his most private creative space: his study. In Charles Williams’s ‘A Noble Poet Scratching up His Ideas’ (1823), a lightly caricatured Byron suffers from the dreaded malaise of an empty head (fig. 17.8). Despite the allure of the open casement, which looks out onto the beautiful Venetian vista of St Mark’s Square and the Bridge of Sighs (though Byron was actually in Genoa, the point is that he was living in luxurious exile), Byron appears frustrated at his lack of inspiration. The scene evokes Hogarth’s impecunious scribbler, including classic details such as the disjecta membra of strewn manuscripts and the encroaching creditor who asks Byron’s servant ‘Is his lordship writing that note for me?’ The reply crystallises the satirical interchangeability of literary and monetary value: ‘No Sir he is writing Poetry.’ ‘How do you know that?’ ‘Because he is scratching his head.’ Other details add to Byron’s woes. He requires help from a sympathetic devil perched on his shoulder, and directly above his head there is a picture of Cain killing Abel, an allusion to his monodrama Cain (1821), but also another pun: the title ‘End of Abel’ implies the poet is no longer ‘able’ to write, even though he has thrown his lot in with Romantic satanism and, unlike the hapless Abel, escaped the wrath of the law in his home country for his seditious writings. The contrast with the gushing, incontinent poetics of the Laureate Southey, who sold his soul to an antithetical master, is striking. It seems that Byron is paying a high price for his Vision of Judgement, represented in the print – inaccurately but emphatically – by a discreet volume on the floor, situated beneath a bound copy of the Liberal, the periodical in which Byron’s satire was first published. Though the Hunts’ periodical failed after only four numbers (Higgins 2005, 123–7), Byron’s pen is poised over a partially ‘scratched’ page headed ‘Il Liberale’, as if he has erroneously abandoned creative literature for radical journalism. Yet a more positive interpretation of this motif of suspended composition is possible. We could see this halted moment as the pivot for Byron’s plunge into militant

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Figure 17.8  Charles Williams, ‘A Noble Poet Scratching up His Ideas’. Published by John Johnston, 1 January 1823. © The Trustees of the British Museum. activism that would indeed see his books ‘end’ one year later in the cause of European nationalist struggles. If this is the fate he is pondering as he gazes dreamily out of the window, the tableau still functions as a salutary pastiche of the depoliticised aesthetics of the literary portrait. Byron is shown in the active pose of inscribing himself into political history, a visual scenario that could only be realised in caricature where texts are presented as dynamic agents of change rather than monumental, retrospective and inert signifiers of high culture.16 The final episode to consider in the satirical chronicle of Romantic authorship also links back indirectly to Southey’s controversial appointment to official national poet. When Walter Scott declined the post in 1813, he stood on the brink of a major shift in his career from renowned poet to the anonymous author of Waverley (1814), the first of a groundbreaking series of historical novels. Given this unusual move from fame to anonymity, it took some years before he resurfaced in the caricature record. A visit to Ireland in July 1825 was the trigger for the first of two satirical depictions of Scott’s career by Robert Cruikshank. Though the Waverley novels were still officially

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anonymous, and this was not a reading tour, Scott was widely known as the author and his literary celebrity was met with great acclaim. Cruikshank’s prints examine this fame with characteristic satirical scepticism. ‘The Great Unknown Lately Discovered in Ireland’ (1825) presents Scott as a huge, totemic curiosity (fig. 17.9). Instead of the antiquarian suit of armour he wore in ‘Rival Candidates for the Vacant Bays’, Scott now sports full Highland dress in his new role as the personification of Romantic Scotland. This is a source of amusement for the bemused lower-class Irish onlookers who mutter disapprovingly, ‘it would be but dacent if he put on a pair of breeches’. The innuendo is aimed at Scott’s larger-than-life adoption of a nostalgic, synthetic Scottish identity which is the source of his literary potency, as evidenced by the huge column of Waverley novels balanced on his head (the absence of ‘breeches’ may also allude to Scott’s Jacobite, not Jacobin, sans-culottism). Scott’s astonishing productivity has made him a formidable literary giant, but the satirical logic implies that the creative impulse was less important than commercial success. To rub this point in, his son Walter, a military officer who appears puny beneath the sublime tower of books, complains that his father ‘should have made a poet of me instead of a souldier’. Scott replies, with all the confidence of a seasoned campaigner, that together they will dash off a poem on ‘the auld Celtic island’. Although the print shows Scott as a consummate professional author in charge of his destiny, he is simply too ‘great’ for comfort. In other caricatures, the burden of literary cargo on his head would simply crush him,17 but Scott stands erect like a self-fashioned monument: implacable, expressionless, stolid, unembarrassed, untouchable – the polar opposite of the clownish Southey, even though they have both compromised their integrity. Clearly, Scott was wise to reject the greasy pole of state patronage. As his ‘Celtic’ admirer observes, ‘what a power of books he has’. ‘The Great Unknown Discovered in Ireland’ was perhaps as close as caricature could come to fashioning a tribute to the ‘egotistical sublime’ of masculine literary authority. The key motif is the stately pile of books balanced on Scott’s head: this is a litter not litter, a corpus rather than chaos, order not ordure. Scott is self-composed, the proud bearer of an outlandishly and ostentatiously self-aggrandising canon. But in the satirical universe it is only a matter of time, we can surmise, before that monolithic achievement will come crashing down, and the more familiar caricature landscape of precarious, agitated print culture will resume its ascendancy. Hence only two years later, in 1827, Robert Cruikshank produced a sequel print in which Scott is now beleaguered by unruly and disruptive books which he struggles to control. ‘The Great Unknown and the Great Captain Cutting Up Napoleon the Great’ (fig. 17.10) brings us back full circle to Jacobinism, as the problematic text is not a Waverley novel but Scott’s multivolume Life of Napoleon Bonaparte. The schism in this scene is caused by the return of the repressed, the fear of revolution which had haunted British culture since the 1790s. The figure opposing Scott is Napoleon’s adversary, the Duke of Wellington, who protests that Scott’s biography is upstaging him. He demands that Scott censor his text: ‘cut every paragraph out that tends to exalt the character of Bonaparte & lower mine in the estimation of the Public’. Scott is compliant, replying ‘I’ll cut him up and dissect him so that neither you nor the devil himself would ken him again’, and duly wields his ‘pruning knife’, filling up a basket of ‘Errata’ with discarded pages. The confrontation is a vivid and sprightly reworking of the perils of political influence which so beset Southey. As in Gillray’s ‘New Morality’, both men are frantically wielding texts, but they clutch

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Figure 17.9  Robert Cruikshank, ‘The Great Unknown Discovered in Ireland’. Published by John Fairburn, July 1825. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Figure 17.10  Robert Cruikshank, ‘The Great Unknown and the Great Captain Cutting Up Napoleon the Great’. Published by John Fairburn, July 1827. © The Trustees of the British Museum.



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torn and tattered pages instead of whole works. The issue is now brands not firebrands, reputation not revolution, sales not sedition. The teeming textuality of Cruikshank’s print is yet another ironic tribute to Scott’s productivity, but there is no longer the pretence of dignity and respectability. Scott’s study is transformed into a workshop of literary fabrication and his desk is an operating table for hackery. The inert quill pen signifies the switch from composition to decomposition and imposture, and the cleft manuscript in Scott’s hand contrasts with the neatly arranged volumes of the biography on the desk. Significantly, this orderly sequence of books no longer dominates the scene as it did in The Great Unknown. The implication of Scott’s industrious mutilation of literature is that the whole of his career is about to be re-edited and compromised as the impressive jumble of books on the shelves meet the same fate as his Napoleon. The literary waste on the floor is no longer a symbol of ‘distressed’, misguided or overreaching creativity but a signifier of wilful contempt for aesthetic and professional standards: the reduction of ‘prose’ to ‘brose’ or uncooked porridge. The emphasis has shifted entirely to the material processes of publication, the infrastructure that is invisible in the literary portrait. In the spirit of satirical punning, it is tempting to regard this image as bookending the caricature narrative of Romantic authorship. But there is one further in-joke to consider. The last laugh lies with the print’s publisher, John Fairburn. On the far right of the scene, beneath Wellington’s outstretched arm which holds up the ripped title page of Scott’s biography, there is an engraved panel announcing that ‘The only correct and impartial Life of Napoleon written by W. H. Ireland is published by John Fairburn.’ This commercial rival to Scott’s biography appeared in instalments from 1823 onwards and then in four volumes, the first three of which were published by Fairburn. According to the British Museum, this detail makes the print a simple case of self-promotion, but this assessment misses several ironic subtexts.18 The author of the Fairburn biography was no other than the notorious ex-Shakespeare forger William Henry Ireland, so the insinuation is that Scott the fabricator has been upstaged by a superior talent in this regard (Worrall 2007, 125; Lynch 2018). Moreover, the Fairburn edition has the added attraction of ‘beautiful engravings’, but what is not declared, almost certainly intentionally, is that the illustrations were the work of George Cruikshank. In other words, Fairburn celebrates the new era of illustrated literature which overlapped with caricature’s dominance over the representation of contemporary experience (Haywood et al. 2019), and which provided a dual career for artists like the Cruikshanks, the jewels in Fairburn’s crown. The real Scott took this message to heart, and, determined not to be outflanked, he authorised a full, ‘landmark’ illustrated edition of the Waverley novels which commenced in 1829 (Hill 2016, 75). So perhaps the sceptical caricature narrative of Romantic authorship had a happy ending after all.19

Notes   1.   2.   3.   4.

For a very useful recent discussion of these issues, see Sangster (2021, 13–49). The phrase ‘fuller picture’ is used by McCreery (2004, 6). See Hazlitt (1876); Mulvihill (1998). Marcia Pointon notes that ‘portraiture was intimately linked with caricature through its audiences and through the conceptual practices that placed portraiture at the heart of political discourse’ (1993, 96).

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  5.   6.   7.   8.

British Museum Satires Undescribed, 6722, 12139–40. British Museum Satires 1812. This ‘seminal’ satire was written by George Canning (Dyer 1997, 46). Sangster argues that ‘Books existed in tight metonymic relationships with their authors’ in the Romantic period (2021, 14).   9. Although Wordsworth was being spied on in 1798, this was not due to his published work but his associations with Coleridge, Thelwall and other West Country radicals during his residence at Alfoxden. See Roe (2018, Ch. 5). 10. British Museum Satires 9045. 11. There is insufficient space here to discuss the spectrum of texts which Gillray includes, but they range from women writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft to the popular songster Captain Morris. Lesser-known items include Mary Robinson’s Walsingham (1797), Charlotte Smith’s Young Philosopher (1798), Thomas Holcroft’s Knave or Not (1798) and Thomas Paine’s extremely rare Defence of the 18 Fructidor (1797). 12. Scott’s alleged venality was also attacked in Charles Williams’s compendious Genius of the Times (1812), British Museum Satires 11941. 13. Pope (1870, 289). 14. Southey used this phrase when he tried, unsuccessfully, to negotiate more creative freedom for the Poet Laureate role. See Gamer (2016, 108). 15. See my series of posts on Queen Caroline for the ‘Romantic Illustration Network’; for example: (last accessed 6 May 2022). 16. There was another spate of caricatures of Byron in the immediate aftermath of his death, when fake memoirs were in circulation. See, for example, Charles Williams’s series Anecdotes of Byron (1825), British Museum Satires 14826, 14827. For a discussion of this rash of prints, see Mole (2007, 89–93). I have not considered them as they do not show Byron as a writer. 17. See, for example, Charles Williams, The End of Parliament (1807), British Museum Satires 10728. 18. See the second Curator’s comments on the print, online British Museum Collection: (last accessed 18 March 2021). 19. I am aware that there is an absence of satirical portraits of women writers in my discussion, which can be partly explained by the backlash against women intellectuals in the wake of the revolutionary 1790s (Mellor 2013). At too late a stage to include in the chapter, I discovered a caricature of the playwright Elizabeth Inchbald in which she is shown as a ‘distressed’ drunken hack: see (last accessed 6 May 2022). My thanks to Laura Engel for alerting me to this.

Bibliography Barrell, John. 2006. The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s. Oxford: Oxford UP. Burke, Edmund. [1790] 1969. Reflections on the Revolution in France. London: Penguin. Calé, Luisa. 2019. ‘Frontispieces’. In Book Parts, edited by Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth. Oxford: Oxford UP. Cronin, Richard. 2000. The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth. Houndmills: Macmillan. Dyer, Gary. 1997. British Satire and the Politics of Style 1789–1832. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

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Gamer, Michael. 2016. ‘1813: The Year of the Laureate’. In The Regency Revisited, edited by Tim Fulford and Michael E. Sinatra. Houndmills: Palgrave. Gilmartin, Kevin. 2007. Writing Against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790– 1832. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Haywood, Ian. 2004. The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People 1790–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ———. 2013. Romanticism and Caricature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Haywood, Ian, Susan Matthews and Mary L. Shannon, eds. 2019. Romanticism and Illustration. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Hazlitt, William. 1817. ‘Review of Southey’s Wat Tyler’. Examiner, 9 March 1817. ———. 1876. ‘On Sitting for One’s Picture’. In The Miscellaneous Works of William Hazlitt, vol. 2, 25–36. Philadelphia: Clackson, Remsen and Haffelfinge. Higgins, David. 2005. Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity, Politics. New York: Routledge. Hill, Draper. 1965. Mr Gillray the Caricaturist: A Biography. London: The Phaidon Press. Hill, Richard J. 2016. Picturing Scotland though the Waverley Novels: Walter Scott and the Origins of the Victorian Illustrated Novel. London: Routledge. Johnston, Kenneth R. 2013. Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s. Oxford: Oxford UP. Lynch, Jack. 2018. ‘England’s Ireland, Ireland’s England: William Henry Ireland’s National Offense’. In Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe, 1450–1800, edited by Walter Stephens and Earle A Havens. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. McCreery, Cindy. 2004. The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth Century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Magnusson, Paul. 1998. Reading Public Romanticism. Princeton: Princeton UP. Mee, Jon. 2016. Print, Publicity and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s: The Laurel of Liberty. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Mellor, Anne. 2013. ‘Romantic Bluestockings: from muses to matrons’. In Bluestockings Displayed: Portraiture, Performance and Patronage, 1730–1830, edited by Elizabeth Eger. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Mole, Tom. 2007. Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Mulvihill, James. 1998. ‘“True Portrait and True History”: William Hazlitt’s Art Criticism’. Prose Studies 21 (3): 32–50. North, Julian. 2010. ‘Shelley Revitalized: Biography and the Reanimated Body’. European Romantic Review 21 (6): 751–70. Pointon, Marcia. 1993. Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in EighteenthCentury England. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. Pollin, Burton R. 1973. ‘Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd as Jacobins and Anti-Jacobins’. Studies in Romanticism 12 (3): 633–64. Pope, Alexander. [1734] (1870). ‘Epistle to Arbuthnot’. In The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Roe, Nicholas. 2018. Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years. Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford UP. Rogers, Pat. [1972] 2014. Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture. London: Routledge. Sangster, Matthew. 2021. Living as An Author in the Romantic Period. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Southey, Robert. 1797. Poems by Robert Southey. Bristol: Joseph Cottle. ———. 1821. A Vision of Judgement. London: Longman. Stabler, Jane. 1998. ‘Guardians and Watchful Powers: Literary Satire and Lyrical Ballads in 1798’. In 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads, edited by Richard Cronin. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

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Stetz, Margaret D. 2007. Facing the Late Victorians: Portraits of Artists and Writers from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Stillinger, Jack. 1994. Coleridge and Textual Instability. Oxford: Oxford UP. West, Shearer. 2004. Portraiture. Oxford: Oxford UP. Wootton, Sarah. 2006. Consuming Keats: Nineteenth Century Representations in Art and Literature. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Worrall, David. 2007. The Politics of Romantic Theatricality, 1787–1832: The Road to the Stage. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

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18 ‘A Point to Aim at in a Morning’s Walk’: Encounters at the Print Shop Maureen McCue

A capital print-shop (Molteno’s or Colnaghi’s) is a point to aim at in a morning’s walk – a relief and satisfaction in the motley confusion, the littleness, the vulgarity of common life: but a print-shop has but a mean, cold, meagre, petty appearance after coming out of a fine Collection of Pictures. We want the size of life, the marble flesh, the rich tones of nature, the diviner expanded expression. (Hazlitt 1822, 489)

T

aken from his essay on ‘Mr Angerstein’s Collection of Pictures’, William Hazlitt’s description of the merits and deficiencies of print shops, particularly when contrasted with those of a collection of paintings, registers many of the preoccupations of Britain’s art world at the turn of the nineteenth century. This was an unstable, if pivotal, moment in the history of art in Britain: the public desire for a myriad of forms of visual culture had reached a fever pitch; art institutions and the artist were gaining new found cultural importance; Old Master art, once solely the prerogative of aristocrat connoisseurs, was increasingly available to bourgeois collectors and middle-class viewers; and there was a growing desire to move away from ephemeral exhibitions to publicly owned, permanent collections. The debates surrounding the meaning and value of art, as well as a voracious audience’s fervour to consume a diverse range of visual culture, were shaped and determined by contemporary print culture, and in particular popular periodicals and engraved prints. Print shops were at the very heart of this frenzy and could be found throughout the country, with an especially high concentration located in London. Thanks to an influx of highly skilled Italian engravers to Britain, who would collectively raise the profile of British engravings for an international market, shops specialising in prints became popular in the mid-eighteenth century (Murgia 2019 and Rauser 2008), even as they operated within a wider network of printed and visual culture. The print shop shares a kinship with booksellers, publishers, map-makers and art supply stores, all of which also sold engravings. But not all print shops were created equal, and wares could range from rare engravings of Old Master art or high-end prints of contemporary history paintings (as in the case of Molteno’s and Colnaghi’s), to satires of the most salacious gossip and political intrigue found in the popular periodicals of the day (as one might find at Hannah Humphrey’s or William Holland’s). Hazlitt’s morning walk to the print shop has elicited a number of often conflicting responses from scholars assessing the place of visual culture in Romantic-period Britain and its literature. Critics have been especially interested in how Hazlitt’s view

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of prints and the print shop defines his understanding of art, and may support a distinction between original ‘High’ art and merely ‘mechanical’ copies, whose very reproducibility threatened individual genius by producing seemingly endless derivative products. Richard Sha, for example, portrays Hazlitt as an elitist, who finds solace in picture galleries and original works of art, while shunning the mimetic goods of the print shop (Sha 1998, 52). Jonah Siegel, however, insists that Hazlitt’s trips to print shops betray a sense of inadequacy in front of original artworks, reflecting both Hazlitt’s urban identity and his democratic ideals (Siegel 2000, 172–5). Gillen D’Arcy Wood argues that Hazlitt ultimately held a negative conception of prints and their purpose. To Wood’s mind, Hazlitt, concerned about the impact of the expanding print market on ‘the visibility of the original works themselves’, extends Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s disdain for copies by stepping in line with Sir Joshua Reynolds’s vocal censure of engravings (Wood 2001, 82–3). While these critics agree on the tenets of what we might call ‘High Romanticism’, they disagree on Hazlitt’s own position: is he a snobby connoisseur or a champion of democratic values? As with so much of Hazlitt’s art writing, the answer often lies in the in-between, but the tendency to frame Hazlitt and his essay in unified, coherent terms erases some important details about its publication and the ways in which Hazlitt’s seemingly contradictory stance regarding prints and original artworks might reflect the wider tensions surrounding both visual and verbal print culture at this time. The above studies, for instance, take this essay from Hazlitt’s collection, Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries of England, which was published anonymously in 1824. Most of the essays included in this collection, however, were originally published in The London Magazine between December 1822 and November 1823, with the Burleigh House essay published in January 1822 as part of Hazlitt’s ‘Table Talk’ series in The New Monthly Magazine. This publication history deserves further consideration as it maps a lessstable art world than the one suggested by Sketches. Binding essays together into a quasi-guidebook confers an authority onto the collated chapters which far outweighs their importance as individual essays dispersed in the pages of a magazine. Publication within the pages of a magazine highlights the ephemerality of print, while having a guide to the so-called ‘principal’ galleries implies a comprehensive approach to the subject, suggesting that such galleries are in themselves more stable and accessible than they were in reality. Siegel argues that for Hazlitt, such ‘collections are something to visit from time to time, almost always out of town, at some country seat belonging to a member of a hated class’ (Siegel 2000, 172–5; 173), but many of the collections included in Sketches could be found either in London or in its periphery. There is no mention, for example, of the great collections of Chatsworth, Blenheim or Petworth, all of which fit Siegel’s criteria and would have constituted the top ‘principal’ galleries in England. Likewise, how one frames Angerstein’s collection itself may influence how one reads Hazlitt. In discussing this essay, Sha notes that Hazlitt refers ‘to the collection not as an institution open to the public, but rather as the property of [John Julius] Angerstein’ (Sha 1998, 52–3). The timing here is important: Sketches was published shortly after Angerstein’s collection was purchased by the government with the intention of creating a ‘National Gallery’. The original 1822 article was not altered; instead, an advertisement in the front of Sketches explains the recent events. At this time, the paintings were still on display in Angerstein’s Pall Mall home; the current Trafalgar Square location would not open until 1838 (McCue 2018; and Avery-Quash in this

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volume). By returning Hazlitt’s essay on ‘Mr Angerstein’s Collection of Pictures’, then, to the pages of the periodicals, we discover an art world very much in flux, and very much dependent on the power of print to mediate it for the public. Having trained as a painter and spent time sketching Old Master works in the Louvre, Hazlitt had much more extensive and direct experience with original artworks than his average reader. But with the Romantic experience of the visual arts being inherently unstable and multifaceted, Hazlitt must rely on all the opportunities to experience art that were open to him. To this end, he highly values his own prints, sketches and paintings – that is, his small collection of reproductions – throughout his life (Wu 2010, 277; 343–4). In an attempt to catch up with the long-established European Schools of art, at its inception the Royal Academy had barred (often foreign) engravers from being members of the society, and its first president, Joshua Reynolds, would pronounce Raphael (alongside Michelangelo) as sitting at the pinnacle of art (Discourses, 1778). Yet Hazlitt, writing for a lay audience, would forge connections between Hogarth (shunned by the RA and best known through engravings of his work) and Raphael, arguing that they both faithfully adhere to Nature (McCue 2014, 92–3). This growing audience for art would need to find a way to participate in the discussions surrounding art; Hazlitt, and others like him, trains his readers in what we might call a ‘Romantic’ response to art, one which favours emotional and imaginative engagement more highly than formal, critical or overly learned assessment. But this is just one of many possibilities, found in poems, novels and countless periodical essays, that enabled readers to navigate the period’s often bewildering art world. The debate between originals versus copies offers only a narrow historiography of the reception of visual culture in this period, hiding the ways in which the print itself was becoming an important art form in its own right, and limiting the range of valid experiences of art. In the end, it was in the space created by the relationship between the printed image and the printed page that the key questions surrounding the state of art in Britain were debated and determined, not in the Royal Academy or in Reynolds’s Discourses.

‘Silly Victims of their Curiosity’: Outside the Print Shop Window In Persuasion (1817; title page 1818), Jane Austen portrays the space in front of the print shop window as uniquely absorbing. In what will turn out to be a fortuitous meeting, Anne Elliot spots Admiral Croft outside a print shop window in Bath’s fashionable Milsom Street: He was standing by himself at a printshop window, with his hands behind him, in earnest contemplation of some print, and she not only might have passed him unseen, but was obliged to touch as well as address him before she could catch his notice. When he did perceive and acknowledge her, however, it was done with all his usual frankness and good humour. ‘Ha! is it you? Thank you, thank you. This is treating me like a friend. Here I am, you see, staring at a picture. I can never get by this shop without stopping. But what a thing here is, by way of a boat! Do look at it. Did you ever see the like? What queer fellows your fine painters must be, to think that anybody would venture their lives in such a shapeless old cockleshell as that? And yet here are two gentlemen stuck up in it mightily at their ease, and looking about them at the rocks and mountains, as if they were not to be upset the

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next moment, which they certainly must be. I wonder where that boat was built!’ (laughing heartily) ‘I would not venture over a horsepond in it. Well,’ (turning away), ‘now, where are you bound? Can I go anywhere for you, or with you? Can I be of any use?’ (Austen 2004a, 136–8; 137) The Admiral is so completely engrossed in looking at the picture of the boat that Anne is forced not only to address him ‘but was obliged to touch [. . .] him before she could catch his notice’ (Austen 2004a, 137). That such a respected and sensible naval officer could become so absorbed in a work and unaware of his surroundings reflects the lure of the print shop window. While the Admiral takes issue with the accuracy of the depicted boat and seems to be ignorant of the sublimely picturesque merits of the print (suggested by the rocks, mountains and small figures), it requires a great effort on Anne’s part to pull him out of his reverie and return him to a normal sort of social interaction. While individual examples or albums of prints are captivating in their own right, the print shop window became a kind of revolving spectacle or exhibition (see fig. 18.1). Though Austen does not describe the crowd around the print shop window, the Admiral’s distracted state has made him vulnerable, not to just becoming overly absorbed by art, but also by becoming inattentive to his surroundings. Unlike exhibition spaces which charged an entrance fee, these window displays were available to any passers-by for free. The crowds that gathered around the windows were varied and, unlike more formal exhibition spaces, might easily include a range of tradespeople, children, those from the professional classes, fashionable ladies, members of the labouring classes, and

Figure 18.1  Theodore Lane, ‘Honi. Soi. Qui. Mal. Y. Pense: The Caricature Shop of G. Humphrey, 27 St. James’s Street, London’, 12 August 1821. Hand-coloured etching. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1917. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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those from the margins of society. A shop’s allure of course increased with the frequency with which the displays were changed, and even Admiral Croft could ‘never get by this shop without stopping’, presumably because there was always something new in the window to attract or affront the eye. The subject matter of those prints displayed necessarily reflected the printseller-publisher’s own interests and specialities, but might include a range of topics simultaneously, anything from engravings of works by Old Masters, portraits by contemporary artists, antiquarian or picturesque views, or satires of recent events or public figures. As countless visual and verbal depictions of the crowds in front of print shop windows make clear, this indiscriminate mixing of the classes and topics, coupled with the hold prints seemed to wield over their viewers, made for some very dangerous viewing conditions indeed.2 The pavement in front of print shop windows were high-risk places, and could easily cause bodily as well as moral harm to the viewers. In 1808, The Athenaeum published a letter from an anonymous ‘Complainant’ (signed ‘THE PUBLIC’) who describes the dangers faced by those trying to go about their daily business in the metropolis: I can scarcely walk the streets without meeting with something to put me out of temper. Sometimes, upon a narrow foot-pavement, a fruit-woman runs her barrow directly in my way, and obliges me to step into the kennel to avoid a broken shin. If I stop among the crowd that blocks the road before a print shop, besides the danger to my pockets, I find a butcher’s boy among the spectators with his tray on his shoulder, who, turning short, runs a bloody rump of beef full against my clean neck-cloth, whilst a chimney-sweeper on the other side soils my coat. As I proceed, a porter gives me a great thump on the back with his load, and then cries, “By your leave;” and before I have recovered myself, two mason’s labourers carrying a long ladder thrust me against a shop-window. (Anonymous, ‘A Complainant’ 1808, 537) Being too closely amongst the rabble and in the flow of commercial interests is an affront to the respectable gentleman’s person. The distracted state of the butcher’s boy and chimney sweep (caused by the wares of the print shop) override the social order and respect the ‘Complainant’ believes to be his due, whilst stopping at all is assumed to put one at risk of being pickpocketed. This was such a commonplace fear (and possible occurrence) that in his Helps and Hints: How to Protect Life and Property, with instructions in Rifle and Pistol Shooting, &c (1835), Lt Col. Baron de Berenger advises his readers to ask their tailor to add a secret and secure interior pocket in the lining of their great coats (1835, 21). In Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine’s review of the book, however, the reviewer confesses that having done this to ‘the only morning frock or coat we have, and the consequence of such an arrangement [. . .] is, that we are unable to pick our own pocket’ (Anonymous, 1835, 409). Although the Blackwood’s review pokes fun at de Berenger’s pompous attitudes and exhortations, nonetheless his guide reflects the very real fears about the dangers rife in the metropolis. And while the Colonel’s advice might be aimed specifically at helping the individual visitor avoid the thieves hidden in the crowd, it articulates a much more insidious fear that print shop windows expose the vulnerability of those in power, by creating a space which blurs class lines. In addition to the physical harm awaiting pedestrians, this unmonitored and unregulated space posed even greater moral dangers. The Examiner’s ‘Foreign Intelligence’

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column relays the ways in which prints of contemporary events might inform a wider, predominantly illiterate audience’s views of current events: Paris, France; Aug. 19.—   Caricatures rapidly succeed one another, and the windows of the print shops are surrounded by crowds of amateurs. Many of these productions are laughable, but many may excite the peasantry to use violence towards the overseers of the collection of certain taxes. The same prudence which has restrained the liberty of the pen, will, without doubt, repress the licentiousness of the graver. (Anonymous, ‘Foreign Intelligence’ 1814, 548) Reporting from France less than three months after the Treaty of Paris had been signed, the author’s comments about the freedom of the press and the power of print in all forms highlights the fear of revolution that seems almost inevitable when ‘crowds of amateurs’ gather. That prints ‘may excite the peasantry to use violence’ reminds us that the crowd in front of the print shop window contains within it the seed of the ‘swinish multitude’ descried by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). The prospect of social revolution was terrifying for those in power, but the images displayed also presented a more insidious threat. While Admiral Croft’s irritation at the unrealistic boating scene leaves him vulnerable, the unregulated, freely available print shop window was a siren call to uninitiated and undiscerning viewers. The weekly newspaper, Figaro in London, which ran from 1831 to 1838, highlights such dangers: ‘What! attack the arts!’ – No, not exactly, but the crowds who assemble and block up the pavement (extending even into the kennel) before shops exhibiting caricatures. A great obstruction and annoyance to men of business, – aye, – and to women of business too, and to other print-incurious passengers. What is worse, these warehouses of comic sketches, or, of the minor arts, if you please, are the rendezvous of pickpockets, who, while the spectators are grinning, gaping, and staring, at some ridiculous satirical exposure of vice or folly, in the prominent characters of the day, make an excellent harvest, by reaping from the incautious and silly victims of curiosity, their money, watches, or pocket-handkerchiefs. Then, the indecency of some of these pretty pictures, such as the protuberant Hottentot Venus, and many other indelicate nudity contours. (Anonymous, ‘Print Shops’ 1838, 117) The vulgarity supposed by the author to be inherent in such ‘minor arts’ extends out to the viewers on the pavement. Even those wishing to avoid the spectacle are impacted, while enraptured viewers not only stare at scandalous social satires, but are also unwittingly exposed to indecent pictures. Such ‘incautious and silly victims of curiosity’ easily fall prey to contours that entrap and entrance them. Women’s bodies had long formed the primary basis of aesthetic beauty, yet the fragile male gaze often found the soft curves of the idealised feminine form emasculating because potentially sexually stimulating. While the tenets of Civic Humanism earlier in the eighteenth century had promised that the careful study of art would lead to virtue, over the course of the century a range of hermeneutic responses arose in order to stave off the embarrassment of encountering the ubiquitous naked female form. As John Barrell has demonstrated:

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[T]o distinguish the aesthetic gaze from the scopophiliac stare, [. . . the] critic [must] display . . . his civic credentials, [to show that his] aesthetic interest in [the Venus de’ Medici’s] body is made possible by virtue of his emancipation from her sexual potency. He is then free to gaze, and gaze, and gaze again; and if he can get close enough to the original, he evinces the innocence of his pleasure by getting out his callipers and footrule. (Barrell 1992, 84) Though Figaro in London is singling out those ‘warehouses of comic sketches’, both high and low art relied on a shared and complex network of meaning which directed the gaze, but which was also determined by factors such as class, gender and wealth. While cognoscenti were often depicted in caricatures as impotent and enslaved by their voyeuristic need to consume the female form in various media, in general, such aristocratic connoisseurs leveraged their exclusive learning and social standing to inoculate themselves from any serious moral censure. Middle-class viewers could not escape this moral element so easily and were compelled to demonstrate purely edifying motives for viewing art. With no entrance fee and a seemingly endless progression of prints of all descriptions and on all subjects, the print shop window provided viewers unfettered access to art without the protection provided by such training. William Heath’s print ‘The March of Morality’ (1827–9), anticipating the Figaro in London essay by a decade, shows a beadle followed by two women striding down the street in front of Thomas McLean’s shop (fig. 18.2). The female form abounds in this busy street scene. As the churchman and his companions cut through the crowd

Figure 18.2  William Heath, ‘The March of Morality’, 1827–9. Hand-coloured etching. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1971. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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(which includes two pickpockets on either side of this central group), they are accosted by sellers hawking classical statues, the nudity of which has been hastily covered (very hastily judging by the boy on the right-hand side with a nearly bare backside). The female statues are casts of the Venus de’ Medici, then thought to manifest the classical beau idéal through balanced measurements. Casts of the statue littered collections up and down the country and Heath represents her twice from different angles, a common practice in engravings of this esteemed statue. That the statues featured are all half-clothed reflects (and jeers at) the increased attention to questions of morality for art’s growing audience. However, while perhaps the most prominent and instantly recognisable female forms in the print, the two statues are far from being the only female bodies on display. Indeed, apart from one or two representations of the male form (notably the Achilles in Hyde Park), the window is filled predominantly with nude or nearly nude female bodies, some of which are suggestive of the work of Old Masters, while others replicate contemporary subjects. The two prints in the upper right-hand corner of the window’s top row are especially important as they show two distinct Venuses: a caricature print of Sara (also ‘Sarah’ or ‘Saartjie’) Baartman, the so-called ‘Hottentot Venus’ (possibly after one of Heath’s own), and, in the far corner, what appears to be an engraving of the Venus de’ Medici, one which might be used to demonstrate her idealised proportions, such as we see in Gérard Audran, Les Proportions Du Corps Humain, Mesurées sur les plus belles Figures de l’Antiquité (1683) or William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753). The ‘March of Morality’ reflects the instability of Britain’s contemporary art world, as inherited European aesthetic values grappled with new objects, people and influences as a result of Britain’s aggressive colonial expansion. Baartman, a Gonaque Khoekhoe woman from the Cape of Good Hope, was in her thirties when she first arrived in London in 1810. She spent five years touring Britain, Ireland and France; she died in Paris in 1815 and her body was repatriated in 2002. In recent years, historians have sought to disentangle Baartman’s story from that of the ‘Hottentot Venus’, thereby sketching a fuller portrait of her as a human being who lived within a complex web of shifting racial identities and colonial realities, meanings which were determined through place, power structures, national agendas and cultural beliefs. The exhibition of Baartman was just one of many in a long line of ‘commercial displays of living people’ (McEvansoneya 2013, 26). Initially marketed as a freak show, the exhibition in Piccadilly came under intense public scrutiny despite its popularity, leading to a hearing at the King’s Bench. Though the court ruled that Baartman was not being coerced to perform, the show was nonetheless repackaged as an ethnographic enquiry, making it now seemingly suitable for polite, bourgeois consumption (McEvansoneya 2013, 27; Scully and Crais 2008, 319–22). However, unlike this strategic move to legitimise the spectacle through a scientific lens, prints of the ‘Hottentot Venus’ seldom attempted to regulate the viewer’s gaze. Though there is some evidence to suggest that Baartman, as the named copyright holder, may have had some input into the initial exhibition’s early advertisements, it is doubtful that she received any of the profits from the print sales (Scully and Crais 2008, 318), nor was she able to control later productions by other artists. As imitators, satirists and pseudo-scientific appropriations began to proliferate, an iconography of the ‘Hottentot Venus’ emerged. As both Figaro in London and ‘March of Morality’ make clear, unwitting viewers may begin

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to admire or even desire the ‘protuberant’ curves displayed in prints of the ‘Hottentot Venus’; to do so ‘was to deviate from the virtue, harmony and proportion [embodied in the Venus de’ Medici] that were closely identified with the classical heritage and thus the core values of Western civilisation as a whole’ (Forth 2012, 215). Prints which either focused on or featured the ‘Hottentot Venus’ did so for a variety of purposes and continued to be produced in Britain and abroad throughout the nineteenth century, long after the exhibition had closed (see, for example, fig. 5.4 in James Watt’s chapter). The continued use, misappropriation and reception of this constructed figure speaks to the influence print has to engender normative modes of looking and reinstate or reiterate long-accepted ideals.

Inside the Print Shop Print shops – as depicted in the period’s magazines, literature and prints – became imagined spaces in which to debate the period’s most pressing questions surrounding art (amongst other concerns). But there is often a clear distinction between the seemingly democratic space in front of the window, and the more exclusive shop interior. Crossing the threshold often, though not always, forces the promiscuous eye to become, or at least be seen to become, a more discerning eye. Indeed, much of the population was prohibited from entering many such spaces, either through the demands of propriety or because some shops, like contemporary exhibitions, charged a shilling entrance fee, a sum far beyond what would be feasible for a member of the working classes. As critics have demonstrated, exhibitions were overwhelmingly social spaces, places to see and be seen, with the actual art often taking a back seat to the spectacle of one’s fellow gallery goers (see, for example, Art on the Line 2001). Print shops were no exception and ‘were part of the daily round of the man of fashion, a place to meet friends and exchange gossip as well as to inspect the new prints’ (Altick 1978, 110). While images of the print shop window abound, there are fewer extant images of print shop interiors. Perhaps one of the most important is Richard Newton’s 1794 depiction of William Holland’s exhibition rooms at 50 Oxford Street in London (fig. 18.3). Holland claimed to have the largest selection of caricatures in Europe and charged a shilling’s entrance fee. Newton’s print depicts a crowded room of seemingly respectable viewers gazing at a plethora of images on the wall. The composition is anchored by a man in military dress, using a quizzing glass to view either the caricatures on the wall, or – perhaps more likely – the fashionably dressed woman walking in his general direction. He seems to be one of the few fixed points in the entire image, but his stance suggests this is only momentary. As one’s eye begins to break down the print into its component parts, one begins to discern that the images on the wall are identifiable caricatures and that most of the crowd are entranced by the floor-to-ceiling display, their faces contorted by laughter. Presumably published by Holland, Newton’s print functions in several key ways. First, it reflects the social element of visiting print shops and suggests that a print’s meaning is at least partially constructed through how it is collectively received. Furthermore, much like depictions of print shop windows, this print acts both as a snapshot of the act of visiting and as an advertisement for a particular shop or artist, even as it mocks patrons and place alike. Indeed, several of the prints on the wall are by Newton himself, who produced nearly 300 single sheet prints from the start of his

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Figure 18.3  Richard Newton, ‘William Holland’s Print Room’, 1794. © The Trustees of the British Museum. career aged 14, until his death in 1798 at age 21. In this depiction of Holland’s shop then, Newton papers the walls with a range of political and social satires published by Holland in the years leading up to the print’s publication. The print’s background can be divided into thirds, corresponding with the room’s walls. The largest print in the top left-hand third is Newton’s own ‘Promenade in the State Side of Newgate’. This print from October 1793, portrays (and lists) a group of radical reformers, politicians and publishers visiting friends at the infamous Newgate prison. Holland, who often published political texts under the pseudonym ‘Paddy Whack’ and had been imprisoned at Newgate in February 1793 for selling a pamphlet by Thomas Paine, is pictured alongside figures such as Charles Piggot and Martin Van Butchell. Newton also reproduces works by other artists, including, for example, a print of Catherine the Great of Russia, in the top right third. Attributed to Thomas Rowlandson, ‘An Imperial stride!’ (12 April 1791), shows Catherine II, dressed in a voluminous pink gown, straddling the distance between Russia and Constantinople, with the ‘European powers’ gazing up her petticoats. In reproducing the print shop’s interior alongside recognisable prints, Newton reflects the dynamics between social discourse, entertainment, politics and art which played out in the print shops at the turn of the nineteenth century. In a much subtler way, Newton’s depiction of Holland’s exhibition rooms also makes a claim for the legitimacy of the print (and especially caricatures) in the wider art world by mimicking a series of prints used to promote the Royal Academy’s annual show. Created by royal charter in 1768, the Royal Academy launched its annual exhibition in 1769. The first print Newton seems to reference is ‘The Exhibition of the

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Royal Academy of Painting, in the Year 1771’, which was painted by Michel Vincent (sometimes called Charles) Brandoin and engraved by Richard Earlom, and was published in 1772 as a way to stir up excitement for the upcoming hang (fig. 18.4). Viewers of the print make up the fourth wall, and individual paintings, including portraits by Thomas Gainsborough and James Barry’s The Temptation of Adam, are discernible. Although it may be easy to read this image as simply recording an event, it also anticipates issues which will provide fodder for later satirists, most especially the inattentive audience members (including the sleeping boy, the perplexed clergyman and the coquette looking through her fan). Newton’s precursor is also anchored by the man with the quizzing glass, positioned slightly left of centre. Though the Royal Academy had excluded engravers, members nonetheless relied on the sale of engravings of their paintings to secure their livelihoods and their reputations. By fashioning his own print in the same manner, Newton is putting his own work on par with those artists-members of the RA.

Figure 18.4  Engraved by Richard Earlom, after Michel Vincent Brandoin, ‘The Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Painting in the Year 1771’, 1772. Mezzotint in black on cream laid paper. Sara R. Shorey Endowed Acquisition Fund, The Art Institute of Chicago.

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Importantly, Newton’s print of Holland’s also mimics the series of images painted in the 1780s by Johann Heinrich Ramberg and engraved by Pietro Antonio Martini, which depict members of the royal family visiting a number of annual exhibitions. The ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy, 1787’ (see fig.10.1 in Martin Myrone’s chapter), shows the Prince of Wales, standing in front of his own portrait in the centre foreground (much like Newton’s military man), accompanied by the RA’s president Sir Joshua Reynolds, who directs the Prince’s attention to Opie’s Murder of Rizzio. Ramberg’s ‘Portraits of their Majesty’s and the Royal Family Viewing the Exhibition of the Royal Academy, 1788’ has a similar composition, except that it is George III, flanked by his wife and children, who anchors the image, again echoed in Newton’s print. By the early nineteenth century, it had become commonplace to show galleries as crowded with visitors who are more interested in being seen at the exhibition than they are about seeing the art on display. However, Newton’s 1794 print seems to be doing something more. The conflation of the Royal Academy’s exhibition rooms, especially when populated by the royal family, with those of a caricature shop breaks down the boundaries the RA had lobbied so hard to construct. In doing so, it reflects more accurately the market for art at the end of the eighteenth century.

The Serious Business of Art To be effective, Newton’s echoing of the Ramberg and Martini print relies on a robust and familiar commodity culture. Prints served several private and social functions, and manifested themselves in a variety of forms throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Engravings, for example, might be stored in albums, to be pulled out to entertain friends after dinner, or they might be used as ‘furniture prints’ to decorate one’s home. If one could not afford to collect prints, one might rent such an album, either to share with friends or to copy as part of an ongoing art practice. If, on the other hand, one could afford to collect a good number of prints, one might create one’s own print room, as Lady Louisa Conolly did when she pasted some two hundred engravings collected over several years and depicting amongst other things landscapes, classical subjects and even prints made after portraits of friends and family members, to the walls of a room at her estate in Castletown, Ireland. Decisions regarding placement and choice of prints were often made by consulting with friends, and the inclusion of Edward Fisher’s mezzotint after Joshua Reynolds’s painting of Louisa’s sister, entitled Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces, speaks to the sociability of such an undertaking. However, prints could also remain portable and still perform this social function. Ramberg and Martini’s print, for instance, was extremely popular and came in a variety of forms ready for repurposing. A slightly modified version of the engraving formed the basis for its owner to paint, decorate and construct a personal fan (fig. 18.5). As an essential part of one’s wardrobe, such an accessory invited sociable conversation and silently communicated much about its owner-maker’s taste, skills as a craftswoman, and interest in the arts. Furthermore, its subject matter established the owner-maker’s place within a wider social art network. A well-known print collector, botanist and patron of the arts, Queen Charlotte, along with her daughters (particularly the Princess Elizabeth), served as a role model for women and the arts, influencing both taste and private practices. In his Chalcographimania (1814), ‘Satiricus Sculptor’ (most likely the infamous forger William Henry Ireland) suggests that

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Figure 18.5  ‘Fan depicting King George III and his family visiting the Royal Academy, 1788’, 1789. Royal Collection Trust/ © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022.

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Queen Charlotte and Princess Elizabeth are the first amongst the nation’s enthusiastic print collectors or chalcographimanians: First in the ranks our nation’s queen A Chalcographian dame is seen, Yet though she buys is always wary, Of precious money passing chary. Eliza, Britain’s princess too, Stands register’d among my crew: Of prints she boasts full many lots, And shows who legions of tea-pots, And daily would add more and more, Had she of cash sufficient store. (IV.132–3) Although at the apex of the social hierarchy, the queen and her daughters’ engagement with visual culture (as seen perhaps most especially in the print room and bower painted by Princess Elizabeth in the Queen’s Cottage at Kew) seem accessible to any respectable woman and provides a blueprint for collecting, developing one’s art practice and displaying one’s taste through furnishings, embellishments and even one’s choice of teapot. If Newton had highlighted the similarities between Holland’s print shop and exhibition spaces, the proliferation of Ramberg and Martini’s prints reflects the serious business of art. While outside the print shop window was often depicted, both visually and verbally, as a space where one’s individual identity is largely erased as it is absorbed into the gaping crowd, crossing over the threshold into the shop’s interior re-inscribes one’s identity as a lover of art. Thomas Rowlandson’s print ‘Connoisseurs – or Portrait Collectors!!!’, which was used to illustrate John Britton’s The Pleasures of Human Life (1807), demonstrates the effort required to actively perform a connoisseurial identity, even as it satirises the earnestness with which some would-be collectors purchase (or, in this case, possibly nick) prints and paintings (see fig. 18.6). In both Rowlandson’s print and Britton’s text, the collecting of paintings and prints, that is of originals and copies, is conflated. The shop is littered with framed and unframed prints and paintings, while the window is completely covered in prints. But Britton, under the guise of Hilaris Benevolus and Co, warns readers against blindly following fashionable recommendations without the requisite knowledge and personal discretion. He argues the value of a picture, or print, is estimated according to the taste or judgment of the person viewing it. Besides, the more ugly, doubtful, and unintelligible, some things are, the more highly they are prized: else how is it that 10, 15, and 20 guineas are frequently given for a badly engraved, ill-looking print, said to be a portrait of a certain person, whose name is written at the bottom. (1807, 64) While creating a fan out of a print with the portraits of the royal family might confirm the owner-maker’s identity as an appreciator of art cast in the queen’s likeness, one’s ability to decipher the veracity and authenticity of an engraved portrait, however ‘badly engraved’ or ‘ill-looking’, will determine one’s standing as either a true

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Figure 18.6  Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Connoisseurs-or Portrait Collectors!!!’, 1807. Hand-coloured etching for John Britton, Pleasures of Human Life. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. connoisseur or an ignorant dupe. While this commodity culture may seem anathema to the tenets of Romanticism, it nonetheless provides the arena for navigating the porous boundaries of and frequent slippages between high and low art, original and copy, and the poetic connoisseur and the mere collector of prints. Women were particularly implicated in this commodity culture. Largely denied the opportunity to become professional artists, they were often relegated to remain ‘amateur’ artists. Yet, visual culture was a central part of many women’s day-to-day lives, particularly through its material manifestations, such as painting, embroidery, private or shared sketch albums, and in the creation of domestic furnishings such as screens and silhouettes. As simultaneous consumers and maker-producers, women’s interests in and knowledge of the arts (that is, their ‘accomplishments’), not only gave them a symbolic ‘currency’ in the competitive marriage market, but also had a real impact in shaping both Britain’s visual and print culture, and its economy. Perhaps one of the most familiar names in Romantic-period art circles is Rudolph Ackermann, whose shop, Repository of Arts, epitomises the ways in which commercial ventures answered the desire for art. Although more of a general art emporium than strictly a print shop, Ackermann’s Repository (as seen in fig 18.7) gives us a good sense of how a high-end, fashionable print shop (as opposed to one specialising in caricatures) might look or function in polite society. As Ann Pullan and Ann Bermingham have demonstrated, spaces like Ackermann’s were particularly important for female viewers and artists as they created opportunities for a female

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Figure 18.7  Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin, ‘Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, 101 Strand’, 1809. Courtesy of Special Collections, Graphic Arts Collection, Princeton University Library.



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appreciation of and participation in art that was otherwise systematically closed to them (Pullan, 1992; Bermingham, 2000). While the Quarterly Review would complain that the ‘dark and cavern-like rooms of the late Mr Angerstein’s house’ were inadequate for the nation’s budding collection, no such complaint could be made of the Repository (Anonymous, Quarterly Review, April 1824, 213). Organised, calm and well lit from extensive skylights, Ackermann’s business encourages patrons to take their time in making purchases, whether of supplies, transparencies or engravings, even as it resembles contemporary lecture halls and exhibitions spaces. Following the model of circulating libraries, customers could also subscribe – on a yearly (for 4 guineas), half yearly (2 guineas), or quarterly (1 guinea) basis – to a portfolio of prints and drawings, for the purposes of improving their own drawing practice or increasing their knowledge, and were allowed to change them as often as they wished or to keep up a number of prints up to the value of their subscription plan (Repository, 1.1, 53–4). In 1809, Ackermann began publishing a companion magazine bearing the name of his shop, bringing London’s art world to the comfort of readers’ own homes. In addition to publishing articles on the arts, local and global history, and a range of sciences, The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics was richly illustrated and included manufacturing and furniture designs (including the business details of the most prominent manufacturers), fashion plates, and small fabric samples for both the clothing and furniture featured. Rowlandson and Pugin’s print of Ackermann’s store ‘is the commencement of a series of plates intended to exhibit the principal shops of this great metropolis’, with haberdashers, glass manufacturers, furniture designers and more being showcased in subsequent issues. In this way, The Repository functions both as a kind of early catalogue for those unable to visit the shop in person, and, when bound together following the precise instructions included for bookbinders as to print placement, as a virtual tour of London’s most fashionable shopping spots. Much of this commercial activity was targeted at women, even as their own knowledge of art or artistic practices connected them to the wider public discourse surrounding knowledge and learning more broadly. Literature, alongside the ability to discuss the visual arts, was increasingly seen as an important avenue for self-improvement, particularly for men in the professions, a development which echoes women’s engagement with the visual arts, music and literature. Discussing how much annual income is necessary to have a comfortable living, the Dashwood women in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) come to very different conclusions. When Mrs Dashwood exclaims that she would not know how to spend a large fortune, Elinor suggests that improving their cottage would do away with any such doubts. Although he admits to being ‘saucy’, Edward Ferrars exclaims: What magnificent orders would travel from this family to London [. . .] in such an event! What a happy day for booksellers, music-sellers, and print-shops! You, Miss Dashwood, would give a general commission for every new print of merit to be sent you – and as for Marianne, I know her greatness of soul, there would not be music enough in London to content her. And books! – Thomson, Cowper, Scott – she would buy them all over and over again: she would buy up every copy, I believe, to prevent their falling into unworthy hands; and she would have every book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree. (Austen 2004b, 70)

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The Misses Dashwood are Ackermann’s targeted audience: genteel, motivated and discerning. But this passage points to something more at work, namely the ways in which art and literature were being used as a way to distinguish oneself from the unthinking and unfeeling crowd. Although it is Elinor who is most skilled in drawing, Marianne, with her ‘greatness of soul’, intense emotions, vivid imagination and eye for the picturesque, embodies the Romantic or poetic connoisseur, who, like Hazlitt, hopes to prevent art and literature from ‘falling into unworthy hands’. Although the taint of this wider commercial reality and its implied luxury could be used to dismiss women’s interest in and knowledge of the visual arts, it nonetheless speaks to the wider importance of being fluent in the language of visual arts.

‘Put Up A Picture in Your Room’ While there was a myriad of uses for prints, all of them tended towards a display – however superficial – of private cultivation. For Leigh Hunt and his late-Romantic readers, the aspiration to own prints symbolised their attainment of good taste, in much the same way that Mark Parker has argued that the reading of literary magazines conferred a certain level of ‘gentility’ on magazine readers of the 1820s and 30s (2000, 27). Collecting prints was both an intensely personal act and inherently social. In an April 1834 article from his London Journal, Hunt writes: May we exhort such of our readers as have no pictures hanging in their room to put one up immediately? we mean in their principal sitting-room; – in all their rooms, if possible, but, at all events, in that one. No matter how costly, or the reverse, provided they see something in it, and it gives them a profitable or pleasant thought. (1834, 289) It is hard to imagine that any of Hunt’s readers would not have owned at least one picture, but Hunt’s exhortation has several objectives. Firstly, it sends an open invitation to readers (nominally from all backgrounds), including those without any prior or legitimate claims to engage with the visual arts. Secondly, it denies the power of commercial interests and erases all traces of consumerism. The chosen picture need not cost a lot in order to benefit the owner-viewer by sparking imaginatively ‘profitable’ or ‘pleasant’ thoughts. Thirdly, it anticipates later arguments of ‘art for art’s sake’, by placing the viewer’s personal taste and experience at the centre of the work’s value. Finally, it shows just how conflated one’s private and public worth had become; one’s sitting room is simultaneously a place to relax and a space in which to receive visitors. By selecting images of merit, Hunt suggests, his readers can raise both their public standing and enrich their moments of private contemplation. Throughout the essay, Hunt acknowledges that prints serve a number of purposes, most especially by elevating viewers spiritually, mentally, imaginatively, professionally and socially. His invitation, of course, is not as democratically open as it might at first appear; in uncertain economic times, with access to food and other basic commodities in flux, one would still need to have some disposable income. Inevitably, therefore, Hunt’s readers are a self-selecting group who value social advancement as well as intellectual growth, a point reflected by the fact that this article was reprinted (often by Hunt himself) in The Ladies’ Garland (1842); The Seer, or Commonplaces refreshed

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(1840) and The Indicator, and the Companion: A Miscellany for the Fields and the Fire-side (1840). Such readers belonged to the middle or professional classes and were keen to participate in the once exclusive discourse of art appreciation. Living with such furniture prints, Hunt suggest, reader-viewers learn to ‘read’ them, – to see into every nook and corner of a landscape, and every feature of the mind; and it is impossible to be in the habit of these perusals, or even of being vaguely conscious of the presence of the good and beautiful, and considering them as belonging to us, or forming a part of our common-places, without being, at the very least, less subject to the disadvantages arising from having no such thoughts at all. (1834, 289) Here we see that for Hunt, having a print in one’s drawing room can be as efficacious (perhaps even more so) as contemplating an original work of art. In a gallery (or in front of the printshop window), one must necessarily compete with other viewers, while in the quiet of one’s own home, one is at liberty to forge an intimate relationship with one’s own chosen print, whether it depict a landscape or be an engraving of a history painting.

Conclusion By the 1830s, lithography and wood-engraving began to replace etching as the most popular method for printed images; with these cheaper and more reproducible methods, the print shop’s purpose was replaced by illustrated magazines, newspapers and books. The arts – both in terms of their status and purpose in the nation’s collective public life and in the lives of middle-class reader-viewers – began to stabilise and homogenise, determined by the Victorian drive for moral improvement. What made the Romantic era so distinctive in its engagement with the visual is that while the arts were becoming more readily available, the framework for that availability had not yet fully been standardised, thereby providing space for innovation and transgressive experimentation. Assuming one belonged to the appropriate class (and could thereby legitimately access art), a viewer was as likely to see original art in auction rooms as in gallery spaces. The popularity of prints – whether seen in the shop window, as part of an exhibition or drawing manual, in a friend’s album, or on one’s own wall – speaks to a keen desire for art felt throughout Britain. Based on this popularity, the New Monthly had great hopes for the nation and its capacity to appreciate art: The crowds that may be seen surrounding our print-shops, – not devoted to survey the licentious or vulgar prints which have been considered, and too truly, the characteristic of the taste of the lower orders of the English people, – but to view and criticise the highest efforts of the art, shows that the taste for the fine arts is most rapidly extending. (‘Useful Arts’ 1833, 522) However, without dedicated, readily available and freely accessible viewing spaces, the public relied on a range of visual and verbal print culture to satisfy its desire for the visual arts and to provide ordinary reader-viewers with a language to discuss art. While the Royal Academy would posit that original history painting was the highest

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form of art, a viewer’s only exposure to such paintings might be in a print. Still others might argue that a contemporary attempt by a member of the RA at such a painting would never be able to reach the heights found in Titian or Raphael. While it is true that prints are often but ‘loose memorandums [. . .] of what the painter has done’, Hazlitt still finds that ‘Good prints are no doubt, better than bad pictures; or prints, generally speaking are better than pictures; for we have more prints of good pictures than of bad ones’ (1822, 489–90). Romantic-period prints and print shops, as reflected through the lens of contemporary literature and periodicals, were sites therefore which could often simultaneously be high and low, public and private, democratic and exclusive. The slippages between such hierarchies became invitations to the reader-viewer to fashion themselves into true lovers of art.

Note Some of the research presented in this chapter has been supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grant.   1. It was so dangerous that, as the Examiner reported in 1829, the Middlesex Sessions tried unsuccessfully to have print shop window displays officially deemed a ‘nuisance’ (Anonymous, ‘Exposures in Shop Windows’, 369).

Bibliography Ackermann, Rudolph. 1809. The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics 1.1 (January), 3rd ed. London: Ackermann. Altick, Richard (1978). The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Anonymous.1808. [The Public]. ‘A Complainant’. The Athenaeum: a Magazine of Literary and Miscellaneous Information 3 (18) (1 June): 537–8. Anonymous. 1814. ‘Foreign Intelligence’. Examiner 348 (28 August): 548–50. Anonymous. 1824. ‘Art. XII. – [Review of] Catalogue of the celebrated Collection of Pictures of the late John Julius Angerstein, Esq. By John Young’. Quarterly Review (April): 210–13. Anonymous. 1829. ‘Exposures in Shop Windows and on the Bench’. Examiner 1115: 369–70. Anonymous. 1833. ‘Useful Arts’. New Monthly and Literary Journal 39 (156): 522–5. Anonymous. 1835. ‘[Review of] De Berenger’s Helps and Hints’. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 38 (239): 409–16. Anonymous. 1838. ‘Print Shops’. Figaro in London 7 (346): 117. Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780–1836. 2001. Edited by David H. Solkin. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Audran, Gérard. 1683. Les Proportions Du Corps Humain, Mesurées sur les plus belles Figures de l’Antiquité. Paris: Chez Gérard Audran. Austen, Jane. 2004a. Persuasion. Edited by Deidre Shauna Lynch. New York: Oxford UP. ———. 2004b. Sense and Sensibility. Edited by James Kinsley. New York: Oxford UP. Barrell, John. 1992. The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Bermingham, Ann. 2000. Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Britton, John [Hilarius Benevolus]. 1807. The pleasures of human life: investigated cheerfully, elucidated satirically, promulgated explicitly, and discussed philosophically: in a dozen dissertations on male, female, and neuter pleasures. Interspersed with various anecdotes, and expounded by numerous annotations. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme.

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De Berenger de Beaufain, Charles Random. 1835. Helps and Hints: How to Protect Life and Property, with instructions in Rifle and Pistol Shooting, &c. London: T. Hurst. Forth, Christopher E. 2012. ‘Fat, Desire and Disgust in the Colonial Imagination’. History Workshop Journal (73): 211–39. Hazlitt, William. 1822. ‘Mr. Angerstein’s Collection of Pictures’. London Magazine 6 (36) (December 1822): 489–94. Hunt, Leigh. 1834. ‘Put up a Picture in your Room’. Leigh Hunt’s London Journal 37: 289. Ireland, William Henry [‘Satiricus Sculptor’]. 1814. Chalcographimania; or, The Portrait-Collector and Printseller’s Chronicle, With Infatuations of every description. – A Humorous Poem. In Four Books. With Copious Notes Explanatory. London: R. S. Kirkby. McCue, Maureen. 2014. British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793– 1840. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. ———. 2018. ‘Guiding the Nation’s Taste: Periodicals and the Construction of the National Gallery’. Yearbook of English Studies 48: 13–30. McEvansoneya, Philip. 2013. ‘“Hottentot Venus”: The Exhibition of Sara Baartman in Dublin in 1812’. History Ireland 21 (1): 26–8. See (last accessed 18 January 2022). Murgia, C. 2019. ‘The Artistic Trade and Networks of the Italian Community in London Around 1800’. In Art Crossing Borders: The Internationalisation of the Art Market in the Age of Nation States, 1750–1914, edited by J. D. Baetens and D. Lyna, vol. 6, 164–92. Leiden: Brill. Parker, Mark. 2000. Literary Magazines and British Romanticism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP. Pullan, Ann. 1992. ‘“Conversations on the Arts”: Writing a Space for the Female Viewer in the Repository of Arts, 1809–15’. Oxford Art Journal 15 (2): 15–26. Rauser, Amelia. 2008. Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in EighteenthCentury English Prints. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Reynolds, Joshua. 1778. Seven Discourses, Delivered in the Royal Academy, by the President. London: T. Cadell. Scully, Pamela, and Clifton Crais. 2008. ‘Race and Erasure: Sara Baartman and Hendrik Cesars in Cape Town and London’. Journal of British Studies 47 (2): 301–23. Sha, Richard C. 1998. The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Siegel, Jonah. 2000. Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art. Princeton: Princeton UP. Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. 2001. The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760– 1860. New York: Palgrave. Wu, Duncan. 2010. William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man. Oxford: Oxford UP.

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19 Illustrated Poetry in the Romantic Period Susan Matthews

The Rage for Illustration

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eviewing a collection of ‘Illustrated Books’ in 1844, the Quarterly Review laments ‘the rage for ornamented, or as they are now termed, “Illustrated” or “Pictorial” editions of books’ (Anonymous, ‘Illustrated Books’ 1844, 168). Images have long been added to the written or printed text – whether through the illumination of manuscripts, by cutting and pasting in existing engravings or by the addition of newly commissioned engravings (on copper, wood or steel) to reprinted or newly published texts. What is new, as the Quarterly Review makes clear, is the term ‘illustration’ used in place of the older ‘ornamented’ or ‘embellished’. This chapter explores the creation of the new category of the ‘illustration’ evident to the 1844 reviewer. In doing so it follows some of the concepts that shape the 1844 account, not just the shift from the ‘ornamented’ to the ‘illustrated’ text but also the opposition between ‘ideal’ and ‘real’ illustration. These are not terms that make sense to a modern reader: whereas the Quarterly Review contains the word ‘illustration’ within quotation marks, the modern reader is likely instead to require quotation marks for the ‘real’. Taking up many of the themes of the 1844 essay, Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s The Shock of the Real presents the ‘real’ of the panorama and of J. M. W. Turner’s illustrations to Scott’s poetry as signs constructed by culture (D’Arcy Wood 2001, 111). The shift he traces ‘is not between M. H. Abrams’ mirror and lamp, but between the lamp and the magic lantern’ (7). For the Quarterly and for many of the consumers of ‘illustration’ in the early nineteenth century, the ‘real’ is a category which legitimates visual images. In doing so it displaces an earlier model of book illustration centred on the illustration of poetry. Although the word ‘illustration’ had begun to settle into its now familiar meaning of an image specifically created or commissioned to accompany text in the second decade of the nineteenth century, the Quarterly still insists on scare quotes. At the turn of the nineteenth century, we are told, ‘“Illustrated” books were of comparatively rare occurrence’ but now: Every engraving, every woodcut, every ornamented letter, however meaningless, however absurd, is an illustration; and provided such things are rather numerous in proportion to the extent of the work, it is forthwith dubbed ‘an illustrated edition,’ and the public are good-natured enough to buy it. (192)

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The Quarterly’s conservative history has continued to shape academic study of illustration in the Romantic period, both insofar as it sets out to displace a rival tradition associated with the popularisation of visual culture, and in that it tends to forget earlier forms of illustration. In particular the Quarterly favours a view of illustration as the creation of unique visual texts, either through the illumination of manuscripts or through ‘extra-illustration’ by which engravings are pasted into a single copy (172–5). This is a tradition that has recently been explored in rich detail by Luisa Calè and others. The Quarterly notes that the extra-illustration of poetry continues into the nineteenth century: ‘We know of copies of Byron’s works and Scott’s works, each “illustrated” with many thousands of prints and drawings, and each increasing almost daily.’ But the rise of illustrated books is bringing to an end a technique that ‘required time, money and, moreover, knowledge and taste. Illustrations are now wanted ready-made for the million’ (175). The unique illustrated book is displaced by the ‘ready-made’.

The Mental Illustrator Illustration potentially destroys the uniqueness of an individual, replacing it by a generic image. ‘I have his figure this moment before my eyes’, Yorick tells the reader of Sterne’s 1768 A Sentimental Journey as he struggles to communicate the image of the monk he holds in his mind (Sterne 1984, 5). Able only to use words, Yorick calls on a vocabulary of paintings familiar from engravings or from the Grand Tour: ‘It was one of those heads which Guido has often painted, – mild, pale – penetrating, free from all commonplace ideas of fat contented ignorance looking downwards upon the earth’ (5–6). At the same time, Yorick is wary of the power of the imagination to conjure up visual images: Fancy is ‘a seduced and seducing slut’ who ‘cheatest us seven times a day with thy pictures and images’ (17). Images, it seems, can be dangerous, whether driving the insatiable hunger of the extra-illustrator, the ‘rage’ of the consumer of illustrated books or the compulsive imagination of some artists. The Quarterly mentions the ‘grotesque fertility’ of George Cruickshank and the artists who worked on Punch (172). Few in 1844 would have been aware of one of the most striking cases of excessive imagination. In 1796, the artist Joseph Farington noted in his diary that ‘Blake has undertaken to make designs to encircle the letter press of each page’ of Young’s Night Thoughts (Bentley 1988, 305). This project was commissioned by the bookseller Richard Edwards who provided William Blake with letterpress text from early editions of Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–5). Working in watercolour on expensive Whatman paper cut to make a window for the text, Blake created magnificently imaginative scenes of soaring and diving figures, freed from gravity. Blake’s images act as a kind of visual annotation ‘surrounding the text which they are designed to elucidate’ (in the words of the 1796 advertisement), a technique he would employ a few years later to create an extra-illustrated copy of Gray’s Poems for his friend Anne Flaxman. In these unique watercolour copies, image dominates text – encircling the words and reversing the expected hierarchy. Blake’s designs frequently appear to continue behind the words, as if existing in a space behind the text (fig. 19.1). A cross in pencil or pen and ink often marks a line of text as suitable for illustration (though many of these marks have been masked by the mount). Often Blake chooses to represent a metaphor or figure of speech, responding in visual terms to the words of the poem.

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Figure 19.1  William Blake, ‘Where shall I find Him?’, from Young’s Night Thoughts, 1795–7, Night II, page 23. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Richard Edwards’s invitation to Blake to illustrate Night Thoughts may have been intended to cash into the new market for luxury texts but it may also have been an attempt to harness the imagination of a highly unusual artist to a familiar and valued text. The 547 folio images that Blake created for Night Thoughts reveal a visual fertility incompatible with commercial realities and when the edition was published in 1797 only forty-three of Blake’s designs were engraved. The start of the Night Thoughts project (1794/5) coincides with the date Blake gave to Europe: a Prophecy, a visually complex illuminated book that seems to have baffled even sympathetic friends. Copy D, purchased by the miniaturist Ozias Humphrey, was lent to Blake’s friend George Cumberland who added passages of verse and prose (mainly from Edward Bysshe’s Art of Poetry) in ink onto the margins of the illuminated pages. The annotations allow the owner to read Blake’s images in relation to familiar (and comprehensible) passages of verse (Matthews 2011, 157–60). In theory, history painting tamed the imagination of the artist by attaching it to familiar and culturally important stories. But both William Blake and Henry Fuseli pictured scenes from stories of their own invention: Fuseli’s Percival Delivering Belisane from the Enchantments of Urma, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1783, was based on the ‘Provencal Tales of Kyot’, a text ‘which never existed, [but] which was in turn supposed to be a translation of a further nonexistent text’ (Myrone 2006, 85).

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Illustration and History Painting As artists struggled to find patrons willing to fund large-scale public projects, most classically trained artists in the period relied to some extent on work for booksellers. The literary galleries of the 1790s employed leading painters to produce works inspired by Milton, Shakespeare, English poets, English history or the Bible and their financial viability depended on the sale of engravings derived from these paintings either as folio engravings without text or as smaller illustrations accompanying editions of texts (Altick 1985, 43). There was a close relationship in the 1790s between book production and printmaking as booksellers sought to capitalise on a new market for luxury editions (Jung 2013, 100). These were not generally described as illustrated books, but as ‘embellished’, ‘ornamented’ or ‘elegant’ editions, to distinguish them from the growing market for small, relatively cheap editions of ‘old canon’ texts (including series by Bell, Cooke and Harrison) which appeared after the end of perpetual copyright (St Clair 2004, 128). The Quarterly Review saw the involvement of artists of this calibre in book illustration as ‘a great change – a marked improvement’ over the artists of the previous generation (Anonymous, ‘Illustrated Books’ 1844, 191). But the public role of the artist celebrated and inculcated by the Royal Academy represented small-scale work for booksellers as a damaging privatisation of culture. Henry Fuseli lamented the shrinking of public culture to the confines of the ‘snug, less, narrow, pretty, insignificant’ (Knowles 1831, 48). The engraver Abraham Raimbach describes starting out as an engraver during the wars with France in the 1790s, working for booksellers who ‘were at this time the only patrons (such as they were) of engraving, by the decoration, with little vignettes, of small volumes of poetry, plays, &c’ (Raimbach 1843, 22). Commissions from Cooke, ‘a publisher of miniature editions of the works of the poets and novelists’, tided him over, though ‘his publications were not regular, languishing, as did every thing connected with the arts, under the paralysing influence of a war, waged with, perhaps, unprecedented inveteracy’ (26). At the end of the 1790s, Raimbach was admitted to the Royal Academy and studied there for nine years, supporting himself by continuing to engrave small plates when I could obtain them for the Poets, Novels, German Theatre &c., and devoting the large remainder of time almost exclusively to academical studies, in the hope of more propitious opportunity, and of better qualifying myself to profit by a favourable change, if it should arrive. (32) The turning point came in 1801 when he was commissioned to work on twenty-four engravings from pictures by Robert Smirke for the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, the ‘first of a series that tended greatly to elevate the character of decorated books’ (107). Returning to London after a visit to see the great art collections of Paris during the Peace of Amiens in 1802, Raimbach finally abandoned his ambition to work as a painter ‘as a powerful impulse had been now given to the decoration, in a superior way, of the standard literature of the country’ (107). Raimbach’s story exemplifies the rising status and the financial rewards offered by the changing market in illustrated books. But the refusal of the Royal Academy to admit engravers as full members continued to rankle and in 1837 Raimbach was one of forty-eight engravers who signed a petition to the king to plead for recognition by the Royal Academy (Fox 1976, 16). Raimbach’s account in his 1843 Memoirs, however, does not use the word ‘illustration’. He refers

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to ‘decorated books’, to ‘the decoration, in a superior way, of the standard literature of the country’, to ‘highly-embellished books’ and to ‘ornamental literature’.

Illustration and the Ideal One of the blind spots of the 1844 Quarterly Review article is the relatively minor role accorded to Thomas Stothard (1755–1834), the pre-eminent book illustrator of the period. Of course, Stothard would not have seen himself as an illustrator because the word was a creation of the 1820s and Stothard ‘was typically included in an artists’ listing as specializing in “History, Domestic Life, &c”’ (Myrone 2019, 293). Moreover, Stothard’s reputation had faded by 1844 as a new model of illustration gained currency. The Quarterly Review notes that ‘Many of his designs, engraved by the elder Heath for Harrison’s “Novelist’s Magazine,” are of great beauty, though but little known’ and mistakenly ascribes this body of work to ‘the late Charles Stothard, R.A., a truly English artist’, Thomas Stothard’s illustrator son who died in an accident in 1821 (Anonymous, ‘Illustrated Books’ 1844, 191–2). Martin Myrone argues that ‘Stothard’s work has been seen as just too small, too conventional, too commercial, and too popular to merit serious scholarly interest’ (2019, 288). But Stothard’s work is central to any attempt to understand the quality of ‘elegance’ associated with the ornamented or embellished book in the years before the term ‘illustration’ took hold (Matthews 2019, 123). Like other classically trained artists in the period, Stothard’s art is centred on the human figure, rendered with a degree of generality. Stothard told Samuel Rogers: ‘I often take an evening walk in the park in summer to observe the figures, and at a distance they position themselves into those bold simple forms that were the delight of the Grecian artists’ (Bennett 1988, 24). Individuals are represented as ‘bold simple forms’ not as unique individuals as in portraiture. Trained as a history painter at the Royal Academy schools, Stothard reimagined the masculine genre of history painting within a rococo visual language (Bennett 1988, 9–10). To Charles Lamb, his work was ‘Graceful as Raphael, as Watteau genteel’ (Talfourd 1838, 418). Stothard’s paintings for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery according to one reviewer ‘Match Raphael’s Grace with thy lov’d Guido’s air’ (Bennett 1988, 22). To his contemporaries, Stothard seemed to offer an ideal representation of womanhood: Leigh Hunt’s sonnet ‘To Thomas Stothard. R.A.’ celebrated Stothard’s ability to capture ‘true woman’s gentle mien divine’ (Hunt 1923, 248). The artist Edward Dayes believed that ‘In the works of Stothard female beauty and elegance strongly prevail, and that in a degree infinitely beyond his contemporaries’ (Dayes 1805, 351). Representing ‘woman’ rather than individual women, Stothard defines a feminine ideal for his class and his period. The qualities that Stothard brought to small-scale book illustration can be exemplified by a 1798 edition of Cowper’s two volume Poems issued by Joseph Johnson with ten plates designed by Thomas Stothard. In some copies, the plates were printed in colour and finished with watercolour washes. Several of Stothard’s designs feature images of books and of reading. From ‘The Garden’, book III of The Task, Stothard’s plate illustrates the lines:   ___________ where he enjoys, With her who shares his pleasures & his heart, Sweet converse (Cowper n.d., 2:95–6)

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This passage comes from the poem’s celebration of ‘Domestic happiness, thou only bliss/ Of Paradise that has surviv’d the fall!’ – lines which Hannah More chose as an epigraph to her 1799 Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education. Stothard was, after all, listed as an artist specialising in ‘Domestic Life’. Cowper describes the ‘self-sequester’d man’, kept indoors by bad weather who turns to his ‘Well chosen’ book and shares what he reads with his female companion ‘As aught occurs that she may smile to hear’ (Cowper n.d., 2:95–6). Stothard shows an outdoor conversation piece: at a tea table under an arbour, the woman sits holding a book from which she looks up, perhaps to notice the plants growing (fig. 19.2). The man looks down at her, tenderly, his hat fallen on the soft green sward. Perhaps this is Stothard’s attempt to produce a composite image of Cowper’s alternative scenes – a bad-weather indoor option and a fair-weather scene in which the man oversees the work of the gardener (Cowper n.d., 2:96). But the illustration, unlike Cowper’s text, presents the woman as reader of the volume (whose size matches that of the octavo volume in which the illustration is found). There are no gardeners (as in Cowper’s text) to break the domesticity of the pair and the focus of the man’s gaze is on the woman.

Figure 19.2  Engraved by I. B. Drayton after Thomas Stothard, ‘Sweet converse’. Poems by William Cowper, London: Joseph Johnson, 1798, Vol. II, facing page 96. Private collection.

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Figure 19.3  Engraved by Legat after Thomas Stothard, ‘Kate is Craz’d’. Poems by William Cowper, London: Joseph Johnson, 1798, Vol. II, facing page 25. Private collection.

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Stothard also illustrates the figure of ‘Discipline’ from The Task, book II, as a kindly old teacher helping young boys, seated on stools in a circle, to read. And he adds a reading child beside a woman bobbin maker in the scene from ‘Truth’ (facing p.76) which describes ‘Yon Cottager, who weaves at her own door’. The happiness of the cottager who ‘Just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true’ contrasts with the unhappiness of the sceptic Voltaire (Cowper n.d., 1:77). While the woman and child to the left in the illustration look down (at their bobbin making or reading respectively), the central figure looks up towards the light which shines from the top left corner of the image. The cat suggests the comfort of the little group and the broom to the lower right tells us of the cleanliness of this cottage home. Stothard’s cottagers, children and young women are types who reappear across his work. They create an image of an idealised rural England quite different from that imagined by Fuseli’s 1806 illustrations for the same two-volume set. Fuseli’s women (in ‘A Dressing Room’, or ‘The Newspaper in the Country’) recall the elongated lines of fashion plates, suggesting the world of high society and urban debate. Fuseli takes the reader into a claustrophobic world of interiors (Matthews 2019, 134). Where Fuseli represents ‘Kate is Craz’d’ alone on a windswept rock, Stothard brings Kate close to the viewer, with a torn shawl and bare feet (see figs 19.3 and 19.4). The setting is a green and pleasant woodland glade, and there are three small figures sitting a little way away. She is part of a prelapsarian, pre-industrial rural community in which the viewer can expect that her needs will be met.

Figure 19.4  Engraved by William Bromley after Henry Fuseli, ‘Kate is crazed’, 1 March 1807. Frontispiece (Vol. II) for Poems by William Cowper, London: Joseph Johnson, 1808. © Royal Academy of Arts, London.

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‘Real’ Illustration The Quarterly Review’s history of the illustrated book is prompted by the task of reviewing twelve recent illustrated books, which include the Abbotsford Edition of the Waverley Novels, published between 1842 and 1844. This project epitomises what the reviewer sees as ‘real illustration’: It is this minute illustration, this transporting of ourselves to the actual locality of the scene that interests us, which makes us value as we do the Abbotsford edition of Scott. It is not fancy when we say we understand him better in this edition, as the cuts – in general – we regret to say not uniformly – do really illustrate the text. (196–7) The Abbotsford Edition marked the high point of the Victorian idea of illustration, drawing on the skills of 189 artists and 113 engravers to produce 120 steel plates representing places associated with the text and around 2,000 wood engravings interpellated into the text (Garside 2013, 145). This project allows the Quarterly to determine the proper role of illustration as providing ‘representations of actual or material things, such as persons or places, existing or purporting to exist’ (Anonymous, ‘Illustrated Books’ 1844, 190) and to backdate this view to the history of illustration. These kinds of image, we are assured, made up the majority of the ‘ornaments or illustrations of printed books’. ‘[O]nce’ and ‘once only, Hogarth designed a merely ornamental or imaginative subject for a volume’ (191). By contrast, any ‘mixture of the real with the imaginary’ is dangerous. The reviewer is shocked that ‘In Westall’s Illustrations to the Bible, figures may be seen, the exact counterparts of those in his illustrations of the “Lady of the Lake”’ (193). The category mistake is concerning, confusing history and poetry, because the events of the Bible are classed as ‘real’. Illustration had long encouraged the recycling and reuse of images, whether in the form of extra-illustration or ready made in printed books. The Quarterly Review notes that in Fox’s Book of Martyrs ‘one wood-cut represents eighteen persons burned by sixes at Brentford, Canterbury, and Colchester respectively, and serves also to depict seven who suffered at Smithfield’ (Anonymous, ‘Illustrated Books’ 1844, 189). The Quarterly is particularly hostile to the vogue for annuals or gift books: ‘At last arose the rage for Annuals, and for a time Art lay prostrate at the feet of Nonsense’ (Anonymous, ‘Illustrated Books’ 1844, 192). Whereas extra-illustration demanded time, effort (and money) on the part of the compilers, these volumes offered pleasure with little effort. The Byron Gallery of 1833 was sold in six parts each containing five engravings designed to be cut and pasted into existing editions of Byron’s poetry. These were the ultimate recyclable image: some portraits in this collection reappear in Finden’s Byron’s Beauties a series of Ideal Portraits of the principal Female Characters in Lord Byron’s Poems (1835). The Shakspeare Gallery; Containing Forty-Five Plates Of The Principal Heroines In Shakspeare’s Plays, Engraved By Mr. Charles Heath, From Drawings By The First Artists is a series of imaginary portraits rather than the history paintings commissioned by Boydell. The painters who contributed to the volumes of Byron Beauties include the fashionable portraitist A. E. Chalon whose images define conventions of female beauty. The commentaries which accompany the beauties provide a tame moralisation of the unmistakeably erotic visual material. Zuleika’s innocence legitimises the reader’s

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Figure 19.5  Engraved by H. T. Ryall after J. W. Wright, ‘Zuleika, Bride of Abydos’, Frontispiece for The Gallery of Byron Beauties; Portraits of the principal female characters in Lord Byron’s Poems. From Original Paintings by Eminent Artists. London: Tilt and Bogue, 1836. Private collection.

gaze: ‘On the narrative of the Bride of Abydos the mind dwells with melancholy interest, unmingled with any feeling of reprehension for the lovers were innocent’ (Tilt and Bogue 1836, n.p.; see fig. 19.5). Whereas Stothard’s women are placed within a landscape or interior setting, these beauties are represented as portraits to hip level. We are brought closer to the figures and the stipple etching creates a sensuous contact with flesh and fabric. Ornament and embellishment return under the guise of ‘illustration’. The first example of ‘illustration’ in the OED to mean a small image commissioned to accompany a text, is Westall’s Illustrations to the Works of Walter Scott, Esq. published in 1817 (Haywood et al. 2019, 5). But this project represents a model of illustration that Scott sought to escape. Westall’s unauthorised illustrations to The Lay of the Last Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake employed the classical visual language of the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery to frame dramatic scenes. Scott was specifically concerned about historical inaccuracy in illustrations of the Highland characters of the 1810 Lady of the Lake, writing to Joanna Bailie: By the way I understand there are two rival sets of illustrations in preparation for the Lady of the Lake, even before she makes her appearance. Both will probably be execrable for if Westall who is really a man of talent fail’d in figures of chivalry

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where he had so many painters to guide him, what in the Devil’s name will he make of Highland figures. I expect to see my chieftain Sir Rhoderick Dhu in the guize of a recruiting sergeant of the Black Watch. (Gordon 1971, 301) Hazlitt thought that ‘the smooth, glossy texture’ (1825, 136) of Scott’s verse ‘takes away any appearance of heaviness or harshness from the body of local traditions and obsolete costume’ and that his figures were ‘very like Mr. Westall’s drawings, which accompany, and are intended to illustrate them’ (1825, 137). In choosing illustrators, Scott was determined to escape the classicising visual language of these artists, turning down the work of J. J. Mesurier, who had been commissioned to provide illustrations to The Lay of the Last Minstrel and rejecting Flaxman because his ‘genius is too classic to body forth my Gothic Borderers’ (Gordon 1971, 300). Real illustration, for this generation, provided cultural, historical or geographical specificity, most often by supplying the setting that gave rise to a poem. An 1803 volume, Cowper, Illustrated by a series of views in, or near, The Park of WestonUnderwood, Bucks, accompanied with copious descriptions, and a brief sketch of

Figure 19.6  Engraved by Richard Golding after Richard Westall, ‘These are Clan Alpine’s warriors true/ And Saxon – I am Roderick Dhu’. Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake: a Poem. Fifth Edition. Edinburgh: Ballantyne and Co.; and London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, and W. Miller, 1810. Proof. Creative commons licence.

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the poet’s life provides ‘A survey, though in miniature, of the scenes that occupied the attention, and gave matter to the pen, of the immortal Cowper’ (Storer and Greig 1803, 27). The text of the poem is not included and landscape images occupy the full page. Similarly, John Christian Schetky’s 1810 Illustrations of Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel: consisting of twelve views on the rivers Bothwick, Ettrick, Yarrow, Tiviot, and Tweed represent the scenery that inspired the poetry, rather than the poetry itself: this is an ‘endeavour on my part to illustrate, by Drawings, the beautiful scenery described in The Lay of the Last Minstrel’. As many commentators have suggested, these volumes provide a form of virtual tourism (D’Arcy Wood 2000; Watson 2012). Schetky’s volume provides an image of Melrose Abbey facing a passage from Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel: If thou wouldst view fair Melrose aright, Go visit it by the pale moonlight; For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild but to flout the ruins gray. Although claiming to be ‘taken on the spot,’ the image reprises Thomas Pennant’s image of Melrose from the 1772 Tour of Scotland with the difference that Schetky provides the moonlit setting that a tourist is unlikely to have seen (Russett 2017). Turner’s Melrose Abbey: Moonlight of around 1822 is similarly inspired by The Lay of the Last Minstrel (Finley 1980, 75). By the 1830s, according to Washington Irving, one guide resorted to artificially creating the moonlight scene that the text had led them to expect: ‘many of the most devout pilgrims to the ruin could not be content with a daylight inspection, and insisted it could be nothing, unless seen by the light of the moon’ (Irving 1835, 14). The tourist now demands the recreation of a virtual experience. Visiting Loch Katrine in 1814, one of the many tourists inspired by the extraordinary success of Scott’s 1810 poem reprised the tour that Scott himself had undertaken in 1809. Charlotte Malkin noted in her diary: We took cold provisions with us, & landed on Ellen’s Isle to eat our dinners there. The whole of this scene is so poetically, & at the same time so accurately described by Walter Scott, that when I read his poem of ‘The Lady of the Lake’ I shall always be able I hope, to call to my recollection the very great pleasure I have enjoyed this day. (Malkin 1814) Accuracy and poetry seem to Malkin to coexist in a present-day scene which allows access to history. Rereading the poem will allow Malkin to replay the experience of her journey and her memory of the day will provide a mental illustration of the scene. The 1810 illustrations to The Lady of the Lake by Richard Westall created scenes populated by exotically dressed figures, dreamt up by the imagination of the artist. This was ideal illustration in which the artist (according to the Quarterly) ‘may be as imaginative and his fancy as unbridled as the poet’s own’ (Anonymous, ‘Illustrated Books’ 1844, 195). Poetry, however, could equally provide scope for ‘real’ illustration: ‘Byron and Scott are alike in this, that they give ample scope both for real and ideal illustration’ (Anonymous, ‘Illustrated Books’ 1844, 196). Turner’s illustrations for the twelve volumes of The Poetical Works of Walter Scott published in 1833 and 1834

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show what the period (or the Quarterly) understood ‘real’ illustration to entail. Turner is described by the Quarterly not only as the ‘greatest, and also the most industrious, of living geniuses in art’ but as one who ‘has, we believe, allotted a space of every day for many years past to the execution of small drawings for the “illustration” of books’ (Anonymous, ‘Illustrated Books’ 1844, 192). Turner’s first collaboration with Scott was the ten designs for The Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland that appeared ‘with descriptive illustrations by Sir Walter Scott. Bart’: Scott’s words ‘illustrate’ the prints, throwing light on, or explaining the images. Issued in parts from 1819 to 1826 and collected into two folio volumes, this was a picture book. The purchaser could travel through the images with Scott acting as tour guide, ‘an agreeable and intelligent Cicerone’, according to the Prospectus, ‘who, without loading his conversation with dry and uninteresting details . . . [would] communicate in an authentic, and, at the same time . . . popular form, the history of the building, and . . . the events, real or traditional, with which it is connected’ (Thomson 1999, 15). In his ‘descriptive’ phase, which reaches its height in these designs, Turner saw the work of the painter and the poet as distinct because the ‘contrariety of their means underlies [and] separates Poetry from Painting’ (Finley 1980, 32). But in the 1830s, Turner embarked on a series of illustrations for poetry, including Samuel Rogers’s Poems (1834), John Macrone’s Milton’s Poetical Works (1835) and E. Moxon’s Campbell’s Poetical Works (1837). The insistence of Scott’s publisher, Richard Cadell, that Turner be exclusively commissioned to produce the designs for the Poetical Works was driven by the success of the 1830 edition of Samuel Rogers’s Italy with illustrations by Thomas Stothard, the pre-eminent practitioner of the ideal, and J. M. W. Turner the pre-eminent practitioner of the ‘real’ in illustration. Stothard worked on figures and Turner on landscape (sometimes within the same image) (Bennett 1988, 26). Such a division of labour was not new: engravers often specialised in figures or landscape. In Turner’s ‘High Street of Edinburgh’ and ‘Heriot’s Hospital’ for the Provincial Antiquities, the figures were engraved by George Cooke with the rest engraved by H. le Keux. But the collaboration of two artists with such different skills on the illustrations for Italy was significant because the two categories, figures and landscape, also mapped onto the division between the ‘ideal’ (or the imaginative) and the ‘real’. The twelve volumes of the 1833–4 Poetical Works were edited by John Gibson Lockhart, Scott’s son-in-law who, from 1825, had edited the Quarterly Review. Each volume contains two engravings after Turner: a landscape frontispiece and a landscape vignette on the facing title page (see figs 19.7 and 19.8). The choice and placement of the scenes was subject to some negotiation between Cadell, Turner and Scott, but in their final use they represent a new model of illustration, one which points outside the poetry rather than to particular lines. The published images allow the reader to retrace the 1831 journey undertaken by Turner (guided by Scott in the area around Abbotsford), each image offering the viewer a route into the landscape, a snaking path into the middle distance, following picturesque theory that shaped both Turner’s and Scott’s appreciation of landscape. Working up the sketches into scenes for the project, Turner added small figures as decorative features which register scale: men fishing, women washing or, in some cases, Scott’s own party as tourists. Nigel Leask argues that Turner’s vignette for volume 8, which includes The Lady of the Lake, shows the prospect view which Scott unfolds through the perspective of Fitz-James at the

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Figure 19.7  J. M. W. Turner, engraved by W. Miller, ‘Loch Katrine’, Frontispiece for The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart, Vol. 8. Edinburgh: printed for Robert Cadell and Whittaker, London, 1834. Proof. Tate. Photo: Tate.

Figure 19.8  J. M. W. Turner, engraved by W. Miller, ‘Loch Achray’, Title page vignette, The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart, Vol. 8. Edinburgh: printed for Robert Cadell and Whittaker, London, 1834. Proof. Tate. Photo: Tate.

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beginning of the poem (Leask 2020, 232). But the framing of this edition also sets up a view of illustration which accords with the Quarterly’s ideas. Turner’s vignette and landscape provide the ‘scene’ ‘laid chiefly in the vicinity of Loch-Katrine, in the Western Highlands of Perthshire’. Lockhart’s editorial matter not only shapes the way in which readers encounter the poetry but also shapes their understanding of the relationship of word to image (Millgate 1993). A long quotation from the Quarterly Review of May 1810, supplied as footnote to volume 8, sets up a comparison between Scott’s poetry to painting: ‘He sees everything with a painter’s eye. Whatever he represents has a character of individuality, and is drawn with an accuracy and minuteness of discrimination, which we are not accustomed to expect from verbal discrimination’ (Scott 1833, VIII 19). Scott’s descriptive accuracy, we are told, derives from images ‘already stored up in the memory’ rather than from ‘invention’ which ‘must appear confused and ill-defined, if the impressions originally received by the senses were deficient in strength and distinctness (Scott 1833, VIII 19). It is Scott’s familiarity with these scenes that allows his touch to be ‘easy, correct and animated’: The rocks, the ravines, and the torrents, which he exhibits, are not the imperfect sketches of a hurried traveller, but the finished studies of a resident artist, deliberately drawn from different points of view. (Scott 1833, VIII:19–20) The notes to the 1833 edition show the way in which editions of the poetry and of travel literature are intertwined, for example by citing the second edition of Graham’s Sketches of Perthshire (which itself notes the impact of Scott’s poem): ‘To these causes of increasing resort to this quarter of Scotland, may be added another of recent occurrence. Mr Walter Scott, by adopting it as the scene of the transactions of his justly admired poem, The Lady of the Lake, has rendered it classic ground’ (Graham 1812, iii). Graham’s 1812 edition explains that Scott had cited the first edition of the Sketches of Perthshire ‘repeatedly in flattering terms, in the notes to his celebrated poem’, which ‘has contributed much to the credit of that little volume’ (Graham 1812, iv). But although the rationale for Turner’s images is that of the ‘real’ espoused by the Quarterly from as early as 1810 and shaped by Scott’s view of himself as a descriptive writer, the images that appeared in 1833 and 1834, after Scott’s death, are both saturated in associative memories, and shaped by the octavo page. Rendered as steel engravings, Turner’s vignettes turn the ‘real’ into a new kind of poetry.

Technological Change and Proliferating Illustration Working for steel engravers, Turner produced smaller, more intense and more abstract images (Finley 1980, 29). The Quarterly’s ‘Illustrated Books’ is published in the early days of portrait photography: a calotype of Robert Cadell exists. Steel engraving allowed a far greater number of impressions to be taken from a block without the quality degrading as it did with copper engraving; improvements in wood engraving allowed both larger and more finely detailed images; steam presses increased production of prints, and the invention of a roller for inking after 1816 (rather than ‘balls’ with which ink was dabbed onto the plate) speeded up the process (Anonymous, ‘Illustrated Books’ 1844, 170). To some, new technologies of image reproduction promised changes as powerful as those which accompanied the printing press. For these writers, the

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dissemination of images to new audiences was part and parcel of the spread of knowledge and of enlightenment. Charles Knight believed that the success of his Penny Magazine (published every Saturday from 1832 to 1845) and illustrated from the start with wood engravings prepared ‘the way for writers and booksellers to reap the abundant harvest when the “second rain” of knowledge should be descending “uninterrupted, unabated, unbounded; fertilizing some grounds and overflowing others; changing the whole form of social life”’ (Knight 2014, 2:183–4). The quotation is from Walter Scott’s 1823 account in Quentin Durward of the ‘new fashioned art of multiplying manuscripts by the intervention of machinery’. But Knight omits the last words which look forward to ‘establishing and overthrowing religions; erecting and destroying kingdoms’ (Scott 1827, 3:735). The spread of illustrated texts to a new audience, many of whom were illiterate, was a cultural revolution with unknown implications. Knight’s Penny Magazine was designed from early on ‘to familiarise the people with great works of art’. The magazine included ‘engravings of a costly character, of such subjects as the Laocoon, the Apollo Belvedere, the Cartoons, and the great Cathedrals, British and Foreign’ (Knight 2014, 2:184). Patricia Anderson points out that the ‘magazine’s predominant feature and major selling point’ was ‘its high-quality engravings of painting and sculpture’ (Anderson 1987, 134). The cultural knowledge that allowed Sterne’s reader to conjure up images of Guido Reni’s monks was now, in theory, available to all. For the Tory Quarterly, this visual turn was potentially a sign of the infantilisation as well as the democratisation of culture: it marked a ‘partial return to baby literature – to a second childhood of learning – the eye is often appealed to instead of the understanding’ (Anonymous, ‘Illustrated Books’ 1844, 171). The Quarterly is engaged in a culture war to protect elite culture from the democratising (if still hierarchical) urges of utilitarian projects. In the rise of the new visual culture, it notes, ‘the greatest impulse was given by the publication of the “Penny Magazine” of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’ (170). The new visual print culture seemed the consequence of ‘a low utilitarian wish to give and receive the greatest possible amount of knowledge at the least possible expense of time, trouble, money, and, we may add, of intellect’ (Anonymous, ‘Illustrated Books’ 1844, 171).

Coda A manuscript of A Sentimental Journey held by the British Library is extra-illustrated with nineteenth-century pictures.1 The first image of Calais Harbour is based on a painting by Clarkson Stanfield. The others are cut from an 1839 edition of A Sentimental Journey, with engravings by John Bastin and G. Nicholls, based on drawings by Charles Jacque and Joseph Fussell. The 1839 edition, however, employs illustrations to a very different effect than Sterne’s mental illustrations, lifting the scenes out of the realm of the imagination. La Fleur, the reader is told, ‘is not an entirely imaginary character. That excellent man was born in Burgundy’ (Sterne 1839, iv). La Fleur, who is still alive at this point, is able to testify to the truth of the episodes described by Sterne: ‘The dead ass is not a fiction. The poor man bathed in tears, was as simple and interesting as my master described him. I remember the circumstance perfectly’ (Sterne 1839, v). La Fleur (the real Burgundian traveller) is thus able to testify to the honesty and generosity of Sterne/Yorick’s motives: ‘I remember that at almost every post, he would turn to me, with tears in his eyes, and say, “these poor creatures afflict

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me much, my dear La Fleur. How can I relieve them?”’ (Sterne 1839, vi). The 1839 Sterne illustrations use gesture, scene setting in small woodcuts drawing on techniques familiar from illustrations by Phiz for Pickwick Papers. They also play down the eroticism of the text. When it comes to ‘The Captive’, the picture does not signal that this is an imagined captive. The illustrations turn this into a travel book, with characters and details of the locality cashing in on the period’s enthusiasm for travel and tourism, transforming the freedom of the unillustrated ‘Fancy’ into ‘real illustration’.

Note   1. ‘A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY, etc., etc.’, the first part; by Laurence Sterne, M.A. The author’s corrected draft, prepared for the press; together with the printed preface and woodcut illustrations of the edition by Nichols (?). Prefixed is a letter of Mrs. Jemima Day respecting the history of the manuscript; 7 July 1843. Paper; XVIIIth cent. Small Quarto. [Bibl. Eg. 1,610.] British Library Egerton MS 1610.

Bibliography Altick, Richard D. 1985. Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760–1900. Columbus: Ohio State UP. Anderson, Patricia J. 1987. ‘Pictures for the People: Knight’s “Penny Magazine”, an Early Venture into Popular Art Education’. Studies in Art Education 28 (3): 133–40. Anonymous. 1844. ‘Illustrated Books’. Quarterly Review 147: 167–99. Bennett, Shelley M. 1988. Thomas Stothard: The Mechanisms of Art Patronage in England circa 1800. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Bentley, G. E. Jr. 1988. ‘Richard Edwards, Publisher of Church-and-King Pamphlets and of William Blake’. Studies in Bibliography 41: 283–315. [Boydell]. 1789. A Catalogue of the Pictures in the Shakspeare Gallery. London: Sold at the Place of Exhibition. Calè, Luisa. 2017. ‘Blake, Young, and the Poetics of the Composite Page’. Huntingdon Library Quarterly 80 (3): 453–79. Cowper, William. n.d. Poems in Two Volumes: A New Edition. 1798th ed. Vol. 2. 2 vols. London: J. Johnson. ———. n.d. Poems in Two Volumes; a New Edition. 1798th ed. Vol. 1. 2 vols. London: J. Johnson. Dayes, Edward. 1805. The Works of the Late Edward Dayes, Containing Professional Sketches of Modern Artists. Edited by E. W. Brayley. London. Finley, Gerald. 1980. Landscapes of Memory: Turner as Illustrator to Scott. London: Scolar Press. Fox, Celina. 1976. ‘The Engravers’ Battle for Professional Recognition in Early Nineteenth Century London’. The London Journal 2 (1): 3–31. Garside, Peter. 2013. ‘Print Illustrations and the Cultural Materialism of Scott’s Waverley Novels’. In British Literature and Print Culture, edited by Sandro Jung, 125–57. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Gordon, Catherine. 1971. ‘The Illustration of Sir Walter Scott: Nineteenth-Century Enthusiasm and Adaptation’. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 34: 297–317. Graham, Patrick. 1812. Sketches of Perthshire. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Peter Hill and John Ballantyne; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Co. Haywood, Ian, Susan Matthews and Mary L. Shannon. 2019. Romanticism and Illustration. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

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Hazlitt, William. 1825. The Spirit of the Age: or, Contemporary Portraits. London: Henry Colburn. Hunt, Leigh. 1923. The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt. Edited by H. S. Milford. London and New York: Oxford UP. Irving, Washington. 1835. The Crayon Miscellany, by the Author of the Sketch Book, No.2 Containing Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard. Jung, Sandro. 2013. ‘Packaging, Design and Colour: From Fine-Printed to Small-Format Editions of Thomson’s The Seasons, 1793–1802’. In British Literature and Print Culture, edited by Sandro Jung, 97–124. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Knight, Charles. 2014. Passages of a Working Life during Half a Century, Volume 2: With a Prelude of Early Reminiscences. 1873 reissue. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Knowles, John. 1831. The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli. Vol. 3. 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley. Leask, Nigel. 2020. Stepping Westward: Writing the Highland Tour c. 1720–1830. Oxford: Oxford UP. Malkin, Charlotte. 1814. ‘Charlotte Malkin Journal of Travels in Scotland’. Curious Travellers. (last accessed 19 May 2022). Matthews, Susan. 2011. Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness. First paperback edition. Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 88. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ———. 2019. ‘Henry Fuseli’s Accommodations: “Attempting the Domestic” in the Illustrations to Cowper’. In Romanticism and Illustration, edited by Ian Haywood, Susan Matthews, and Mary L. Shannon, 119–42. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP. Millgate, Jane. 1993. ‘For Lucre or for Fame: Lockhart’s Versions of the Reception of Marmion’. The Review of English Studies 44 (174): 187–203. Myrone, Martin. 2006. Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination. London: Tate Publishing. ———. 2019. ‘Coda: Romantic Illustration and the Privatization of History Painting’. In Romanticism and Illustration, edited by Ian Haywood, Susan Matthews and Mary L. Shannon, 288–301. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Raimbach, Abraham. 1843. Memoirs and Recollections of the Late Abraham Raimbach, Esq. Edited by M. T. S. Raimbach. London: Frederick Shoberl. Russett, Margaret. 2017. ‘To View Fair Melrose Aright’. The Bottle Imp (blog). (last accessed 5 November 2021). Scott, Walter. 1826. Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland with Descriptive Illustrations by Sir Walter Scott. Bart. Vol. 1. 2 vols. London and Edinburgh: John and Arthur Arch, William Blackwood. ———. 1827. The Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Volume III Containing The Abbot, Kenilworth, The Pirate, The Fortunes of Nigel, Quentin Durwand. Vol. 3. Paris: A and W Galignani. ———. 1833–4. The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. 8 vols. Edinburgh: Robert Cadell and Whitaker. St Clair, William. 2004. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Sterne, Laurence. 1839. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, by Laurence Sterne, Illustrated with Numerous Engravings on Wood by Bastin and G. Nicholls: From Original Drawings by Jacque and Fussell. London: J. E. Nicholls. ———. [1968] 1984. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Edited by Ian Jack. Oxford: Oxford UP. Storer, James and John Greig. 1803. Cowper, Illustrated by a Series of Views in, or near, The Park of Weston-Underwood, Bucks, Accompanied with Copious Descriptions, and a Brief Sketch of the Poet’s Life. London: Vernon and Wood.

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Talfourd, Thomas Noon, ed. 1838. The Works of Charles Lamb. Vol. 1. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers. Thomson, Katrina. 1999. Turner and Sir Walter Scott: The Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland. Tilt, Charles, and David Bogue, eds. 1836. The Gallery of Byron Beauties; Portraits of the Principal Female Characters in Lord Byron’s Poems from Original Paintings by Eminent Artists. London: Tilt and Bogue. Watson, Nicola J. 2012. ‘Holiday Excursions to Scott Country’. In Travel Writing and Tourism in Britain and Ireland, edited by Colbert, Benjamin, 132–56. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. 2000. ‘Working Holiday: Turner as Waverley Tourist’. The Wordsworth Circle 31 (2) (Spring): 83–8. ———. 2001. The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

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20 Fashioning the Female Artist: Allegory and Celebrity in Lady Diana Beauclerk’s Watercolours of The Faerie Queene Laura Engel

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his chapter explores Lady Diana Beauclerk’s (1734–1808) rarely studied large-scale images of scenes from Edmund Spenser’s epic, The Faerie Queene, completed in 1781 while she was in residence near Horace Walpole’s Gothic mansion, Strawberry Hill. These remarkable watercolours depict key moments from the epic that focus on Spenser’s heroines in action. Borrowing from a variety of styles and techniques, the paintings are a blend of fantastical detail, global iconography and au courant fashion trends designed to highlight particular aspects of Spenser’s narrative. In this way, Beauclerk provides the spectator with a dazzling array of examples of the eclectic nature of late eighteenth-century visual culture. In particular, her portrayal of Spenser’s Britomart as a powerful and striking Minerva figure capitalises on the associations between Minerva, the goddess of war and wisdom, and women’s intellectual and artistic accomplishments across visual and narrative materials. Beauclerk’s representation of female figures in Spenser indicates that she was not just highlighting feminine virtue and beauty (as was the case with most visual representations of Spenser’s heroines), but rather revisiting specific instances of power, agency and determination in the epic.1 In doing so, Beauclerk provides new ways of thinking about the role of women artists in the late eighteenth century. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, The Faerie Queene was the subject of paintings and engravings by a number of artists including: Benjamin West, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Henry Fuseli and Angelica Kauffman.2 In terms of illustration, however, Beauclerk’s watercolours appear to be the only set of pictures made to accompany the epic (potentially for publication) aside from William Kent’s less elaborate images completed in 1751. Although these watercolours have been largely unseen both by her contemporaries and by modern scholars (they are housed today in a drawer at the Lewis Walpole Library), I argue that we can understand them as cleverly staged advertisements for Beauclerk’s work. Considering Beauclerk’s watercolours of The Faerie Queene to be more than simply amateur productions highlights the ambiguous distinction often made between amateur and professional women artists in the late eighteenth century. Beauclerk’s Faerie Queene project allowed her to participate in a trend popularised by leading professional artists, and these carefully rendered illustrations may have been designed to create more opportunities for her artistic career. While most eighteenth-century artists’ depictions of Spencer’s female characters focused on Una as an honourable heroine of the British nation accompanied by her

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beloved Lion or surrounded by lusty satyrs, Beauclerk only includes one image of Una in her series. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted a portrait of Beauclerk’s daughter Elizabeth as Una with her Lion in 1778.3 In her own vision of Spenser, however, Beauclerk includes her daughters in another scene reproducing a direct reference to her own portrait of them. In creating a world in which her daughters could quite literally ‘see’ themselves, Beauclerk offers alternate ways of viewing the epic through female agency and artistry. In addition, Beauclerk’s iconography in these images (such as her use of armour, putti, skeletons and graceful female figures) anticipates elements of her successful commercial illustrations for the Gothic poem ‘Lenore’ by Gottfried August Bürger, published in 1796. Ironically, The British Critic offered a harsh critique of William Blake’s illustrations for the same text, praising Beauclerk’s more realistic and attractive designs. In an epilogue for this chapter, I look briefly at the implications of this comparison. What does it mean that very few people have heard of Diana Beauclerk, while William Blake is a household name? How might the reception of the ‘Lenore’ illustrations tell us something about Romantic spectators and the formation of canonical icons? Beauclerk’s career as a professional artist has been largely overlooked. According to Hazel Wilkinson, who is the only scholar to publish an in-depth critical analysis of Beauclerk’s watercolours of The Faerie Queene, Beauclerk’s invisibility is connected to the reception history of Spenser in the eighteenth century. In her discussion of the watercolours, she argues that ‘the Spenser paintings create a version of the poem that fulfilled the same function as a closet drama; it allowed a select coterie to gather in an intimate space and imagine themselves into Spenser’s narrative’ (Wilkinson 2016, 127). Wilkinson concludes that the reason ‘Diana Beauclerk’s watercolours have remained unpublished and undiscussed’ is ‘testament to the lasting influence of the cult of privacy that pervaded eighteenth-century coterie responses to Spenser’ (Wilkinson 2016, 130). While I’m not interested in disputing Wilkinson’s persuasive argument, what I do want to propose is that there are more possible explanations than a lack of public interest in Spenser for why Diana Beauclerk’s watercolours have remained in an archive drawer. In my view, the fact that these images have received little attention is connected more directly to Beauclerk’s precarious status as a working female artist in the late eighteenth century, as well as the complicated nature of her celebrity. Most women artists in this period were classified as ‘amateurs’; there were only two women, Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffman, officially admitted to the Royal Academy (I will return to Kauffman later in this chapter). Many women, such as Anne Damer, Mary Linwood and Maria Cosway (to name just a few), were well-known, established artists working in a variety of media, including sculpture, painting, miniatures and embroidery.4 Scholars of women’s writing in particular are returning to the ambiguous classification of ‘amateur’ in order to revise this inadequate designation, a conversation that is also happening right now in art history and theatre studies.5 Diana Beauclerk’s scandalous backstory, her ability to work across media often associated with craft or the decorative arts, and the lack of critical attention to her art during her lifetime, have all contributed to ways in which her work as a legitimate artist has been ignored. The daughter of Charles Spencer, the 3rd Duke of Marlborough, Diana Beauclerk grew up a child of privilege living in the cavernous Blenheim Palace. Despite her aristocratic title, her father’s debts and the family’s lavish lifestyle made it necessary for her and her sisters to marry into money. Diana Beauclerk’s advantageous and tumultuous

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marriage to Lord Bolingbrooke resulted in a very public separation and divorce. She left him for the handsome Topham Beauclerk, who subsequently died, leaving Lady Diana at liberty to pursue her artistic career full time. This fortunate freedom coupled with her proximity to Horace Walpole, his important circle of literati and artistic friends, and his exceptional house Strawberry Hill, contributed to the ways in which her work flourished from the 1780s until her death in 1808. She worked in an impressive variety of media including pastel, watercolour, interior design, wax and porcelain.6 Most critical attention paid to Beauclerk has either been in reference to her titillating biography or to her illustrations for Walpole’s Gothic drama, The Mysterious Mother (which were housed in a specially made piece of furniture called ‘The Beauclerk Cabinet’ in a unique room at Strawberry Hill).7 The secretive and seductive nature of these images – meant to be viewed, like the play itself, by a select audience – has created a narrative about Beauclerk as an amateur artist without any ambition or professional aspirations. I propose alternatively that the Spenser watercolours (which are much larger than The Mysterious Mother drawings) represent a very different view of Beauclerk. These watercolours, conceived as a group, resemble history paintings, echoing the very popular work of Angelica Kauffman.8 Yet, Beauclerk’s works also contain contemporary elements that refer back to her own artistic practice, creating a kind of hybrid effect. Beauclerk’s use of Spenser’s heroine Britomart as a Minerva figure, and her adaptation of late eighteenth-century fashionable dress and accessories to work within Spenser’s world, provide her with strategies for potentially reaching a wide audience. Beauclerk’s decision to represent scenes dramatising female figures, particularly Britomart, in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, perhaps England’s most famous allegorical narrative, allows her to play with visual and textual motifs supporting female artistic agency inherent in Spenser’s epic. As scholars have expertly shown, the range of female characters in The Faerie Queene represents various aspects of Elizabeth I (I will return to this idea later on). As such, these figures are a hybrid or composite portrait of a specific individual. I suggest that Diana Beauclerk stages a similar dynamic, representing diverse versions of herself as an artist through her rendering of Spenser’s world. Beauclerk’s ghosting of herself in various places creates a visual archive of self-representation. She invites viewers to engage in different ways of seeing the watercolours. If we pay close attention to visual details, we can find representations of the literary nuances of the text, particularly in relation to the agency of the central heroines. At the same time, close attention to visual details reveals the talents of the artist herself. Sometimes this is very obvious, such as when she positions a portrait of her daughters in the front of a scene or embellishes a shield with images of her decorative putti designs for Wedgwood, while other figures invite allusions to the idea of herself as a Minerva – an artistic warrior figure revealing her significant talents to the world. In doing so, Beauclerk’s watercolours of The Faerie Queene represent a particular aesthetic strategy of allusion and intermediality designed to navigate the murky and ambiguous terrain between the amateur female artist and the legitimate working professional. Catherine Nicholson’s recent analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representations of Una in The Faerie Queene offers some important context for the ways in which Beauclerk’s watercolours both engage in and depart from a view of the epic as a celebration of childhood imagination, freedom and fantasy. According to Nicholson, ‘[w]hen eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics struggled to account

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for their persistent attachment to The Faerie Queene, it was Una, and childhood, they remembered’ (Nicholson 2020, 77). Nicholson provides a long list of eighteenthcentury male authors who fondly remember The Faerie Queene as one of their favourite reading pleasures as children, including Pope, Addison, Southey and Hazlitt (Nicholson 2020, 78–9). While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore how young girls might have encountered The Faerie Queene, it seems important to note that Beauclerk’s illustrations may have been designed with female readers, like her daughters, in mind. Her vision of the epic departs from images of Una as either an ideal heroine or an eroticised figure (Una is often depicted lounging in semi-erotic poses),9 and introduces Britomart as the central figure along with the joyful, dancing Hellenore and the gloriously beautiful Pasturella. At the same time, the details of these images reference Beauclerk’s own work, while also echoing well-known professional artists, such as Angelica Kauffman.

Celebrity and Allegory: A Minerva Moment The incomparable novelist and social observer, Frances Burney, recalls in her diary a telling conversation at Strawberry Hill about Lady Diana Beauclerk between Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke and Edward Gibbon around the time Beauclerk began composing her vision of The Faerie Queene. From the window of the dining-parlour, Sir Joshua [Reynolds] directed us to look at a pretty white house, which belonged to Lady Di. Beauclerk. ‘I am extremely glad,’ said Mr. Burke, ‘to see her at last so well housed; poor woman! the bowl has long rolled in misery; I rejoice that it has now found its balance. I never, myself, so much enjoyed the sight of happiness in another, as in that woman when I first saw her after the death of her husband [. . .] Oh, it was pleasant, it was delightful to see her enjoyment of her situation!’ ‘But, without considering the circumstances’ said Mr. Gibbon, ‘this may appear very strange, though, when they are fairly stated, it is perfectly rational and unavoidable.’ ‘Very true,’ said Mr. Burke, ‘if the circumstances are not considered, Lady Di. may seem highly reprehensible.’10 The satiric tone of Burney’s theatrical retelling of this anecdote reflects the conflicting ideas circulating around women, reputation and artistic ambition in the late eighteenth century. Clearly Diana Beauclerk’s situation as a recently widowed woman (from her second husband), enjoying herself in her new circumstances, was a topic for gossip and critique. It is important to remember that Beauclerk painted the watercolours of The Faerie Queene at a moment when her public image was shifting – a time when she needed to invent ways to recast her persona. Because of her questionable reputation and social standing in the 1780s, Beauclerk needed to borrow from available models of female success to promote her work. Angelica Kauffman’s subject matter and her use of the goddess Minerva, in particular, provided Beauclerk with a way to approach her revision of Spenser’s epic as well as a way to refashion her own image.11 For the select few female artists who achieved professional status and admission to the Royal Academy, the use of allegory became inextricably entwined with the creation and promotion of their celebrity. As Angela Rosenthal argues in her groundbreaking study of

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Kauffman, ‘[t]he blurring of the lines between self-portraiture and symbolic, allegorical or mythological self-fashioning was for women artists a particularly attractive mode of claiming artistic status’ (Rosenthal 2006, 245). In particular, Kauffman’s ‘exploration of new forms of self-inscription’ and her use of ‘symbolic, allegorical, and mythological masks’ enabled her ‘to perform successfully on a professional stage, significantly upending our notion of what self-portrayal should and could entail’ (Rosenthal 2006, 233–4). Amanda Vickery argues persuasively that Kauffman developed a business strategy designed to promote her own specific brand of female artistry in order to counteract the dangers associated with public recognition: ‘Kauffman neutralized the risqué associations of female flaunting with a self-presentation that was ever soothing and saintly, making the most of her continental cachet, musical talents, quiet charm and sensibility’ (Vickery 2020: 7). Kauffman participated in the fashionable trend of using classical iconography to depict notable women as goddesses and female muses in order to connect their personas with beauty, fame, artistic talent and intellectual accomplishment.12 For Kaufmann and other artists, Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, the arts and strategic warfare, seems to have been a multifaceted figure for celebrating artistic intellectual women. Angelica Kauffman’s self-portrait (c. 1775–80) features the artist holding a paintbrush and folder of sketches, posed next to an antique bust of Minerva, elevating her own persona to a position of timeless power and artistic agency. The same ideas are repeated in Kauffman’s Portrait of Lady with a Sculpture of Minerva (c. 1775), which represents a beautifully dressed woman in a deep blue ‘all’antica’ robe trimmed with gold. She holds a scroll and writing tool in her hands, a bronze statue of Minerva clad in armour sits on an ornate table next to a book. Although we do not know who this woman is, Angela Rosenthal surmises that she ‘could be a writer of genteel status, while the presence of Minerva/Athena presiding over the scene, gazing down at and casting its shadow over the book, might also suggest that the woman is a patron of the arts, herself presiding over cultural creativity’ (Rosenthal 2006, 168). John Fayram’s portrait of the intellectual bluestocking Elizabeth Carter as Minerva depicts Carter wearing armour and gazing confidently at the spectator. Portraits of Minerva served as an emblem for many different kinds of notable women, from artists to aristocrats to bluestockings.13 Minerva’s mutability provided a way for Beauclerk to connect the celebrated realm of ‘high art’ represented by Kauffman with imagery circulating in the everyday world through prints and periodicals. Recently, as part of her extraordinary work on The Lady’s Magazine, Jennie Batchelor has focused on the figure of Minerva as a representation of female artistic accomplishment, authorship and wisdom. According to Batchelor, Minerva became [t]he figurehead for the aspirations of a woman’s magazine that advocated the individual and cultural benefits of women’s reading and writing. In 15 of the 20 frontispieces it published between 1770 and 1789, Minerva takes centre stage as guide, counsellor, and protector of its female reader, muse of its authors, and as precedent for the ideal of virtuous female learning the periodical promoted (Batchelor 2020, 80). Beauclerk’s representations of Britomart – a character that Spenser specifically refers to as Minerva in one of the scenes that Beauclerk reimagines –­ recuperate

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and restage these connections between Minerva and female artistic agency during what I am calling a ‘Minerva moment’. Kauffman’s portrait of herself with a bust of Minerva is from 1780; frontispieces for The Lady’s Magazine for 1779, 1780 and 1781, all feature images of Minerva; and Beauclerk’s watercolours of The Faerie Queene are dated 1781. These images combine depictions of Britomart/ Minerva with images of contemporary women in fashionable late eighteenthcentury dress, creating a paradoxical connection between the fantasy of the past and the tangible reality of the present. Beauclerk actively participated in this vogue for Minerva imagery, which was a popular shorthand for women’s artistic ambitions (Batchelor 2020).

The Watercolours The very little that we know about the circumstances and composition of the paintings comes from James Boswell, who paid an afternoon visit to Beauclerk’s house while staying with Walpole at Strawberry Hill. I begged to see a particular painting by her ladyship from Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and read the passage . . . and looked at the picture and was charmed. I said the representation was such, one could not say whether the poetry was taken from the painting or the painting from the poetry; whether the poetry or the painting was first. Said she: That is the finest compliment I ever had paid me. I’ll write that in a book, as you do. (quoted in Hicks 2002, 270) Although Hazel Wilkinson dismisses this compliment, writing that ‘Boswell’s praise of them was sycophantic’ (Wilkinson 2016, 120), I’m not sure why we cannot accept Boswell’s admiration of Beauclerk’s talent. Watercolour was certainly not as lofty a genre as painting or sculpture, but famous artists of the time period (particularly Thomas Gainsborough) worked in this medium.14 The materials were easy to obtain but very difficult to manipulate, particularly on such a large scale. The reproductions of Beauclerk’s watercolours do not show the depth and movement of the paint. The effect of the intricacy of the materials or the shadow and texture of the foliage is lost. What would it mean to consider the idea that Boswell was telling the truth in his assessment of the astonishing connection that he felt between the poem and the paintings? Even Wilkinson admits that ‘this level of textual fidelity had never before been seen in illustrations of Spenser’ (Wilkinson 2016, 127). Somehow for Wilkinson it makes sense to say that Beauclerk was an accomplished reader, but not that she was an accomplished artist. As I have previously mentioned, the scale of these watercolours is truly impressive, which suggests that they could have been intended to create a kind of installation or that, when engraved, they could illustrate a large edition of The Faerie Queene. Beauclerk’s watercolour from Canto I, Book IX, depicts Una and the Redcrosse Knight entering the cave of despair (fig. 20.1). The scene takes place just moments before Una grabs a knife from Redcrosse’s hand and prevents him from taking his own life. Beauclerk’s talent for invoking the Gothic is on full display in this image, which features a large, mysterious cave, a dead body, swirling foliage and skeletons. Redcrosse is at the centre of the scene dressed in meticulously detailed armour; Una

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Figure 20.1  Lady Diana Beauclerk, Drawing for Book I, Canto IX, 33–37 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, c. 1781. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. stands behind him, her figure highlighted by her white gown and veil. The viewer’s eye is drawn to Una’s character, suggesting that she is the key player in this drama. Beauclerk’s representation of Una as a saviour foreshadows her subject matter in the subsequent pictures drawn from later moments in the epic. In this way, Beauclerk sets up her own visual story, one that follows the adventures of key female heroines and their important performances. The following illustration (fig. 20.2) from Book III, Canto IX 22–3, features Britomart standing centre stage, revealing herself as a dazzlingly beautiful woman to the astonished Arthegall. Wilkinson points out that Arthegall is still ‘in disguise as the Salvage Knight, as indicated by the vines wreathed around his armor’ (127). The text from the poem reads:

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Figure 20.2  Lady Diana Beauclerk, Drawing for Book III, Canto IX, 22–23 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, c. 1781. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Then of all of them she plainly was espyde, To be a woman, wight, vnwist to bee, The fairest woman wight, that euer eye did see. Like Mineura, being late returned From slaughter of the Giaunts conquered; Where proud Encelade, whose wide nostrils burnd, With breathed flames, like to a furnace red, Transfixed with the spear, down tumbled ded, From top of Hemus, by him heaped hye; Hath loosd her helmut from her lofty hed, and her Gorgonian Shield gins to vntye, From her left arme, to reste in glorious victorye. (21–2, 511)

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Spenser represents Britomart here as a fascinating hybrid creature: she is male and female, captivating and frightening, Minerva and Medusa. The power she wields to transfix others by her beauty is both celebrated and marked as potentially dangerous. Beauclerk’s representation of this scene highlights the specificity of Britomart’s dazzling figure. She stands in a pose that is simultaneously sculptural and active; holding the sword above her head and her shield against her forehead, her helmet lies on the ground as if she had just thrown it down. Britomart’s theatrical role as a Minerva figure becomes a sign for the dramatic significance of Beauclerk’s performance as an artist and creative muse. Such representations of figures dressed in armour resemble large-scale works by Angelica Kauffman, such as her Armida in Vain Endeavors with her Entreaties to Prevent Rinaldo’s Departure. Painting armour allows Beauclerk to show off her ability to render the anatomical details of bodies clothed in specific materials.15 Additionally, the putto figure on the front knight’s shield seems to function as a kind of eighteenth-century pop-up meme. While Beauclerk’s most recent biographer, Carola Hicks, notes that Wedgwood began working with women artists, including Beauclerk and Lady Templeton, around 1783, painted flowerpots from the archives of Strawberry Hill provide evidence of collaboration between Beauclerk and Wedgwood from 1779.16 Beauclerk’s decorative cherubs and cupids closely resemble the image on Scudamor’s shield, completed in 1781. Although we do not have correspondence between Beauclerk and Wedgwood specifically about the origins of her work for him, we do know that she became one of his female designers after 1783 and was included as an artist in his catalogue for 1787. Highlighting a moment in the epic that foregrounds Britomart as a Minerva figure, and including a visual reference to her own artistic design, one that could potentially be lucrative for her in the future, may have been part of Beauclerk’s clever strategy to advertise herself and her work through The Faerie Queene images. Beauclerk’s watercolour for Book III, Canto X represents the heroine, Hellenore, dancing joyfully with the satyrs after her escape from Malbecco’s house (fig. 20.3): Faire the Hellenore, with girlonds all bespred Whom their May-lady they had newly made: She proud of that new honour, which they red, And of their louley Fellowship full glade, Daunst liuely, and her face did with a Lawrell shade. (44, 531) As a dancing figure, Hellenore resembles depictions of the Three Graces, iconography that echoes portraits from the Renaissance, resurfacing again ubiquitously in portraits of women in the late eighteenth century.17 Helen Hackett examines the use of the three goddesses in depicting Queen Elizabeth and the politics of her court. She proposes, ‘The prolific use of the Three Goddesses motif may be understood as part of [a] widespread response to the iconographic problem posed by an unmarried female ruler. Her monarchical power and intellectual ability – both essential to a ruler but problematically masculine – could be more acceptable by means of identification with Juno and Pallas and could be balanced against the safely feminine beauty of Venus’ (Hackett 2014, 242). Beauclerk’s depiction of Hellenore mirrors the gestural iconography from a portrait of Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses (1569) by Hans Eworth, owned by Queen Charlotte.18

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Figure 20.3  Lady Diana Beauclerk, Drawing for Book III, Canto X, 43 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, c. 1781. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. I am not suggesting that Beauclerk was channelling this exact painting, but that her presentation of Hellenore as a graceful dancing muse may be associated simultaneously with forms of classicised, idealised femininity (found in representations of Elizabeth I) as well as notions of freedom and escape from convention.19 Beauclerk’s careful rendering of Hellenore’s crown of leaves and the black gauze veil that envelops her body also echoes the fashionable practice of depicting women in Turkish dress in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Here she aligns herself again with Kauffman. Angela Rosenthal explains, ‘Kauffman’s women in Turkish costume engage in a

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creative, if certainly not unproblematic, synthesis of Mediterranean cultures, reflecting the view that modern Turkey echoed ancient Greek Culture’ (Rosenthal 2006, 128). In fact, Kauffman’s portrait of Teresa Robinson Parker (1773) includes the sitter in sumptuous Turkish dress with an antique bust of Minerva and the Three Graces on a stone pedestal in the background, a combination of iconography employed by Beauclerk to signify particular aspects of female artistic identity. In addition, the exotic representation of Hellenore dancing allows Beauclerk to comment allegorically on the connections between herself as creator and muse, perhaps echoing her youthful conception of herself as the muse of dance. Beauclerk’s decision to represent Hellenore’s dancing scenes, like her decision to highlight the adventures of Britomart, reflect a reading of Spenser’s epic that privileges moments of female agency and freedom in the text. Beauclerk’s watercolour drawn from Book III, Canto XII returns to Britomart, in the scene where she rescues Amoret from the evil sorcerer Busirane (fig. 20.4). Holding her sword high in the air, Britomart threatens the sorcerer to reverse his curse and then manages to heal Amoret’s knife wound, making her body whole again: The cruell steele, which thrild her dying hart, Fell softly forth, as of his owne accord: And the wyde wound, which lately did disport Her bleeding brest, and riuen bowels gor’d Was closed vp, as it had not bene bor’d. (38, 559) Conjuring the stage, Beauclerk frames the scene through theatrical curtains revealing an ornately decorated set with intricate geometric designs that cover the back wall and archways. Clearly this is an extraordinary interior space. Christopher Burlinson has written about Spenser’s relationship to art, objects and architecture in this episode of The Faerie Queene where Britomart finds herself wandering through two long art galleries with a mixture of tapestries and paintings in order to get to Amoret. He suggests that treating Spenser’s objects as material things that might mimic the varied inventories of contemporary early modern galleries is another way of understanding the relationship between these artefacts and the scene’s central heroine (2006, 58). The imagery Beauclerk uses to depict the house of Busirane seems borrowed directly from the architecture and decorative objects found at Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill.20 This scene from Spenser may perhaps be Beauclerk’s reference to walking through Walpole’s galleries with his eccentric collection of contemporary portraits, antiques, armour and statuary. Her role as Britomart/Minerva casts her as the most powerful creative agent in the scene, as she not only reverses the curse, but remakes Amoret’s body after it has been wounded. Once again, it would seem that Beauclerk represents herself as a dynamic artistic force existing in a theatrical world of decorative things that present a variety of possibilities for rich interpretation. Busirane as the evil sorcerer/owner of the house may also represent an amalgam of male oppression, privilege and opinion (recall the conversation between Reynolds, Burke and Gibbon). In this reading, Amoret can be seen as an abject, traditionally feminine figure, although in Beauclerk’s world the female artist warrior is able to remake the scene and save the day.

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Figure 20.4  Lady Diana Beauclerk, Drawing for Book III, Canto XII, 30–33 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, c. 1781. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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Figure 20.5  Lady Diana Beauclerk, Drawing for Book VI, Canto IX, 7–9 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, c. 1781. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Beauclerk’s representation of Book VI, Canto IX contains the most strategic reference to her own work (fig. 20.5). In this scene, depicting Pastorella on a hill surrounded by lovely lasses and lusty shepherds, Beauclerk inserts a replica of her own portrait of her daughters in the foreground. Beauclerk’s large pastel of her young daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, captures them in a moment of reading and discussion (fig. 20.6). One of the daughters holds her hand up, gesturing with a finger, as if the two are deep in conversation. In the Spenser watercolour, two female figures dressed in late eighteenth-century fashionable garb are similarly seated together. Although they do not have a book in this scene, one of the figures holds up her hand to make a point with her finger, mimicking the iconography Beauclerk uses in her portrait of Mary and Elizabeth. Beauclerk’s original pastel of her daughters became an instant sensation when the well-known printmaker, Bartolozzi, reimagined the scene by placing the two girls on a long couch surrounded by an ornate curtain (fig. 20.7). In addition to figures that mimic Mary and Elizabeth, the central heroine of the image, Pastorella, placed ‘higher than all the rest’, is similar to Beauclerk’s widely circulated image of Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, also engraved by Bartolozzi. According to Carola Hicks, the Georgiana engraving and its ‘mass production in an edition of two hundred prints’ were ‘snapped up and rapidly sold out’ (Hicks 2002, 247). This success prompted

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Figure 20.6  Lady Diana Beauclerk, Portrait of the artist’s daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, reading a book, c. 1780. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Figure 20.7  Francesco Bartolozzi, Lady Diana Beauclerk’s daughters sitting on a bench, 15 May 1780. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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Beauclerk to try the same thing with her pastel portrait of her daughters. Hicks suggests that Beauclerk’s decision to market her work was directly tied to the aftermath of her husband’s death, her new-found artistic freedom, and her need for money. The fact that the Bartolozzi engravings appeared in 1779 and 1780, just as Beauclerk was composing The Faerie Queene series, suggests that she carefully positioned references to her past works within Spenser’s landscape. Beauclerk’s visual archive of her family and her artwork within Spenser’s world marks a deliberate strategy. Weaving references to her original compositions into episodes of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and staging iconographic echoes of Angelica Kauffman (particularly to the figure of Minerva as a mirror for Britomart, female artistry and Britain), provided Beauclerk with useful methods for fashioning her celebrity in her new-found freedom after the death of her second husband. This brings us back to the question of why these paintings have not been widely written about or exhibited. Certainly, Beauclerk’s considerable ability to work across artistic media further associated her talents with decorative art and craft, which led to her classification as a minor amateur artist. In addition, her scandalous marital history had an impact on her reputation as a significant artist later in her life. For Beauclerk, turning to Spenser may have offered her a way to use ‘speaking pictures’ to visually reimagine her own story.

Coda: Illustrating Lenore Several years after the Spenser project, when she was in her mid-sixties, Diana Beauclerk provided the illustrations for R. W. Spenser’s edition of Gottfried Augustus Bürger’s poem ‘Lenore’.21 As in her illustrations for The Faerie Queene, Beauclerk includes details of her previous work in these images, asserting her own brand. The decorative putti that she had designed for Wedgewood throughout the late 1780s adorn the frontispiece and the heading of each chapter. In one image, the putti are holding skulls, merging two seemingly incompatible forms of iconography that refer back to Beauclerk’s signature designs. The foliage, skeletons, armour and depictions of the central heroine, Lenore, mirror many elements of the images discussed above (fig. 20.8). In the same year, William Blake published three illustrations for ‘Lenore’ in a now extremely rare edition of the poem. The British Critic made the following comparison: We are highly impressed by the propriety, decorum and grace which characterises all the figures of this elegant artist [Lady Beauclerk], even those of a preternatural kind; forming a most striking contrast to the distorted, absurd and impossible monsters exhibited in the frontispiece to Mr. Stanley’s last edition [i.e. Blake’s design]. Nor can we pass by this opportunity of execrating that detestable taste, founded on the depraved fancy of one man of genius, which substitutes deformity and extravagance for force and expression, and draws men and women without skin, with their joints all dislocated; or imaginary beings which neither can nor ought to exist. (quoted in The William Blake Gallery 2017, 14)22 The British Critic could not have predicted that the ‘depravity and fancy of one man of genius’ would establish Blake much later as one of the most iconic Romantic authors and artists, a figure who defined an era. Yet, Beauclerk’s small moment in the spotlight suggests that her images did engage the public and make an impact on viewers.

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Figure 20.8  Lady Diana Beauclerk, Plate 4 from Leonora, 1796. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Ultimately, Beauclerk’s attention to models of female artistry and genius circulating through forms of lofty and popular genres offers an alternative narrative of Romantic artistic practice. This story looks beyond and around entrenched categories of singularity, authority and genius, and instead towards hybridity, echo and strategy. Beauclerk’s illustrations of The Faerie Queene model new ways of understanding how Romantic women artists viewed canonical texts through the eyes of their own artistic creations and with the vision of imparting a female-centred world to their daughters.

Notes   1. For more about the presence of Spenser in the eighteenth century, see Jonathan Kramnick (1996) and Hazel Wilkinson (2017). For a discussion of eighteenth-century illustrations of The Faerie Queene, see Andrew Hadfield (1999).   2. For a detailed list of paintings, engravings and illustrations of The Faerie Queene in the eighteenth century, see A. Hamilton (1990, 1022). For a detailed discussion of images of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century images of Una see Catherine Nicholson (2020: 84–9).   3. There is some ambiguity about the date of this portrait and about the sitter. Hicks refers to the sitter as Mary Beauclerk and the date of the portrait as 1778. The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1780 (Hicks 2002, 272). Nicholson cites the information from the British Museum taken from a print of the image from 1897 by Thomas Watson. Here the sitter is named Elizabeth and the date of the painting is 1782 (Nicholson 2020, 85).   4. For more on eighteenth-century women artists and material culture see Jennie Batchelor and Cora Caplan (2007); Serena Dyer and Chloe Wigston Smith (2020). For more on Beauclerk and women artists connected to Strawberry Hill, see Cynthia Roman (2009: 155–9).

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  5. For a compelling discussion of the amateur in eighteenth-century theatre and beyond see David Gilbert, Judith Hawley, Helen Nicholson and Libby Worth’s introduction: ‘On Amateurs: An Introduction and a Manifesto’ (2020: 2–9).  6. Beauclerk’s biographers, Hicks’s Improper Pursuits (2002), and Mrs Steuart Erskine’s Lady Diana Beauclerk, Her Life and Work (1903) all discuss Beauclerk’s work across genres. Hicks includes a reproduction of Beauclerk’s youthful self-portrait from 1755, an image where she depicts herself dressed in a costume that mimics a Rubens portrait (now in a private collection).  7. For more about Diana Beauclerk’s drawings for Walpole’s Gothic play The Mysterious Mother see Jade Higa (2014).   8. Their five watercolours. One from Book 1, Canto IX; three from Book III, Cantos IX, X and XII; and one from Book VI, Canto IX.   9. See, for example, Benjamin West’s Una and the Lion (Mary Hall in the Character of Una) (1771), and Angelica Kauffman’s Una and the Lion, c. 1780 (engraved by Bartolozzi). See (last accessed 11 May 2022). 10. Quoted in Hicks (2002, 264–5). Although this comment is a thinly veiled insult, it is far less cruel than Samuel Johnson’s famous and often quoted missive about Beauclerk recounted by Boswell after her adultery was made public: ‘My dear Sir, never accustom your mind to mingle virtue with vice. The woman’s a whore and there’s an end on’t’ (quoted in Hicks 2002, 3). 11. The most famous portrait we have of Diana Beauclerk by Sir Joshua Reynolds, commissioned by Lord Bolingbrooke, from 1763–5 (before the public separation and scandalous press), portrays her as an artist dressed in classical robes holding a painting tool in her hand. 12. The most famous example of this is Richard Samuels’s Portrait of The Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo (The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain) (1778), which depicts notable female artists, authors and actresses as female goddesses. 13. See Clare Barlow’s discussion of Elizabeth Carter as Minerva in her essay ‘Virtue, patriotism, and female scholarship in bluestocking portraiture,’ (2013, 63). 14. Hicks also suggests that the watercolours may have been intended as large book illustrations or prints. 15. It is important to note that female artists were not allowed to attend life-drawing classes at the Royal Academy. Learning anatomical drawing then became an exercise in strategic copying. 16. According to this item in the Strawberry Hill digital archives, Diana Beauclerk completed a design for Wedgwood flowerpots in 1779. See (last accessed 11 May 2022). Hicks notes that Beauclerk’s first contract with Wedgwood was signed in 1783 and that she appeared in his catalogue alongside other women artists in 1787 (284–5). 17. For an excellent discussion of the Three Graces and allegory in eighteenth-century portraits of women, see Gill Perry (1994). 18. According to the Royal Collection Trust this painting is listed as part of Queen Charlotte’s art collection during the time that Diana Beauclerk served as her Lady of the Bedchamber from 1761 to 1763. See (last accessed 11 May 2022). 19. While we cannot prove that Beauclerk saw this painting while she was working for the Queen, there is a chance she might have. There is a strong resemblance between the central figures in both images. 20. Hicks proposes that Beauclerk used Walpole’s house and art collection for inspiration for her Spenser compositions, and that she used his copy of Spenser as her reference guide (271).

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21. ‘Lenore’ is the German name of the poem. The English translation of the title is ‘Leonora’. 22. See (last accessed 11 May 2022).

Bibliography Barlow, Clare. 2013. ‘Virtue, patriotism, and female scholarship in bluestocking portraiture’. In Bluestockings Displayed: Portraiture, Performance, and Patronage, 1780–1830, edited by Elizabeth Eger, 60–80. New York: Cambridge UP. Batchelor, Jennie. 2020. ‘ UnRomantic Authorship: The Minerva Press and the Lady’s Magazine, 1770–1820’. Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840 23: 76–86. Batchelor, Jennie and Cora Caplan. 2007. Women and Material Culture 1660–1830. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Burlinson, Christopher. 2006. Allegory, Space and the Material World in the Writings of Edmund Spenser. Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer. Dyer, Serena and Chloe Wigston Smith. 2020. Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Bloomsbury Press. Erskine, Mrs Steuart. 1903. Lady Diana Beauclerk, Her Life and Work. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Gilbert, David, Judith Hawley, Helen Nicholson and Libby Worth. 2020. ‘On Amateurs: An Introduction and a Manifesto’. Performance Research 25 (1): 2–9. Hackett, Helen. 2014. ‘A New Image of Elizabeth I: The Three Goddesses Theme in Art and Literature’. Huntington Library Quarterly 77 (3): 225–6. Hadfield, Andrew. 1999. ‘William Kent’s Illustrations of The Faerie Queene’. Spenser Studies 14 (1): 1–15. Hamilton, A. ed. 1990. The Spenser Encyclopedia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hicks, Carola. 2002. Improper Pursuits: The Scandalous Life of an Earlier Lady Diana Spencer. New York: St Martin’s Press. Higa, Jade. 2014. ‘My Son, My Lover: Gothic Contagion and Maternal Sexuality in the Mysterious Mother’. In Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater 1660–1830, edited by Laura Engel and Elaine McGirr,179–97. Lewisberg, PA: Bucknell UP. Kramnick, Jonathan. 1996. ‘The Cultural Logic of Late Feudalism: Placing Spenser in the Eighteenth Century’. ELH 63 (4) (Winter): 871–92. Nicholson, Catherine. 2020. Reading and Not Rereading The Faerie Queene: Spenser and the Making Of Literary Criticism. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP. Perry, Gill. 1994. ‘Women in Disguise: likeness, the Grand Style, and the conventions of “feminine” portraiture in the work of Sir Joshua Reynolds’. In Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture, edited by Gill Perry and Michael Rossington, 18–40. Manchester: Manchester UP. Roman, Cynthia. 2009. ‘The Art of Lady Diana Beauclerk: Horace Walpole and Female Genius’. In Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, edited by Michael Snodin with the assistance of Cynthia Roman, 154–69. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. Rosenthal, Angela. 2006. Angelica Kauffman: Art and Sensibility. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Vickery, Amanda. 2020. ‘Branding Angelica: Reputation Management in Late Eighteenth Century England’. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 43 (1): 3–24. Wilkinson, Hazel. 2016. ‘Edmund Spencer and Coterie Culture 1774–1790’. In Re-evaluating the Literary Coterie 1580–1830: From Sidney to Blackwood’s, edited by W. J. Bowers, W. J. & H. Crumme, 111–35. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2017. Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

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21 Angelica Kauffman and the Sister Arts Thora Brylowe

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he sister arts are a curious and unstable collection of siblings. They are said to be daughters of Nature, a divine parent who endows them with mimetic features meant to enhance their mother’s beauty and charm their beholders. Since their birth, their job, if personified allegories can be said to work, has been to represent the relatedness of various cultural forms and practices. There have been many sisters, but the two who first entered the English language were Painting and Poetry. Others followed. In 1748, an English writing master suggested that drawing and penmanship – the purview of pencil and pen respectively – were sister arts (Bickham). Another half century later, the American Presbyterian minister John Blair Linn, in his 1802 poem The Powers of Genius, recommends that architecture be added to a list of sisters that include ‘Poetry, Painting, Statuary and Music’ (81). To understand the sisters’ importance in the period of British Romanticism is to recognise the seeds of something we might today call ‘interdisciplinarity’ or perhaps ‘transdisciplinarity’. To get there, we must invite the personified sisters to exit the realm of form. They properly belong to the realm of use. Despite their fine drapery, these allegories, in fact, work quite hard. Imaginary as they may have been, the sister arts were deployed by real people trying to make a living. This chapter briefly addresses the history of the sister arts in order to frame a discussion of their political implications for Romantic-era cultural practitioners and for their print mediators, with a particular focus on the painter Angelica Kauffman. It will then open out into the broader issue of disciplinarity, which, as Jon Klancher and others have argued, is a legacy of Romantic-era professionalisation across the arts and sciences (Klancher 2013; Valenza 2009). By ‘cultural practitioner’ I mean people who make cultural objects. I use the word make rather than create because I am interested in skilled labour and in practices of the hand. Because of my own disciplinary commitments, I have little to say about most of the cast of sisters. My argument has less to do with music, dance, theatre, gardening, drawing, &c. – all sisters at one point or another – and more to do with painting and poetry. In literary studies, the idea that painting and poetry are the sister arts probably has as much to do with Jean Hagstrum’s 1958 book as it does with John Dryden’s introduction of the sisters in 1695. Hagstrum’s classic The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism from Dryden to Gray has been out of print since 1987, but it resparked an interest in ekphrastic poetry that was taken up by critics whom readers of this volume might know better, among them W. J. T. Mitchell and James Heffernan. Ekphrasis – that is, literary writing about visual art – re-emerged as an important theoretical issue. Heffernan declared, in the opening paragraph of Museum of Words, ‘I suspect we are nearing the end of what we can learn about the sister arts by simply comparing

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them, by observing similarities that help us to read – or more accurately construct – the signature of a period or to formulate a master theory of signification’ (1993, 1). Heffernan goes on to claim that the ‘relation between the arts in an ekphrastic work of literature is not impressionistic – not something conjured up by an act of juxtaposition and founded on a nebulous “sense” of affinity. On the contrary it is tangible and manifest, demonstrably declared by the very nature of ekphrastic representation’ (1). With this dismissal, which of course clears space for a valuable analysis of ekphrastic works from Homer to the twentieth century, Heffernan effectively banishes the sister arts on the very first page of his book – for what sisters in particular offer is relational comparison. Sisters look like one another. Or they don’t. But the point is the comparison they invite, which is, for most of us, decidedly impressionistic. The study of ekphrasis is not the mere comparison between artistic and literary forms. It is a matter of serious study – and in fact of antagonism, as Mitchell explained in his groundbreaking Iconology (1986). For Mitchell, ideology itself is a product of the struggle between words and images that goes back to the beginning of civilisation (4). But gentle, classically garbed sisters suggest feminine affinity, not hostility. The sister arts, it would seem, are different from other word/image relationships. For this reason, I part ways with twentieth-century studies of ekphrasis, energeia, iconology and pictorialism. In this chapter, I, like those I analyse, take up and discard sisters in provisional and self-serving ways. Critics from Hagstrum to the present agree that any sister-arts formulation makes for sloppy theory. Comparison, as Heffernan asserts above, constructs as much as it signals a relationship. ‘You could be sisters’, says a woman on the street of my daughter and her best friend. It is a claim based on an unrigorous, even nebulous, ‘sense’ (to use Heffernan’s word) of similarity. Nevertheless, such comparisons prevail across the Romantic period. Heffernan’s reasons for dismissing the sister arts on the first page of Museum of Words – that they can be made to do whatever we like – is exactly the reason they keep cropping up. What follows, then, is a case for the practical value of comparison. The sisters embody forms and genres in ways that have little equivalence. While we might be comfortable analysing painting vis-à-vis poetry, the idea of making claims that poetry and architecture can be personified as sisters seems strange and out of context. Like my daughter and her friend, they could be sisters, but it would take a persuasive argument that lists their similarities and asserts their affinities for one another. A better question than ‘what makes them sisters?’ might be ‘what makes somebody want to say they are sisters?’ To answer that, to examine the sisters in their historical specificity, is to enter a realm better served by theories of culture than by theories of form. There were (and are) good reasons to make relational claims about fields and subfields of knowledge and culture. Sometimes it is beneficial to adopt. At other times, it is better to disavow unwanted or embarrassing relatives. In the early Romantic period, the sister Poetry was explicitly claimed by British painters, and Sister Sculpture proved useful to engravers. We find sibling relationships deployed by individuals and institutions, and sometimes those deployments are at odds. Sisterly alignments of artistic practice often signal an attempt to unify fault lines within and between artistic disciplines. The sisters found themselves in England when John Dryden translated du Fresnoy’s Ars Graphica, first published in 1695. Dryden added his own preface that claimed to explicate the connection between painting and poetry. Over the eighteenth century, various sister arts became icons for comparisons between

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fields of cultural practice. Again, these sisters kept appearing not despite uncareful theoretical applications, but rather because they had the potential to allegorise and compare whole swaths of cultural practice. It is perhaps unsurprising to hear that a feminine symbol of affinity and relationality smooths over internal struggle: families have relied on women to perform these tasks for thousands of years. Furthermore, for those working across disciplines in academic settings today, it is useful to consider a few lessons taught by these largely forgotten art sisters as we make claims for the value of our own work. The sister arts dress like Greco-Roman goddesses, but they were a Renaissance invention that loaned gravitas borrowed from the ancients to contemporary practice. In England, as Hagstrum’s book argues, from Dryden to Gray they supported the Augustan penchant for pictorial, image-driven poetry. Hagstrum, however, was never really concerned with anything but poetry, and as he explains in his introduction, he’s happy to leave the other sister to the art historians ([1958] 1987, xii, xxi). But Dryden’s original English sisters were of special importance for visual artists, who longed for the cultural prestige of poets, particularly in England, where they were little respected and commanded low pay. Painters need not have any interest in theory to understand that a comparison to poetry was favourable to their trade. Painting was not genteel. A ragstrewn studio was nothing like a small, neat writing desk. The comparison was, therefore, of urgent professional value. The reason Dryden’s preface was reprinted with new translations of du Fresnoy well into the nineteenth century has less to do with its theoretical value than with those who wanted to say that Painting and Poetry were sisters. The Swiss-born painter Angelica Kauffman, an artist known for her self-portraits, understood the power of the sister arts to shape her professional identity. Kauffman moved from Italy to London in 1766, where the fame she had initially garnered in the academies of Bologna, Venice and Rome skyrocketed. Although she was a woman, her talent, her friendship with the painter Joshua Reynolds, and her relationship to the royal family enabled her to act as one of the founding members of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768. If painting was considered an ungenteel profession for a man, it was nearly unthinkable for a woman. Kauffman not only had to negotiate difficulties associated with her profession’s comparatively low status, she had also to manage the expectations associated with femininity and her status as a public figure. Despite her fame, Kauffman’s membership in the Royal Academy amounted to little more than tokenism (Vickery 2016). It was far too indecorous for women to attend academic lifedrawing classes, which featured nude models. In Zoffany’s The Academicians of the Royal Academy, completed in 1772, all the members but Kauffman and Mary Moser, the other woman founder, are pictured surrounding the nude or partially dressed male models in relaxed homosociability (see fig. 21.1). Zoffany manages Kauffman and Moser’s absence by slapping unframed, partially finished portraits of the two women on the wall behind the gathering. In making the women into portraits, they come to serve a decorative function. Yet neither likeness is especially flattering. The gaze of each woman is directed away from the scene below. Their likenesses are painted with closed, unbecoming expressions meant to signify their modesty and perhaps indicate that they ‘look the other way’ as the Academicians enjoy each other’s company. Unlike the adjacent sculptural objects meant to serve as models, the portraits are contemporary, a product of rather than a model for Academicians. The men of the Royal Academy, this painting implies, made these women.

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Figure 21.1  Richard Earlom after Joseph Zoffany, ‘Life School at the Royal Academy. The Royal Academy of Arts’, 1773. Mezzotint. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. If the exclusionary misogyny were not clear enough, one need only note the dismembered sculpture of a female torso in the right foreground. The sculpture appears to be designed to stand, yet its nude marble body lies in a receptive position on the floor, its head either missing or obscured, as the male model seated above casually dresses himself. The angle and shadow emphasise breasts and genital area. Disturbingly, the idealised body’s navel suggests an insertion point for Richard Cosway’s walking stick, which he rests assertively on the statue’s belly. As Magdalena Haüsle points out, Cosway would one day marry the successful painter and composer Maria Hadfield (2007, 254). In fact, Zoffany himself was soon to mentor Hadfield in Florence (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB)). Here, though, Cosway’s phallic stick pressed onto the body of the sculpture suggests possession and domination. Haüsle understatedly calls Cosway’s gesture ‘magisterial’ (2007, 254). Cosway’s set jaw and expression of triumph read as smug cruelty. His faraway gaze indicates that whatever may be underfoot is of no consequence. This foregrounded vignette of sexualised male dominance unfolds directly below the dowdy portraits of Kauffman and Moser. Clearly, the Academy is no place for a lady. While Zoffany’s painting negotiates Kauffman’s status as an Academician in a way that (albeit grudgingly) protects her femininity, making her a painting does nothing to contribute to her standing as a painter. If this painting is any indication, Kauffman had to build her own reputation. She secured a home in Golden Square with a studio

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separate from the space for meeting patrons and exhibited multiple history paintings yearly. As much as the public admired her work, English reviewers consistently criticised her allegedly effeminate treatment of the male body and praised her history paintings as exceptional – for paintings painted by a woman.1 A review of the 1780 Exhibition, for example, deems that her Judgment of Paris ‘has too much the air of a basso relievo’ and dismisses her work overall as derivative of prints and sculpture, noting ‘perhaps she has been deterred by the delicacy of her sex from studying living models’ (Kearsly 1781, 12). Despite reviews and caricatures that positioned her either as too masculine or too feminine, Kauffman found herself in high demand as a portrait painter, particularly for portraits of women, and her history paintings did well as subjects for prints. Her celebrity grew in large part because she carefully managed her reputation. As Amanda Vickery has shown, Kauffman was highly skilled at consistently balancing self-promotion as a talented painter with the carefully regulated behaviour appropriate to a cultured gentlewoman (2016). As Vickery explains, ‘Kauffman neutralised the risqué associations of female flaunting with a self‐presentation that was ever soothing and saintly, making the most of her continental cachet, musical talents, quiet charm and sensibility’ (7). In this balancing act, the Sister Arts proved particularly useful. Kauffman returned to Italy in 1781. Her self-portrait The Artist in the Character of Design Listening to the Inspiration of Poetry, painted in 1782, is an ingenious negotiation of feminine virtue and professional status (fig. 21.2). The painting was sent to her English patron George Bowles and subsequently engraved by Thomas Burke. Kauffman cleverly borrows from a convention present in both paint and print. As Jill HeydtStevenson argues in this volume, it was a trope in European book illustration for women writers to be depicted as the heroines of their novels. Here, Kauffman presents herself not as a character but as the personified allegory that underlies all visual art. In so doing, she pushes at the boundaries of the print convention of author-as-character portrait – and in making herself a Sister Art, she does so in a way that no male painter possibly could. Remarkably, despite the boldness of making herself the stand-in for all of visual design, Kauffman’s female virtue is reinforced through her chaste appearance and because she dutifully listens to her wiser sister. As was typical of the prejudices of the period, Kauffman pictures Poetry as the superior, more decorated art, capable of teaching and thereby elevating her sister Painting. This hierarchy was reiterated yearly in Reynolds’s series of lectures to students at the Royal Academy, which were collected and printed as The Discourses on Art. For example, in Discourse III, presented to the Academy on 14 December 1770, Reynolds argues: Beauty and simplicity have so great a share in the composition of a great style that he who has acquired them has little else to learn. It must not, indeed, be forgotten that there is a nobleness of conception which goes beyond anything in the mere exhibition even of perfect form; there is an art of animating and dignifying the figures with intellectual grandeur, of impressing the appearance of philosophic wisdom, or heroic virtue. This can only be acquired by him that enlarges the sphere of his understanding by a variety of knowledge, and warms his imagination with the best productions of ancient and modern poetry. A hand thus exercised, and a mind thus instructed, will bring the art to a higher degree of excellence than, perhaps, it has hitherto attained in this country. Such a student will disdain the humbler walks of painting, which, however profitable, can

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Figure 21.2  Angelica Kaufman, The Artist in the Character of Design Listening to the Inspiration of Poetry, 1782. Oil on canvas. Inscribed (top): For George Bowles Esq. English Heritage, Kenwood. (The Ernest Edward Cook Bequest Presented by the National Art-Collections Fund) Kenwood House, London. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. never assure him a permanent reputation. He will leave the meaner artist servilely to suppose that those are the best pictures which are most likely to deceive the spectator. He will permit the lower painter, like the florist or collector of shells, to exhibit the minute discriminations which distinguish one object of the same species from another; while he, like the philosopher, will consider nature in the abstract, and represent in every one of his figures the character of its species. Beauty and simplicity in painting, in other words, can be achieved only by a mind ‘expanded’ by reading poetry. Poetry provides a model for the merger of form

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and content, and if one wishes to rise above merely copying that which appears before the eyes, it maps the terrain for doing so. As Kauffman’s painting suggests, reading informs the mind, which in turn guides the hand. It is worth noting that Reynolds in this passage parrots conventional wisdom famously included in Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Oriental tale Rasselas. In it, the philosopher Imlac explains to his pupil Rasselas that [t]he business of a poet . . . is to examine, not the individual, but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances: he does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades in the verdure of the forest. He is to exhibit in his portraits of nature such prominent and striking features, as recall the original to every mind; and must neglect the minuter discriminations, which one may have remarked, and another have neglected, for those characteristicks which are alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness. (2009, 28) While Johnson writes instruction for the general reader, Reynolds’s version of the edict contains a stark professional warning meant for an audience of practitioners. Academicians and poets alike should, like philosophers, follow the ennobled path toward the universal ideal. Reynolds warns that should one stoop so low as to number the tulip’s streaks, the ‘lower painter’ joins ‘the florist’ and ‘collector of shells’. These are mere hobbyists whose tastes for pretty, inconsequential things or curious objects disqualify them from membership in the liberal arts. The implication for the newly formed Academy is that tulip-striping (or, rendering images too close to empirical reality) has no place in a profession struggling to advocate for its own legitimacy and status. Only through emulation of poetry and philosophy would painting enter the pantheon to which its practitioners believed it belonged. Kauffman’s portrait, then, proves her painterly qualifications in two ways. She paints herself with pencil pointed down and away from a closed sketchbook, duly ‘warming [her] imagination’ with poetry. Draped in innocent white, she appears attentive to the words of her golden-robed, laurel-crowned sister. Well aware of ‘[her] permanent reputation’, she acknowledges with this painting that she does not ‘distinguish one object of the same species from another’ (as, incidentally, Zoffany has) but produces instead the universal characters of poetry and design. In reading her image against Reynolds’s text, it becomes clear that she uses the personified sisters to her best advantage, both as feminine icons of universal ideals and by particularising herself as a demure and dutiful Design, who is guided by her sister Poetry. Kauffman’s Design is enlightened, literally by a beam of natural light highlighting her white dress, and figuratively through her attentive listening. Finally, the most striking aspect of the self-portrait is Kauffman’s engagement with the viewer: She looks at us looking at Poetry looking at her. In engaging the viewer, she seems to suggest an awareness of everything this image does. While Zoffany had relegated her to a virtual, unfinished presence, she asserts herself as the universal in the particular, the personified embodiment of her profession – a position she takes not despite but because she is a woman. She looks at the viewer as if to say, I know what I am doing. At the time Kauffman painted The Artist in the Character of Design, she had been freshly lauded in English poetry. In 1781, the year Kauffman returned to Italy, George Keate’s Epistle to Angelica Kauffman was brought out by the prolific

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anthology publisher John Dodsley of 52 Pall Mall, the future home of the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery. A poet and lawyer, Keate was a consistent patron of Kauffman’s work. Their relationship continued long after Kauffman departed from England. She corresponded with Keate and his daughter Georgianna, a young painter who exhibited several paintings at the Society of Artists in 1791 (DNB). In May of 1790 Kauffman was working on a commission for Keate that celebrated his paternal love for his daughter by illustrating a pastoral scene from one of his poems (Williamson 1976, 86). In his Epistle he writes of Kauffman: Could I your bright Ideas catch, Sweet Paintress, or your Pencil snatch, Or on a Voice like yours rely, To wake the Soul of Harmony! Then might my Verses happier flow, Then in firm Outlines would I trace Your vary’d Pow’r, your vary’d Grace, Make you on Art’s bright Summit stand, Upheld by Truth and Nature’s hand. (1781, 12) In referencing Kauffman’s pencil and voice in the same verse, Keate connects her feminine talents to personified figures of Truth and Nature. In a footnote he informs his readers that Nature ‘might have distinguished her as one of the First Singers in Europe, had not her superior Passion for Painting totally engaged her Mind, and induced her to reserve this captivating Accomplishment, for the Elegant Entertainment of her Friends’ (16). In a move familiar to Romanticists from canonical poems like Kubla Khan or ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, the poet imagines taking on the voice of the musician or the pencil of the artist to tell a tale more flower’y than his rhyme. This comparison does not appear to stem from a competitive relationship. Rather, the point here is to enhance one form of art through its favourable comparison to others. In this way, the sister arts could be deployed as part of a strategy of mutually constitutive personal and professional networks. Of course, printed poems available in bookshops were not the only way to consolidate professional credibility in print. The Artist in the Character of Design was engraved and published by Thomas Burke in 1787. Burke had been apprenticed to John Dixon, who regularly engraved prints after Reynolds, and then worked in London for the engraver William Wynne Ryland, who, as Blake scholars will know, was executed for forgery in 1783 (DNB). Although the young William Blake refused an apprenticeship to him, Ryland was a notable stipple engraver and had been Kauffman’s preferred engraver and publisher. Burke initially worked for Ryland, producing mezzotint engravings after Kauffman’s portraits (Alexander 1992b, 144). The plate, which measures about 18x14 inches, considerably reduces the 24-inch diameter painting to a size that might be tucked between the pages of a portfolio – or tipped into a book (fig. 21.3). The print, moreover, was executed in an accomplished stipple or ‘chalk-manner’ style rather than in mezzotint. While mezzotint is richer and well suited to reproduce oil painting, it yields a delicate, velvety print that does not hold up well when sandwiched between papers. Like

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Figure 21.3  Thomas Burke after Angelica Kauffman, ‘The Portrait of Angelica Kauffman in the character of Design, listening to the Inspiration of Poetry’, 1787. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. many stand-alone prints published in the period, Burke’s print was designed such that it could just as easily be displayed on a wall as a ‘furniture print’ as pasted or sewn into a book. Its caption asserts that the image is ‘from the original picture’, thus highlighting the fact that this is no mere book illustration. Yet this execution, complete with a textual accompaniment to caption the image, echoes the author-heroine book illustration described in this volume by Jillian Heydt-Stevenson. Burke’s stipple print also serves to reinforce the similarities between painting and poetry, both of which were disseminated through the medium of print. The printed picture flattens visual cues like Kauffman’s white dress by translating coloured oil paint to single-coloured ink. Like most engravers of the period, Burke engraved

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for artists like Kauffman, but he also worked for a variety of booksellers, producing frontispieces, vignettes and illustrations. The sister-arts formulation particularly suited engravers like Burke, who got their work in the reproductive interstices between word and image. Literary illustration and textual description alike come before our eyes most often in some form of print. Because the two appear together in the same published book (and sometimes, though rarely, on the same page) we tend to think of ‘print’ as one medium. The technologies for reproducing text and images were very different, however, and while typesetting and printing in this period was done by the same firm, engravers increasingly executed plates and then sent them off to printing firms. In this case, the blurring of media is exacerbated by the mixture of copperplate hand and a script that mimics typographic letterform in the caption. The mixture of font styles and sizes on an eighteenth-century title page might initially have signalled the printer’s varied stock, but by the 1780s it was merely convention. Engravers often imitated this convention, as Burke has here, mixing letterforms, all-caps and initial capitals with little consideration of anything other than visual balance. Significantly, engravers like Burke and Ryland considered themselves artists; the compositors who set poems and designed title pages, however, certainly did not think of themselves as authors. Kauffman herself was a capable engraver and had engraved her own paintings. In his essay on Kauffman’s prints, David Alexander points out that while artists like Reynolds (and other Academicians) saw engraving as an afterthought that might garner some extra fame, Kauffman often painted with reproductive engraving in mind (1992b, 150–1). In the elite circle of Royal Academy painters, Kauffman, like the engravers who mediated her work, was an outsider. Her awareness of the print market and its potential marked her as a commercial artist in ways that aligned her with an increasingly print-based art economy, and it also helped her to understand the value of the personified sister arts. For painters, the sisterly association of their narrative works with poetry opened the door into the liberal arts; for engravers, the sister arts meant print was front and centre. Kauffman was certainly not alone in her commercial interest in print. In London, an entire industry arose around this strategic deployment of the sister arts. In the time between the painting of The Artist in the Character of Design in 1780 and its publication as an engraving in 1787, John Boydell began plans for his Pall Mall ‘Shakspeare Gallery’, which opened in 1789 (Boydell and Nicol, 1786). Other sisterarts themed galleries soon followed, including Thomas Macklin’s Poets Gallery, which also included several of her works (Alexander 1992a, 179–92). Notably, the paintings in these galleries were not for sale. An engraver and a printseller, Boydell was certain that commerce would save British art. The Royal Academy assumed a patronage model whereby fine artists were funded through direct payments for private works or by contributions from the state for works commissioned to benefit the public. Boydell, on the other hand, used the cultural capital of Shakespeare to sell the experience of looking at paintings. For a fee, the public could enter the premises of the Shakespeare Gallery, the facade of which included a sculpture of Shakespeare seated between the sister arts. While the walls featured ekphrastic paintings of scenes from Shakespeare’s plays by eminent artists (including both Reynolds and Kauffman), it only sold printed reproductions of those works. Patrons

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could purchase individual prints at the gallery or subscribe to full set. They could also subscribe to Boydell’s fine new edition of Shakespeare’s plays, edited by the learned George Steevens, who had worked with none other than Samuel Johnson on his edition of Shakespeare. Like Kauffman’s prints, the Boydell Shakespeare engravings were suitable for inclusion in books or as furniture, to hang on the wall. Kauffman was named in Boydell’s 1786 Proposal, which claimed the project was designed ‘in Honour of Shakspeare – with a View to encourage the Arts of Painting and Engraving in this Kingdom’ (4). Boydell’s model ensured that engravers, who copied the paintings in literary galleries both for book illustration and for wall art, reaped the benefits of this sister-arts boom. Kauffman painted scenes from Two Gentlemen of Verona and Troilus and Cressida for the project, both of which were engraved by Luigi Schiavonetti. Thomas Burke, too, was offered work. His folio-size stipple engraving of a scene from Cymbeline after William Hamilton was brought out in 1795.2 While most Royal Academy members looked down upon engravings as mechanical copies of their own intellectual produce, engravers themselves considered themselves artists. Engraving was, after all, a form of two-dimensional sculpture, whereby a flat copper surface was incised both mechanically and chemically. A gallery that ‘encouraged’ painting by marketing books and prints necessarily brought to the fore the conflict between these competing ways of understanding engraving: was it a sister or merely a child? Ties to the Boydell and Macklin galleries undoubtedly affected Kauffman’s relationship to the print market and its dependence on its literary sister, the printed book. Before Kauffman left England in 1781, she sold the plates she engraved herself to Boydell, who immediately retouched and reprinted them for sale in his own premises (Alexander 1992b, 171). Engravings after her designs were ubiquitous, so much so that in 1794 Angelica’s Ladies Library, or Parents and Guardians Present was published for John Hamilton at the Shakespeare Library in Beech Street (no relation to Boydell’s gallery). Part anthology, part gift book, Angelica’s Ladies Library was designed ‘to contribute to the moral improvement of the rising generation, by infusing virtuous and liberal ideas into the minds of a class of readers, which must add inestimable happiness to thousands of worthy families’ (Hamilton 1794, 5). It repurposed designs – most of which are not even by Kauffman, despite the name of the volume – made well before its publication. Of the eight engravings, only two are Kauffman’s compositions, engraved for the engraver and printseller William Dickenson of 24 Bond Street. The other designs, by Henry Bunbury, are engraved by a different also unnamed hand, also for Dickenson (Natter 2007, cat. no. 178, p. 274).3 As was often the case in this period, Hamilton’s selection of texts (all out of copyright) may even have been determined by what images he could find to use for illustrations. Curiously, nowhere in Hamilton’s Dedication or Advertisement does he include mention of Kauffman. Nonetheless, the book’s title page banks on her reputation as an artist and her scrupulously ladylike behaviour as a force capable of enticing parents to purchase a book that will ostensibly improve the morals of thousands of families. While it has nothing to do with Kauffman as a person, Angelica’s Ladies Library speaks to what Amanda Vickery calls Kauffman’s ‘brand’ and its association with the

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Figure 21.4  Angelica Kauffman, Self-portrait of the Artist Hesitating between the Arts of Music and Painting, 1794. Oil on canvas. © National Trust Images. sister arts via printed literary works (2020). After she left England, she again painted a self-portrait that used allegorical art sisters to position herself as an artist. Painted in 1791 and again in 1794, Kauffman’s Self-portrait of the Artist Hesitating between the Arts of Music and Painting enacts a new but equally ingenious relationship to the profession of painting (fig. 21.4). Kauffman depicts a much younger version of herself, a girl equally talented in music and art. As a talented young musician and artist, Kauffman apparently consulted a priest as to which path she should follow. The painting represents her in a heroic role traditionally reversed for men – the ‘choice of Hercules’ between the difficult and narrow path virtue or the easy path of pleasure and vice. Kauffman unmistakably references Annibale Carracci’s painting of the subject, replacing Carracci’s Virtue and Vice with personified allegories of Painting and Music (fig. 21.5). Painting wears an updated version of Virtue’s dress and makes a similar gesture up and away from the scene. However, unlike the young Hercules, whom Carracci depicts in the moment just before his decision is made, Kauffman abandons the pregnant moment in favour of an instant after her choice has been made. Clad in virginal white, Kauffman looks backward with an apologetic expression at the mournful Music, as she gestures toward Painting, who assertively leads her away. Critics draw attention to the masculine attributes of Painting, with her set expression and heroic gesture, because the personified allegory references the particularly heroic genre of history painting, practised almost

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Figure 21.5  Annibale Carracci, The Choice of Hercules, 1596. Oil on canvas. Museo di Capodimonte, Naples. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

exclusively by men (e.g. Gaze [2001], 2013, 404; Roworth 2009, 171). In using the Hercules motif, Kauffman has it both ways. She brilliantly inserts herself as hero and demonstrates her youthful aspirations to painting at a serious and professional level. At the same time, she also demonstrates her feminine tastes and docility. In fact, the image does not seem to present a choice at all. Painting, manifested here as a figure of authority, seems to order Kauffman away with a commanding gesture. Kauffman’s painting disguises her decision to become a painter; the medium itself (and religious authority) have deemed it so. Gentle and demure, Music sadly lets go of her prize, who is compelled away. Kauffman’s image sentimentalises and renders acceptable her status in the male-dominated profession of oil painting. Moreover, in making the personified Painting act as the agentive force, Kauffman demonstrates the superiority of her chosen profession over the abandoned practice of music. This master stroke of visual rhetoric displaces her own agency as a working professional onto the power of the medium in which she works. Unlike Kauffman’s earlier sister-arts-themed self-portrait, The Artist Hesitating between the Arts was not reproduced in engraving, although Kauffman herself made a second copy of it around the same time the bookseller John Hamilton was using her name to sell anthologies. If, as Alexander suggests, there was a waning taste for Kauffman’s work in the 1790s, that may help us understand why this painting, which has received considerable critical attention among art historians,

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was not marketed as an engraving at the time (Alexander 1992b, 176). Another possibility, though, is that the sister arts themselves held considerably less status as galleries like Boydell and Macklin’s met with limited success and eventually foundered. While painters had by the 1790s thrown off the label of mere imitators, they disapproved of engravers’ pretention to liberal-arts status. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the cultural attitude toward illustrated books was beginning to shift. Painters distanced themselves from their former benefactors, whose business model involved producing engravings to accompany printed works of canonical literature. Reynolds’s professional warnings suddenly seemed to apply not only to engravers’ imitations of paintings but to paintings that ‘imitated’ words. As the word illustration began referring to images rather than to textual forms of elaboration, authors including Coleridge, Wordsworth and Lamb objected to such pictorial elaborations, which interfered, they claimed, with the imaginative process of reading. Painters felt burdened by the texts they were asked to reimagine, since suddenly their work was understood not as the product of an imagination ‘warm[ed] . . . with the best productions of ancient and modern poetry’ – but as a slavish imitation of a superior art form. This thinking lumped engravers in with gallery owners, publishers and printsellers alike, all of whom skimmed their living from the artist’s genius. The first decades of the new century also saw new printing technologies and cheaper print. As early as 1806, authors and painters alike looked back to the failed literary galleries as the beginning of a commercial flood. In the nineteenth century, authors and artists would increasingly seek to distance themselves from illustrators and Grub-Street hacks – and in so doing, they could not help but distance themselves from each other. The sister arts were, after all, linked through the united technologies of the printed page. And yet the sisters had done significant work for many artists over the course of the eighteenth century. After all, they were an allegory that could be visualised. Writing about the sister arts was one thing. Kauffman, in painting them, moved the sister arts into a medium over which she asserted a significant dominance. Their appearance in print consolidated her reputation through broader circulation of the content of the pictures and through the very medium of engraving itself, which was (at least potentially) another sister art. In a moment before the exact nature and borders of modern disciplines was thoroughly sorted out, the sister arts encouraged readers and spectators alike to adopt a comparative mode for understanding relations between medial forms. While English painting was undervalued, painting was like poetry. As painters gained prestige, the professional necessity of that comparison waned. Kauffman died in November of 1807, not before her treatment by Zoffany was redeemed slightly by Henry Singleton. Singleton’s Royal Academicians in General Assembly, 1795 (fig. 21.6) includes both Kauffman and Moser (Natter 2007, cat. no. 180, 276). Because Singleton exchanges the highly charged life-drawing room for the more decorous meeting room of the General Assembly, Moser and Kauffman are tucked into the background of the painting. The vindication of embodiment is rather undercut by the fact that neither woman could have really been in the room, even if Kauffman had been in London at the time, since women weren’t allowed to attend General Assembly meetings.

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Figure 21.6  Charles Bestland after Henry Singleton, ‘Portraits of the Royal Academicians’, 1802. Stipple engraving. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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Notes  1. For a fuller accounting of Kauffman’s critical reception in England, see especially pp. 72–87 of Wendy Wassyng Roworth’s introductory essay in Angelica Kauffman: A Continental Artist in Georgian England (1992).   2. Full lists of the painters and engravers included in the Shakspeare Gallery are available in Boydell’s Catalogues published in London between 1789 and 1805 or in The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, edited by Walter Pape and Frederick Burwick (1996). An excellent web source is What Jane Saw, curated by Janine Barchas, which reproduces the Catalogues and visualises the gallery.   3. The catalogue caption incorrectly states that all eight illustrations are after Kauffman.

Bibliography Alexander, David. 1992a. ‘Chronological Checklist of Singly Issued English Prints after Angelica Kauffman’. In Angelica Kauffman: A Continental Artist in Georgian England, edited by Wendy Wassyng Roworth, 179–92. London: Reaktion Books. ———. 1992b. ‘Kauffman and the Print Market in Eighteenth-Century England’. In Angelica Kauffman: A Continental Artist in Georgian England, edited by Wendy Wassyng Roworth, 141–78. London: Reaktion Books. Barchas, Janine. What Jane Saw. (last date accessed 18 May 2022). Bickham, George. 1748. The Drawing and Writing Tutor: Or an Alluring Introduction to the Study of those Sister Arts. London: John Bowles. Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. Boydell, John. 1789, 1790, 1793, 1794. A Catalogue of Pictures in the Shakspeare Gallery. London. Boydell, John and George Nichol. 1786. Shakspeare. [Proposal.] London. Gaze, Delila. [2001] 2013. Concise Dictionary of Woman Artists. New York: Routledge, Hagstrum, Jean. [1958] 1987. The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism from Dryden to Gray. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hamilton, John, ed. 1794. Angelica’s Ladies Library; or, Parents and Guardians Present. London: Printed for J. Hamilton. Haüsle, Magdalena. 2007. ‘The Members of the Royal Academy in the Year 1768’. In Angelica Kauffman: A Woman of Immense Talent, edited by Tobias Natter, 254. Ostfildern: Hatje Canz Verlag. Heffernan, James. 1993. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, Samuel. [1759] 2009. Rasselas. Edited by Thomas Keymer. Oxford and New York: Oxford World Classics. Kearsly, G. 1781. The Earwig; or An Old Woman’s Remarks on the Present Exhibition of Pictures of the Royal Academy. London: Printed for G., (no. 46) Fleet-Street. Keate, George. 1781. Epistle to Angelica Kauffman. London: John Dodsley. Klancher, Jon. 2013. Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Linn, John Blair. 1802. The Powers of Genius, A Poem, in Three Parts. Philadelphia: Early American Imprints Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801–1919. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Natter, Tobias, ed. 2007. Angelica Kauffman: A Woman of Immense Talent. Ostfildern: Hatje Canz Verlag. Pape, Walter and Frederick Burwick, eds. 1996. The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery. Bottrop: Peter Pomp.

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Roworth, Wendy Wassyng. 1992. ‘Kauffman and the Art of Painting in England’. In Angelica Kauffman: A Continental Artist in Georgian England, edited by Wendy Wassyng Roworth. London: Reaktion Books. ———. 2009. ‘Angelica Kaufmann’s Place in Rome’. In Italy’s Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour, edited by Paula Findlen, Wendy Wassyng Roworth and Catherine M. Sama. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. Valenza, Robin. 2009. Literature, Language, and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Vickery, Amanda. 2016. ‘Hidden from History: The Royal Academy’s Female Founders’. RA Magazine (3 June 2016). (last accessed 18 May 2022). ———. 2020. ‘Branding Angelica: Reputation Management in Late Eighteenth-Century England’. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 43 (1): 3–24. Williamson, G. C. [1924] 1976. Angelica Kauffmann, R.A.: Her Life and Her Works. New York: Hacker Art Books; London: Bodley Head.

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22 Illustrated Magazines and Periodicals: Visual Genres and Gendered Aspirations Jennie Batchelor

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n 1780, the Lady’s Magazine; or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770– 1832) marked the second decade of its sixty-year run with a gorgeous engraving designed by Robert Dighton (fig. 22.1). By the late 1770s, the conventions of the periodical’s annual frontispieces were well established. All those published in its first decade, like many of those that followed, envision Minerva ushering women readers towards a temple of wisdom. The formula was not wholly original. The goddess had long featured on title pages as a visual shorthand for the cultural benefits of book learning, and Minerva had been a ubiquitous presence in frontispieces to earlier journals such as the Universal and Westminster Magazines, where she typically guides the periodical’s male representative towards fame or immortality (Raven 2002, 49).1 The Lady’s Magazine adapted this visual tradition by re-appropriating the goddess as a figurehead for a periodical that advocated for women’s education in particular, rather than for learning in general (Batchelor 2018, 377–92). The 1780 frontispiece underscores the periodical’s sustained ‘vindication’ of women’s intellectual pursuits, but also admits the competing and seductive claims of fashion upon readers’ attention (January 1780, [3]). In this re-imagining of Hercules at the Crossroads, these claims are embodied by the fashionable, playing-card-wielding ‘Folly’, who tempts the magazine’s reader away from Minerva and the wisdom she represents. Which deity the woman at the engraving’s centre will follow is unresolved. An accompanying textual ‘Explanation’ offers no answers, lamenting only that the temple of ‘Folly is resorted to in crouds [sic]’, while that of ‘Wisdom is almost empty’ except for a few who approach it carrying copies of the ‘Lady’s Magazine, as a kind of ticket to obtain their entrance’ (January 1780, 4). While the text is clear that the only real choice is to follow the few on the path to wisdom, Folly’s grip on the woman and command of her gaze in the plate implies that fashion’s seductions might overpower her judgement. Dighton’s pitting of fashion against wisdom is more than allegorical whimsy. It reflects a tension that the Lady’s Magazine registered throughout its history and in which its illustrations were complexly implicated. The self-declared objective of the Lady’s Magazine was to ‘turn away the female eye from the glitter of external parade, to fix it upon more permanent and more brilliant objects of mental acquisitions’ (‘Address’ (January 1777), [3]). Yet the periodical could ill afford to reject the ‘glitter of external parade’, nor did it do so. Pragmatism dictated that the pre-Wollstonecraftian ‘revolution in female manners’ it sought to initiate had to be waged on two fronts. To

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Figure 22.1  ‘Frontispiece’, Lady’s Magazine, 1780. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Per. 123 m-11 urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10613832-5. secure readers’ attention and subscriptions, the magazine had to appeal not only to the mind, but also to the eye (‘Address’ (January 1778), iii). Thus from its inaugural issue, the periodical committed to providing an array of ‘Embellishments’, including portraits, landscapes, illustrations for fiction, scientific drawings and future fashion plates in addition to an impressive bill of textual fare (‘Address’ (August 1770), n.p.). Over the course of the magazine’s run, copper-plate and later steel engravings of all types were key selling points. Editors generated anticipation for future issues by trailing forthcoming illustrations in advertisements, and regularly reminded readers that embellishments made the periodical exceptional value for money.2 Priced just sixpence an

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issue for its first three decades, each month’s fifty-six pages of letterpress were typically adorned with up to three engravings per month, with an additional embroidery pattern and song sheet. A single needlework pattern costed around ‘double’ the magazine’s cover price from a haberdasher (‘Address’ (August 1770), n.p.). Value for money and aesthetically appealing, the Lady’s Magazine’s engravings were presented as an alluring ‘inlet’ that would direct readers’ attention to the textual ‘treasures’ and wisdom at its ‘heart’ (‘Address’ (August 1770), n.p.). Yet as the Dighton frontispiece implies, there was a risk that visual attractions could be dangerously diverting and encourage readers to privilege embellishment over essence and style over substance. The small body of scholarship on women’s magazines from this period has tended to cast these fears as fact. At best, the perceived tension between images of fashionable consumption and text-based educational content has been viewed as emblematic of the impossibly ‘contradictory messages’ with which magazine readers have been bombarded from the form’s inception (McCracken 1993, 280; Ballaster et al. 1991, 89–90). At worst, the space devoted to celebrity portraits and especially fashion plates is viewed as evidence of the Romantic-era periodical’s investment in promoting models of culturally desirable femininity under the spurious guise of improvement (Shevelow 1989, 188–9). This chapter contests these claims by detailing just some of the multiple ways that image and text remediate one another in the Lady’s Magazine both before and after 1800 when fashion plates only belatedly became fixtures. It argues that while the Lady’s Magazine sometimes did perpetuate mixed messages, it also rigorously questioned these clashing imperatives with the avowed intention of seeking to equip readers to navigate them. The representative illustration types discussed below reveal how engravings encouraged magazine readers to interrogate conflicting gender norms through acts of imaginative engagement and critical reflection prompted by the images’ generative interactions with text and illustrations both in the same issue and in successive issues over time. In certain visual genres – such as landscapes or scientific drawings – fashion is often of limited or no relevance. Yet in engravings for illustrated memoirs, travel writing and fiction, dress typically and productively orients readers towards other images, texts and ideas outside their frame. The intellectual dexterity the reader was encouraged to exercise as she followed up on these visual cues, deciphered pictorial codes, and attempted to mediate between the magazine’s visual and the verbal content, provoked a range of pressing cultural and political questions about women’s lives that were central to the periodical and the contemplation of which aligned with the publication’s intellectual aspirations for subscribers.

Facts and Fictions: Magazine Embellishments (1770–99) Although highly prized by periodical editors and the readers who removed them for scrapbooking or handicrafts, plates in early periodicals have attracted less scholarly attention than book illustrations from the same period.3 The huge number of magazine engravings, the paucity of complete runs of Romantic journals in research libraries, and the ubiquity of pre- and post-binding excision, compound the general challenges of method, attribution and language faced by anyone who works on illustration in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.4 Yet such challenges only partly explain the dearth of scholarship in this area. If illustrations in the Romantic periodical

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in general have been sidelined, then those in the women’s magazine have been additionally marginalised by the low regard in which the form has been held. Fashion plates dominate the few accounts of the topic that do exist (e.g. Adburgham 1972; and Beetham 1996), and are often viewed as paradigmatic of the women’s magazine’s insidious efforts to coach women in particular moral and financial behaviours (e.g. Shevelow 1989, 188–9). Indeed, fashion has become so central to our understanding of the visual economy of Romantic women’s magazines that most image types tend to be viewed through its ‘decoding lens’ (Copeland 1995, 117). Yet it should be noted that fashion plates made only irregular appearances outside annual pocket books and dedicated journals until the early nineteenth century.5 Where they do appear, they typically account for much less than half of any given periodical’s embellishments. For the first thirty years of the Lady’s Magazine’s run, fashion plates were so rare that their publication invariably occasioned editorial commentary advertising their exceptionality and emphasising their production cost. The editor’s footnote to a May 1775 plate depicting an unusual double aspect of the fashions worn at Ranelagh Gardens (fig. 22.2) is typical in underlining the ‘considerable’ expense of the commission, which was arranged only because the verbal report submitted by the magazine’s fashion reporter was too ‘obscure’ to be intelligible in isolation (6, 233).

Figure 22.2  ‘Two Ladies in the newest Dress’, Lady’s Magazine, May 1775. Private collection.

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More consistent visual elements than fashion plates in the Lady’s Magazine before 1800 were: the ‘views’ of cities, landscapes and monuments that accompanied its domestic and global travel writing; portraits published with biographies and trial accounts; and emotionally charged illustrations that accompanied moral tales. These ‘beautiful’, ‘ornamental’ or ‘elegant’ illustrations were presented as markers of taste and curiosity and in recognition of the inadequacy of words fully to impress ideas upon the mind. All of these qualities were attributed to the plate ‘Monument to the Memory of Chatterton’ (February 1784), which was engraved after a sketch by the irascible travel writer and man of letters Philip Thicknesse (fig. 22.3). Thicknesse’s accompanying letter comprises a short meditation on the controversy surrounding the deceased Thomas Chatterton, followed by a much longer description of the ‘mausoleum’ erected in the poet’s memory in the grounds of Thicknesse’s Batheaston home: a ‘Gothic arch, raised between the bosom of two hills’, decorated with a profile of the poet against a backdrop of a broken lyre and bearing an inscription that Thicknesse transcribes in full (15, 62). A brief editorial footnote beneath the published letter enthusiastically praises the ‘hermitlooking paradise’ Thicknesse had created, before explaining the magazine’s decision to commission an engraving designed to give readers ‘a more particular view of the place itself’ than the author’s description provides (62). Here, as throughout the magazine, image and text are presented as mutually corroborative. The engraving needs Thicknesse’s letter to be fully legible, literally in this

Figure 22.3  ‘Monument to the Memory of Chatterton’, Lady’s Magazine, February 1784. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Per. 123 m-15 urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10613836-7.

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case because the inscription on the monument is too small to decipher in the plate. But the image also performs important work in substantiating Thicknesse’s view of the dead poet’s genius. The impressive scale of the monument – evidenced by the diminutive, fashionably dressed tourists who look upon it – accords with Thicknesse’s estimation of Chatterton’s genius, while the composition of the monument – nesting in the bosom of the hill whose domed contours it mimics in stone – reveals nature and art in the same resplendent harmony attributed to Chatterton’s verse in the accompanying letter. In other respects, however, the magazine emphatically asserts the plate’s superiority to the accompanying prose. Thicknesse’s self-deprecating assertion that Chatterton was ‘worthy of a better ornament than I have erected to his memory’ implies – through its pun on the language of ornamentation commonly used to describe periodical engravings – the ‘particular’ effectiveness of illustration to commemorate individuals and their achievements (62). Both the letter and editorial footnote intimate that engravings had the power to memorialise individuals in ways that neither verbal description nor even a physical monument could equal.6 Magazine portraits function in similar ways to ‘Monument to the Memory of Chatterton’. Likenesses of women noted for their achievements on the page, stage or at court were headline features in several Romantic-era periodicals, including the Lady’s Magazine’s sister publication, the Town and Country Magazine (1769–92) and its eventual rivals, the Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798–1828) and La Belle Assemblée (1806–32). Like the engraving of Chatterton’s mausoleum, portraits served to commemorate and curate sitters’ reputations and compensated for the limits of the verbal. As Cindy McCreery argues in relation to the Town and Country’s satirical ‘Tête-àTête’ series, they were designed to give ‘readers a better idea of [the sitter’s] characters than mere words could’ (1997, 215). Crucially, as Laura Engel observes, these images also ‘participated in the creation of ideas about women’s claim to fame, legitimacy and visibility’ and actively promoted identification between subscribers and the actresses, writers, aristocrats and royals upon which they gazed (2018, 458). These effects come into concerted focus in a small but striking subset of magazine portraits: those depicting women on trial. Relative to its competitors, the Lady’s Magazine offered little coverage of court proceedings, which usually amounted to no more than capsule notices in its news columns. When it broke with this convention on the grounds of overwhelming public interest – as it did, for example, when reporting on the trials of Jane Butterfield, the Duchess of Kingston, Margaret Caroline Rudd and Mrs Leigh Perrot (Jane Austen’s aunt) – it did so with style. The magazine’s account of Butterfield’s trial and acquittal (August 1775) ran to over three densely printed pages and an unattributed portrait ‘Drawn from the Life’. The extent of the coverage, which forced the magazine to drop its headline serial for the month, spoke to the periodical’s conviction that the Butterfield ‘affair . . . most peculiarly interest[ed] the fair sex’ (‘Correspondents’, n.p.). The defendant – the daughter of a bricklayer and milliner – was on trial for poisoning her elderly lover, William Scawen, who years earlier had used a female agent to ‘seduce’ the then 14-year-old from her parental home. The trial proceedings, meticulously recounted in the magazine, consisted of lengthy witness testimonies, including Butterfield’s, which was delivered by a clerk owing to her emotional distress. In the courtroom, the silent Butterfield’s demeanour was as vital to her acquittal as her ventriloquised testimony: the defendant, we learn, behaved throughout with

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‘the utmost propriety and with that appearance of decent fortitude which is known generally to accompany innocence’ (400). In the magazine, Butterfield’s portrait (fig. 22.4) plays a similarly vindicatory role. Stood in profile, the fashionably yet soberly dressed woman looks modestly to the right, her eyes partly shaded by her neat black bonnet. In her gloved hands she holds a closed fan and some flowers, which match the bunch attached to her gown by a lace kerchief. The sartorial and bodily signifiers of virtue captured in the engraving construct a literal body of evidence of Butterfield’s innocence every bit as compelling as her verbal statement. Indeed, the portrait proves more effective than the accompanying text in inviting readers not merely to sympathise with Butterfield, but to see her situation as paradigmatic of the plight of women in general.

Figure 22.4  ‘Miss Jane Butterfield’, Lady’s Magazine, August 1775. Private collection.

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As Engel observes, one of the most common mechanisms through which magazine portraits promoted identification between subscriber and sitter was through framing devices, particularly the use of looking-glass-style ovals that frequently encase images (2018, 464–71). The frameless Butterfield portrait similarly invites identification, but its mirroring effect is conjured instead by its reflection of another recently published image in the magazine: the aforementioned ‘Two Ladies in the newest Dress . . . at Ranelagh’ (May 1775). Butterfield’s posture – especially the distinctive angle of her arms – is near-identical to that of the woman in the fashion plate. The sartorial detailing of the gown and petticoat borders in both images uncannily resemble one another and both women hold fans in their right hands and have flowers at their breast. These visual echoes close any presumed gap between the magazine’s reader and the fallen, but innocent, Butterfield. If Butterfield resembles the woman at Ranelagh, then by extension, she resembles the magazine’s readers who had been invited to model themselves after the fashion plate’s image. Butterfield’s case ‘peculiarly interests’ readers of the Lady’s Magazine because of her likeness to, rather than her difference from, them (‘Correspondents’, n.p.). Her fate, the engraving reveals, could be that of any woman’s. To look upon the Butterfield portrait is to see not just one woman’s innocence, but the vulnerability of the sex at large to male predation. A different kind of invitation to self-reflection through navigation of questions of sameness and difference is extended by another group of magazine engravings: illustrations for travel serials. The most high-profile of these images in the Lady’s Magazine were those that embellished its abridgement of James Cook’s A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1784), which ran from June 1784 to February 1789. Original designs by John Webber, the voyage’s official artist, were germane to the magazine’s serialisation. Indeed, according to its editor, the engravings were the very reason why the abridgement was commissioned in the first place.7 Initially, in June 1784, when the periodical featured an excerpt from A Voyage with ‘A capital high-finished Engraving of a Man and Woman of the Sandwich Islands’, it had not envisioned a serialisation, but the ‘numerous thanks’ from subscribers for the extract and especially its ‘elegant Plate’, persuaded them to institute one. The periodical was not alone in serialising A Voyage. Other magazines, including the Gentleman’s and Universal, featured similar abridgements of it, thus making this expensive and exclusive multi-volume work accessible to wider, popular readerships (Anderson 2017). What distinguished the Lady’s Magazine’s serialisation from those of its periodical rivals was its claim to be ‘adapted entirely to Female taste and Female curiosity’ (July 1784, 339). The nature of these adaptations was articulated in the first engraving for the series proper, ‘A Young Woman of Otaheita, bringing a Present’ (July 1784), which is untethered from its associated text in A Voyage and placed instead alongside an edited extract from the work’s introduction which extols the ‘advantages’ of physical travel and the mental journeying to the ‘enlightened man’ (340) (fig. 22.5). ‘A Young Woman of Otaheita’ remediates the Lady’s Magazine text it newly ornaments. At first glance, it is tempting to view the image as an exotic fashion plate, condescendingly selected by the editor because it speaks to predictably gendered notions of the scope and limits of ‘Female taste’ and ‘curiosity’. Yet the effects of the plate’s inclusion within its new context are more far-reaching and complex. As JoEllen DeLucia documents, if travel serials in women’s magazines from this period domesticate the world by bringing it into British women’s homes, then they serve also to expand

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Figure 22.5  ‘A Young Woman of Otaheita bringing a Present’, Lady’s Magazine, July 1784. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Per. 123 m-15 urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10613836-7. women’s horizons by actively encouraging ‘identifications between nations and cultures’ (DeLucia 2018, 215). Images, although not part of DeLucia’s discussion, played a vital, if ideologically fraught, role in forging such connections between British readers and women across a seemingly ever-expanding world.8 In ‘A Young Woman of Otaheita’, like the Butterfield engraving, identification is facilitated by dress, specifically by the indigenous woman’s skirt. The image’s backdrop – omitted in the Universal Magazine’s reproduction of the image one month later – as well as the female figure’s cropped hair, bared breast and naked feet mark her otherness and primitivism. Yet her framed skirt’s resemblance to European hooped petticoats and panniered gowns serves also as a visual bridge that connects her imagined world to that inhabited by the magazine’s readers and that links her appearance to debates about the politics of women’s dress played out over many years in the periodical’s pages.

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The hooped petticoat was a recurrent focus of anxiety for a small but loud group of anti-fashion correspondents in the Lady’s Magazine in the early 1780s for whom this soon to be defunct garment was synonymous with female vanity and the excessive space women accorded fashion in their lives.9 But as a long-running exchange on the subject in issues of the magazine for 1781 to 1782 indicates, not all magazine contributors were of the same mind, and many women understood attacks on the petticoat as an assault on women’s bodies and autonomy. In the words of correspondent Harriot Hooper, who had been provoked to write to the magazine after reading a typical diatribe on the subject, men had no business meddling in women’s affairs and should ‘let our petticoats alone’ (Supp 1781, 678). As the many correspondents who wrote to defend Hooper over the next few months confirmed, ‘repell[ing] . . . attacks made on different parts of our dress’ was vital to women for whom the right to self-fashion and self-ownership were synonymous (‘Letter to the Matron’ (September 1782), 475). ‘A Young Woman of Otaheita’ reanimates and recalibrates this ongoing debate. For all its prodigious size, the woman’s hoop is practical: a frame designed to support the large rolls of tapa cloth and taumi (feathered breastplates) that she presented as gifts to Captains Cook and Clerke. Her impressive skirt is also situationally appropriate: a garment that befits the ceremonial ritual of appeasement for which it is designed. If the petticoat inspires awe and curiosity, it emphatically commands respect and, as such, obliquely refutes the kinds of anti-fashion commentaries that angered Hooper and her defenders. More importantly, the sartorial common ground marked out by the Polynesian skirt makes possible the kind of horizontal identification DeLucia foregrounds and invites critical self-reflection in the magazine’s British reader. Of course, some readers might have looked upon the young woman and seen only difference. But the magazine’s wider intermedial context ensures that any such distancing would have had to be an act of will. Readers of the Lady’s Magazine, like Hooper, knew that dress was political (Batchelor 2005, 108–19). They were well primed to ‘form a Judgment’ about the Tahitian woman’s appearance and, through her example, to revisit the questions about women’s right to self-fashion that the magazine persistently aired (July 1784, 339). In these ways, and like the Butterfield engraving and the celebrity portraits Engel elucidates, ‘A Young Woman of Otaheita’ offers a lens through which the British magazine reader can see herself and the cultural constraints within which she lives anew. In prompting such imaginative and politically charged thinking, the image reveals that while travel accounts – both verbal and visual – merited the attention of the ‘enlightened man’, they could prove vitally, if differently, illuminating for women. Still more clarifying for women readers were the scores of embellishments designed by ‘Royal Academicians’ and European ‘Masters’ to illustrate the Lady’s Magazine’s moral tales. Edward Copeland finds in these images a decade-by-decade reflection on women’s changing relationship to money and the world of goods made visible through an evolving ‘fashion clock’ (1995, 129). But while sartorial taste and style are undoubtedly tracked via these engravings, it is the consistency of the illustrations’ moral sensibility over time that is their most arresting quality. Typically focusing on moments of personal crisis and emotional distress, the sentimental and melodramatic scenes the engravings depict make clear that choosing the right path in life was rarely as simple for women as the Dighton frontispiece implied. While the tales’ settings are geographically and historically diverse – from ancient Greece to eighteenth-century Lapland – they dwell on a common theme. Bookended by condensed moral pronouncements, their

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plots focus intently upon virtue in distress – usually, but not exclusively, female virtue – in dramatic narratives that are resolved either by serendipitous intervention or death. Whatever the setting or the outcome of each tale, the dominant refrain is that prudence offers no guarantee of happiness because women are rarely uncompromised agents in their own lives. Illustrations for short fiction in the Lady’s Magazine worry away at the tales’ framing moral conservatism. Take, for example, ‘Oriental Revenge’ (February 1776), which centres on the unnamed daughter of Rabbi Hassan, solicited with her father’s consent by Mahmoud for his harem despite being secretly in love with the virtuous Alkalla (fig. 22.6). Mahmoud takes the woman’s coldness as modesty, but is disabused when he learns she has arranged to meet her lover. Mahmoud disguises himself as Alkalla and stabs her as a punishment for her betrayal. The tale concludes swiftly but

Figure 22.6  ‘Oriental Revenge’, Lady’s Magazine, February 1776. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Per. 123 m-7 urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10613828-2.

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enigmatically in the sentence following the description of the attack: ‘This was the punishment of an oriental coquet – but what should be that of a European one?’ (94). In posing this question, the text implies didactic intent but crucially leaves the nature of the text’s moral hanging. The Lady’s Magazine was no promoter of female coquetry, and in copies of the magazine from which the illustration has been removed, ‘Oriental Revenge’ might be read as a warning to women who flout parental authority. The illustration fundamentally reframes the import of the text, however. The ‘oriental’ coquet’s westernised dress – a classically styled variation on the open gown and feathered headdresses common in British fashion plates of the time – contrasts with the costume of the servant who supports her dying frame, and more strikingly with that of the opulently trimmed, bejewelled and violent Mahmoud, who appears in shadow. For all its stereotypical Orientalism, the image closes the gap between the pictured heroine and female reader. The engraving directs the eye and mind away from the red herring of coquetry raised by the text to underscore one of the most dominant preoccupations of the magazine: the psychic, emotional and physical violence to which women are subjected when they accede to filial duty at the expense of personal happiness. If ‘Oriental Revenge’ reframes the text it illustrates, then it too is remediated by the countless other images, tales, essays and advice columns the magazine published that dwell similarly on the theme of women’s inability to follow their inclinations or simply to lead their lives without adverse repercussions. Periodical illustrations communicate the psychological costs of female obedience so effectively in large part because they are not bound by the rules of narrative and closure that dictate the magazine’s text-based content. Fiction illustrations in the Lady’s Magazine invariably focus on a pivotal moment where the female protagonist’s emotional distress is most acute. In some tales, like ‘Oriental Revenge’, these moments coincide with the narrative’s conclusion, but in the majority, they occur in the middle of the unfolding drama. ‘The Assault’ (April 1798) follows this latter model. Published two decades after ‘Oriental Revenge’, the anonymous short fiction seems on the surface to have little in common with the earlier tale. A purportedly true story set in contemporary Britain, ‘The Assault’ centres on the impeccably honourable Clara Irwin, a woman subjected to sustained abuse by her groundlessly jealous husband. After fleeing the marital home, Clara is violently accosted by a man employed by her husband and returned on the brink of death (fig. 22.7). The heroine’s unexpected recovery to health prompts her spouse’s moral transformation. The tale concludes by describing the ‘love and joy’ that reigned in the reunited couple’s hearts (149). If the speed of the husband’s reformation – captured in just two sentences after hundreds of words describing the violence with which he exercised his ‘authority’ over his wife – is less than convincing, then it is completely undermined by the plate, which shows a weakened and emotional Clara being dragged through the snow to her marital home. Literally as well as metaphorically, the lasting impression created by the engraving is not the marital felicity fleetingly described in the text’s final lines, but of the devastation of spousal violence. None of the representative pre-1800 magazine engravings discussed above merely illustrates the text alongside which it appears. Each enriches and remediates the articles with which it connects either by enhancing, recalibrating or undermining their logic and argument. Such plates invite readers to travel imaginatively across geographical, historical, class and cultural divides and, in the process, they open up

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Figure 22.7  ‘The Assault’, Lady’s Magazine, April 1798. Private collection. avenues of identification and self-reflection that urge interrogation of the strictures that shape women’s lives. Fashion, as Copeland notes, is undoubtedly part of the visual coding and appeal of many – but not all – of these images. Yet even in those images where dress is foregrounded, it is not the distraction feared in the Dighton frontispiece. Instead, fashion helps readers decipher a range of cultural, social and political topics that are debated across the magazine’s multi-media contents. To what extent these narratives change once dedicated visual and verbal fashion coverage became a mainstay of the women’s periodical in 1800 is the subject of the final section of this chapter.

Fashioning the Reader: Magazine Illustration Post-1800 By 1800, the specialist fashion magazine was well established across Europe. The rise of French fashion periodicals, including Les Cabinets des Modes (1785–93) and Le Journal des Dames et des Modes (1797–1837), was observed with particular care by British women’s magazine editors who sought to capitalise on the new genre’s success. In the 1790s, plates of Parisian fashions from both of these titles began to appear sporadically

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in the Lady’s Magazine as it belatedly made good on the promise to provide readers with regular sartorial intelligence. Within a few years, the periodical introduced additional plates of London fashions in a development necessitated by the July 1798 launch of the Lady’s Monthly Museum. Like the Lady’s Magazine, the elegant and smaller Museum was a periodical miscellany containing biographies, essays, fiction, translations and poetry. Yet the Museum claimed superiority to its forerunner on the grounds of the ‘quality’ of its ‘letterpress’ and especially of its ‘embellishments’ (‘Prospectus’ 1798, 2). This was despite the fact that the Museum’s plates were fewer in number and range than those in the Lady’s Magazine, usually amounting to a single portrait per issue in addition to one or two hand-coloured plates illustrating its ‘Cabinet of Fashion’ section. The Museum’s production values came at a price. Costing a shilling an issue, it offered its readers less content – textual and visual – than the sixpence Lady’s Magazine. Price did not dent the Museum’s popularity, however, and in January 1800, the Lady’s Magazine followed the newcomer’s lead by doubling its cover price in order to include monthly, specially commissioned coloured fashion plates in addition to the landscapes, portraits and fiction illustrations discussed above. A few years later, both the Lady’s Magazine and the Museum were forced to revisit the quality and scope their fashion coverage following the February 1806 launch of the high-end La Belle Assemblée with its extensive and stunningly illustrated fashion section featuring the latest designs of named fashion innovators such as Madame Lanchester and Mrs Bell. In the field of dress history, the question of how reliably magazine fashion plates reflect what people actually wore continues to generate debate, although Hilary Davidson’s recent description of such images as primarily ‘aspirational’ is undoubtedly accurate, perhaps especially for the Lady’s Magazine which attracted a middling and lower-middling sort readership (Davidson 2019, 48–51). In the field of literary history, this same aspirational quality has long been taken as evidence of the impossibly contradictory demands magazines make of women readers. Fashion plates have been charged on multiple counts, from fuelling desires that were incompatible with the bourgeois socio-economic and moral values historic women’s magazines claimed to uphold (e.g. Beetham 1996, 31), to undermining the intellectual ambitions that periodical editors formerly harboured for their readers (e.g. Shevelow 1989, 188–9). Read in light of such influential claims, the 1780 frontispiece with which this chapter began appears eerily prophetic: Folly, it would seem, triumphed over Minerva when fashion began to command more of the magazine’s columns and its readers’ attentions. Situating fashion plates from the Lady’s Magazine in the context of the visual and textual ecology of which they are a part tells a very different story, however. The rise of the fashion plate did not signal the demise of anti-fashion commentary in the Lady’s Magazine, in which dress continued to be the site of critical negotiation it had always been. Plates appeared in issues alongside anti-fashion essays, poems and parodies penned by the magazine’s correspondents and carefully selected excerpts on the dangers of excessive regard for dress and appearance from notable commentators including Hannah More and Jane West. At first glance, the publication of handcoloured drawings of the latest London and Parisian styles alongside these texts might seem inexplicably disorienting. Yet as we have seen, the magazine had long presented readers with contrasting content and divergent viewpoints with the self-declared aim of encouraging subscribers to acquire the mental dexterity to mediate between them. When it came to dress specifically, readers were urged to discriminate between the

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self-indulgent pursuit of fashion for ‘Fashion’s Sake’ – to borrow the title of a May 1800 verse satire on the subject (270) – and a culturally sanctioned acquisition of fashion knowledge that allowed women to buy, make, wear and converse about dress in accordance with their station and prevailing standards of taste. The plates and verbal reports that the Lady’s Magazine introduced at the beginning of the nineteenth century played a crucial role in actuating this discriminatory faculty. Where earlier images such as the dresses worn at Ranelagh were explicitly commissioned to compensate for the limits of written accounts, the new fashion plates and reports were presented as interdependent representational modes only partially legible in isolation (Davidson 2019, 48). The elliptical, staccato prose style of the fashion reports needs visual illustration to enable readers to conjure in the mind the physical forms of named garments, accessories, fastenings and trimmings. Equally, the plates require verbal elaboration of textures and colours that are beyond the power of engravers and hand-colourists to convey in two-dimensional form (fig. 22.8). These complementary modes of elaboration need to be understood in the context of the Lady’s Magazine’s distinctive presentation of its fashion coverage. The Lady’s Monthly Museum and La Belle Assemblée expressly envisaged their plates being ‘copied’ in the dress of their readers (‘Prospectus’ 1798, 2). By contrast, the Lady’s Magazine

Figure 22.8  ‘London Walking and Evening Dress’, Lady’s Magazine, March 1812. Private collection.

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presented its fashion coverage not as spur to emulation, but as a ‘branch of information’ (‘Address’ (August 1770), n.p.) little different from the essays on history or geography and news sections that bookended it. The periodical imagines fashion, in other words, as a form of knowledge that possesses its own aesthetic and a specialist vocabulary that needs to be learned and relearned over time. The periodical’s introduction of coloured plates and detailed reports offered readers mechanisms to broaden and deepen this knowledge. In the process, it allowed them to cultivate a sophisticated form of ‘material literacy’, which the periodical understood as continuous, rather than at odds, with the other forms of literacy (textual, historical, political and cultural) it sought to engender.10 As if to underline its commitment to the production and acquisition of knowledge in all its forms, the Lady’s Magazine’s new fashion coverage coincided with its expansion of the range of subjects it offered for readers’ amusement and edification. Essays on natural philosophy had always found a home in the Lady’s Magazine, but they only became pillars of the periodical’s content when the new plates and reports were introduced. It was this scientific, rather than fashion, content that the magazine showcased in the ‘Advertisement’ for the Lady’s Magazine in 1800 when it headlined the forthcoming ‘Moral Zoologist’ (January 1800–November 1805) by Ann Murry, which boasted ‘an accurate Description of every Genus and Species of Animals; Illustrated with Copper-plates’ (Supp 1799, n.p.). Presented as a dialogue between a preceptress and her pupil, Murry’s serial imparted ‘useful knowledge’ for female readers in the form of ‘a moral investigation of the regular gradations, instincts, and other relative traits, which eminently distinguish the various orders of animals’, including ‘man’ and ‘every inferior class . . . consigned, not only to his protection, but also for the benign purpose of conducing to his advantage’ (January 1800, 9). Over the next five years, Murry’s series offered an encyclopaedic survey of current knowledge about the physiology, behaviours and habitats of hundreds of animals from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas and Australia. Every instalment was illustrated with a stunning engraving of one or more of the creatures discussed in the discourses, from native rodents and birds, to wildcats, primates and elephants. While Murry’s serial was still running, the magazine introduced a second, long-running scientific serial: ‘Botany for Ladies’, by Robert John Thornton. Thornton’s serial adapted his ongoing work for the sumptuously illustrated Temple of Flora (1807), the third and final part of his New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus (1799–1807), for a mass female readership whom he feared might be intimidated by the discipline’s ‘hard and crabbed terms’ and ‘terrific’ taxonomy. Each ‘lesson’ in the series provided clear descriptions of botanic language with a view to demystifying and promoting the science as the most ‘congenial’ to women’s ‘natures’ (March 1805, 115). The serial also featured dozens of black-and-white drawings with keys that cross-referenced descriptions of floral anatomy in the accompanying text. Like the illustrations for ‘Moral Zoologist’, the plates are elucidatory: a visual explanation of otherwise abstract terms and phenomena designed the more effectively to impress instruction upon the minds. While it is important to acknowledge that Murry’s and Thornton’s serials were introductory in nature and didactic in form and tone, they nonetheless manifest an intellectual ambition for the magazine form and for magazine readers that would dwindle markedly in women’s periodicals in the third decade of the nineteenth century (Shteir 2004, 6).

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The launch of Murry’s and Thornton’s series at the moment that the Lady’s Magazine finally delivered regular fashion content is significant. We could read their introduction as a move to offset the higher page count the periodical was giving to fashion, but it would be more accurate to view this effort as corroboration of the intellectual aspirations the magazine had always harboured for its readers. Dress and fashion played a knotty but integral role in realising this ambition. Sometimes dress figures in the magazine as a visual or textual foil for wisdom as it does the Dighton frontispiece and its verbal ‘Explanation’. More often, however, the presumed opposition between physical and mental accomplishments is undermined. The falsity of the opposition is explicit in essays like the anonymous ‘History of Dress’ (December 1801), which reflected on a catalogue of notable writers, thinkers and leaders from European history to prove that ‘taste for dress does not preclude astute ideas, or extinguish noble and generous sentiments’ (638). It is more explicit still in the magazine’s illustrations, many of which, as we have seen, use dress to orient readers towards alternative ways of seeing themselves and knowing. Ironically, the emphasis upon fashion, and especially fashion plates, in the small body of scholarship on Romantic women’s magazines has obscured these realities. Seduced by their attractions, as the magazine sometimes feared its first readers might be, we have too often failed to situate these late arrivals to the women’s periodical scene within the longer history and more dynamic multi-media ecology of which they were a part. The privileging of fashion plates has thus done double disservice in impoverishing our sense of the richness of the visual economy of the Romantic women’s magazine and in allowing us to dismiss periodical embellishments as window dressing or a way to sell particular forms of femininity that readers would passively accept. The reality, this chapter has suggested, was quite different and one that is visible only when illustrations are positioned in intermedial dialogue with the texts they accompany and the myriad other texts, images and, most vitally, the ideas to which they allude or against which they are juxtaposed. As the Dighton frontispiece elucidates, the magazine could not marshal readers to wisdom; it could only entrust that they would plot the right course for themselves. Illustrations could be powerful navigation aids for those who made use of them and fashion could prompt and orient readers’ critical faculties much more effectively than we have allowed.

Notes  1. Earlier women’s magazines that featured Minerva in their frontispieces include Jasper Goodwill’s Ladies Magazine: or, the Universal Entertainer (1749–53) and Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum (1760–1).   2. The majority of engravings of all types were printed on single royal octavo pages. Some illustrations were larger, however, and had to be folded. The majority of the magazine’s embroidery patterns were significantly larger and some had to be folded many times to fit inside the magazine.  3. Important exceptions, beyond those cited below, include Coxhead (1906) and Bennett (1988).   4. On these challenges in relation to book illustration, see Ionescu and Schellenberg (2011, 1–50) and Haywood, Matthews and Shannon, eds. (2019, 1–22). Excision of plates is relatively common in magazines from this period. Owners sometimes removed plates from monthly issues prior to having them bound in annual volumes. Other plates have clearly

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 5.

  6.

 7.   8.   9. 10.

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been removed post-binding by owners or dealers. These latter excisions are most commonly evidenced by visible cutting marks leaving remnants of page edges close to the binding. The 1770s and 1780s saw the launch of the first fashion-focused periodicals in Britain, although fashion coverage in the Magazine à la Mode, or Fashionable Miscellany (1776–7) and Fashionable Magazine (1786) runs to little more than monthly plates and short fashion reports. The first dedicated British fashion journals include Magazine of Female Fashions of London and Paris (1786–1806) and Niklaus von Heideloff’s Gallery of Fashion (1794–1803). A similar argument was mounted when the magazine waded into the controversy about the erection of a statute to republican historian Catharine Macaulay by commissioning an engraving of it and an essay championing Macaulay’s genius (October 1778). On image and memorialisation in the magazine, see Batchelor (2022). The Voyage illustrations are unattributed in the magazine, but several were the work of James Heath, who produced dozens of illustrations for the magazine over many decades, as did his son, Charles. On the assimilationist politics of such images, see: Anderson (2017); and Kacie Wills, in this volume. The political implications of the Tahitian woman’s dress evolved in the 1790s, as Rauser explains, with the alignment between ‘primitive’ or ‘natural’ dress and revolutionary ideas about the natural social order (2020, 179–81). I take the term material literacy from Dyer and Wigston Smith’s recent book on the subject (2020).

Bibliography Adburgham, Alison. 1972. Women in Print: Writing Women and Women’s Magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Victoria. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. Anderson, Jocelyn. 2017. ‘Elegant Engravings of the Pacific: Illustrations of James Cook’s Expeditions in British Eighteenth-Century Magazines’. British Art Studies 7. Ballaster, Ros, Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Frazer and Sandra Hebron. 1991. Women’s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Woman’s Magazine. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Batchelor, Jennie. 2005. Dress, Distress and Desire: Clothing and the Body in EighteenthCentury Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2018. ‘[T]o Cherish Female Ingenuity, and to Conduce to Female Improvement’: The Birth of the Women’s Magazine’. In Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690–1820s: the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. ———. 2022. The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) and the Making of Literary History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Beetham, Margaret. 1996. A Magazine of her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Women’s Magazine, 1800–1914. London and New York: Routledge. Bennett, Shelley M. 1988. Thomas Stothard: The Mechanisms of Art Patronage in England circa 1800. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Copeland, Edward. 1995. Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790– 1820. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Coxhead, A. C. 1906. Thomas Stothard, R.A.: An Illustrated Monograph. London: A. H. Bullen. Davidson, Hilary. 2019. Dress in the Age of Jane Austen: Regency Fashion. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. DeLucia, JoEllen. 2018. ‘Travel Writing and Mediation in the Lady’s Magazine: Charting the “meridian of female reading”’. In Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain,

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1690–1820s: the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Dyer, Serena and Chloe Wigston Smith, eds. 2020. Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Nation of Makers. London: Bloomsbury. Engel, Laura. 2018. ‘Magazine Miniatures: Portraits of Actresses, Princesses, and Queens in Late Eighteenth-Century Periodicals’. In Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690–1820s: the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Haywood, Ian, Susan Matthews and Mary L. Shannon, eds. 2019. Romanticism and Illustration. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Ionescu Christina and Renata Schellenberg, eds. 2011. Book Illustration in the Long EighteenthCentury: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the ‘Text’. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press. McCracken, Ellen. 1993. Decoding Women’s Magazines from Mademoiselle to Ms. Basingstoke: Macmillan. McCreery, Cindy. 1997. ‘Keeping up with the Bon Ton: the Tête-à-Tête series in the Town and Country Magazine’. In Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities, edited by Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus, 207–29. London and New York: Longman. ‘Prospectus’ for the Lady’s Monthly Museum. 1798. London: Vernor and Hood. Raven, James. 2002. London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748–1811. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Rauser, Amelia. 2020. The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s. New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP. Shevelow, Kathryn. 1989. Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical. London and New York: Routledge. Shteir, Ann B. 2004. ‘Green-Stocking or Blue? Science in Three Women’s Magazines, 1800–50’. In Culture and Science in Nineteenth-Century Media, edited by Louise Henson, Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, Richard Noakes, Sally Shuttleworth and Jonathan R. Topham, 1–14. Farnham: Ashgate.

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Part IV Romanticism Reimagined, the 1830s and Beyond

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23 Album Culture: Begging for Scraps Samantha Matthews

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begin with an unsigned print designed to be pasted into a manuscript album or scrapbook as the frontispiece which greeted readers and prospective contributors (fig. 23.1; Ackermann [1830–58]).1 A group of young women and girls offer their blank albums, beseeching the viewer to contribute. The image asserts the album’s interactive, social character: this is not a commonplace book, with content selected by the owner, but a communal work. It also defines album-keeping as a feminine practice and hints at an analogical relation between book and owner; the blank faces echo blank pages, and the tableau performs the owner’s verbal request as she proffers her book. Yet this simple message is complicated by the proscenium arch of visual scraps on comic and sentimental subjects. Ostensibly, this assists contributors by giving examples of content they might contribute. However, the Romantic album was primarily a vehicle for amateur arts, handicrafts, and cuttings from magazines and prints. This commercial lithograph functions also as an advertisement for the prints and scraps – and albums and scrapbooks – sold at Ackermann & Co’s London shop, the Repository of Arts at 96 Strand. It posits that the contributor who lacks the time, interest or talent to create a bespoke artwork can purchase an attractive printed alternative. The frontispiece represents the album as operating simultaneously in a gift economy and the marketplace, but supposes an inevitable progression from handmaking to purchasing mass-produced prints. The conflation of charitable giving with economic transactions, and ambivalence about album culture, are symbolised by a disconcerting figure in the foreground: a beggar-boy with peg leg and bandaged head waves his crutch to solicit our attention and extends his hat for donations. This visual pun announces that the girls are engaged in metaphorical beggary, while the unruly urchin satirises the young women at whom the frontispiece is marketed. The earnest album-keepers cannot see the pictures which subvert sentimental clichés of album iconography through broad jokes on courtship and marriage drawn from the tradition of caricature prints. The disruptive beggar-boy is both confirmatory symbol of the girls’ desire and satirical comment on the dubious value of what they want. How should we understand the relation between middle-class ladies of leisure metaphorically ‘begging’ for scraps in the parlour and the disabled beggar-boy who evokes homeless children cadging in city streets and the pressing contemporary social problems of poverty and vagrancy? The analogy between well-heeled pastime and barefoot destitution appears offensive to modern sensibilities, but this arresting icon is a later iteration of a common 1820s trope captured in ‘gently satirical prints on the theme of “scrap-begging”, in which every conceivable item of waste paper was seen as an item for an album’ (Rickards 2000, 286). This chapter explores the

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Figure 23.1  ‘[Album title page, depicting a group of young girls holding out their albums]’. London: Ackermann and Co. [1830–58]. John Johnson Collection, Trade in Prints and Scraps 1 (1), Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence. valences of the ‘scrap’ in later Romantic print and manuscript culture through the gendered construction and reception of albums and scrapbooks during 1820s and early 1830s ‘albo-mania’. It considers tensions between amateur and professional artistic practices, between handmaking and reproduction, and between gift-exchange and the marketplace. Brian Maidment’s fine study of ‘the “scrap” as a commercial form of visual culture’ in these decades is concerned with scraps in the technical sense: images ‘deliberately produced [. . .] in the expectation that they would be cut out and

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re-assembled as decorative pages in albums or scrap-books’ (Maidment 2007, 4–5), if not yet the glossy highly coloured pre-cut lithographic images which characterise Victorian scrapbooks (Allen and Hoverstadt 1990). My subject is the scrap loosely defined, a figure used across verbal and visual culture in the early nineteenth century to denote slight, fragmentary and ephemeral forms associated with albums: from sketches, cartoons, botanical paintings and portraits, through original light verse, prose tributes and transcribed quotations, to cut-paper work and snippets from newspapers and magazines. These forms were not ‘waste paper’ to those who created and curated them, but the scrap was low in the cultural hierarchy. Scrappiness figures album culture’s defining aesthetics – miscellaneity, eclecticism, inclusivity, but also triviality, slightness, secondariness – valued by (mostly) female practitioners in the domestic sphere, but typically scorned and satirised by (mostly) male commentators in public discourse and print culture. Where Maurice Rickards finds scrap-begging ‘gently satirical’, I argue that it represents the print industry’s drive to appropriate the iconography, practices and dynamics of feminised album culture and gift-exchange for profit. As a form of scribal publication and vehicle for amateur arts, album-keeping represented a challenge to the economics of professional authorship and print publishing, as well as to conventions of feminine subjectivity and behaviour. By aligning albums and their makers with a cynical, socially conservative view of mendicancy as exploitative professional beggary and fraud, print professionals aimed to discipline and discredit amateur women makers’ increasing participation and agency in arts and culture, while exploiting cultural feminisation commercially. Further, my account restores the ideological and ethical charge to identifying the female album-keeper with beggars, ‘gypsies’ (the period’s catch-all term for Gypsy, Roma, Irish Traveller and other nomadic ethnic minorities), the disabled, children and other disenfranchised social figures, when debates raged about how to address the social problem of mendicancy. Maidment sketches a convincing picture of the intellectual and artistic agency of women who participated in Romantic album culture. Albums present a ‘strong sense of textuality as well as an emphasis on the creative abilities and artistic accomplishments of the compiler’ (Maidment 2007, 6). While some expressed themselves through selecting, cutting, arranging and pasting found pictures and texts (what Ellen Gruber Garvey memorably terms ‘writing with scissors’ (Garvey 2012)), those practices were usually combined with ‘demonstrations of the artistic achievements of the compiler and her acquaintances through water colour painting, drawing or calligraphy’. It was also common for the maker to ‘elaborate the material she had collected from elsewhere by hand, so that it [is] sometimes hard to tell what is decoupage and what is hand painted’ (6–7). However, this is hard to reconcile with Maidment’s dismissive description of female scrapbook-makers as passive ‘compilers’ or their practices as ‘competitively or vapidly motivated’ (8). Such ideas can be traced back to 1820s’ satirical and misogynistic commentary on women’s album culture, of which the scrap-begging motif is a prime example. To represent the middle-class album-keeper as a beggar pleading for scraps defines her as an undiscriminating recipient of whatever the better-off donate. Yet this underestimates Romantic albums’ established aesthetic of miscellaneity and eclecticism. We should beware of reproducing the gendered prejudices of print professionals with strong commercial and ideological interests in defining album-keepers as passive consumers and incompetent artists.

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The Scrap, Cultural Feminisation, and Mendicity The Romantic aesthetic of fragments and miscellaneity, here mediated through the language of scraps and trifles, predates the commercial printed scrap. The scrap’s low status is linked to its association with smallness and incompletion. A scrap is ‘A remnant; [. . .] a piece very small by comparison with the whole; a fragmentary portion’ (OED, n., 2). By contrast with the positive connotations of synecdoche, where the part may stand for the whole, the scrap is the least part, and became identified with women’s culture and the amateur arts. Richard C. Sha’s argument that ‘the discourse of sketching contributed to the shaping of gender’ earlier in the period anticipates the scrap aesthetic; ‘Women were thought to be naturally suited for the unfinished and the partial’ (Sha 1998, 73). Scraps were also the ‘remains of a meal; [. . .] broken meat’ (OED, n., 1). Treated figuratively, this sense’s potential to define the female subject as an indiscriminate consumer and inauthentic cultural agent is realised in John Keats’s 1817 denunciation of female intellectuals as ‘Women, who having taken a snack or Luncheon of Literary scraps, set themselves up for towers of Babel in Languages Sapphos in Poetry – Euclids in Geometry – and everything in nothing’, women culpably deficient in ‘real feminine Modesty’ (Keats 1957, 163). Columns of miscellaneous instructive and entertaining quotations and anecdotes popular in Romantic periodicals expressly referenced the scrap trope. The Lady’s Monthly Museum’s column invoked a more elegant alimentary analogy; its title was the ‘OLIO’ – literally an Iberian stew, by extension any ‘hotchpotch’ or ‘collection of various artistic or literary pieces’ (Anonymous, ‘Olio. No. 1’ 1812, 196; OED, n., 2.a.). The OLIO’s epigraph, ‘A thing of shreds and patches’, is a distorted Hamlet quotation which became a scrap-begging meme. By the 1820s, such columns were expressly offered as repositories of wit and wisdom for readers to mine for commonplace books and albums. The anthology Scrapiana; Or, Elegant Extracts of Wit (1818) went through six editions by 1824, and spawned imitators such as Scrapiana Poetica (Anonymous 1824, 1825). Album-makers did not simply copy but appropriated and repurposed such materials. Clare Pettitt discusses Mary Watson’s album in Manchester’s Page Collection, where she ‘glued snippets of text cut out from periodicals and newspaper onto the title page of her 1821 “Olio” or album, using a cut-out puff for a periodical called The Scrap Book as the title for her own hand-made album’ (Pettitt 2016, 32). Where Keats uses the scrap as a sign of feminine deficiency and inauthenticity, Watson co-opts advertising for her own creative purposes. There was no shortage of sources for beggar iconography in Georgian England. Commentators noted the increase in the urban homeless after the Napoleonic Wars. Works such as John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana; or Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the Streets of London; with Portraits of the Most Remarkable (1817) captured recognised beggar ‘characters’ for posterity. The notion that album-keepers were a contemporary social problem on a par with beggars soliciting for money on the streets was a standing joke among professional authors. Robert Southey noted in a letter that ‘I have lately proposed to Wordsworth that we should institute a society for the suppression of albums’ (Southey 1821), while in his 1825 journal Walter Scott facetiously proposed to institute ‘a Society for the suppression of Albums. It is a most troublesome shape of mendicity. Sir, your autograph – a line of poetry’ (Lockhart 2012, 123–4). These literary celebrities who also made their living as professional authors

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objected to being expected to compose original poems without reimbursement. However, their exasperated jokes have an uneasy connection to a serious social context. Southey and Scott allude to the Mendicity Society, a charity founded in 1818 in response to Matthew Martin’s campaign to address the situation of London beggars, and which produced an annual Report of the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity. The Society’s methods led to more ‘punishment of those whom it deemed fraudulent’ than ‘assistance and encouragement for those it thought worthy’ and its emphasis on policing and incarceration hardened public suspicion of beggars (MacKay 1997, 40). Criticised in Charles Lamb’s Elia essay ‘A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis’ (1822), the Mendicity Society’s criminalising of vagrancy coincided exactly with the proliferation of the scrap-begging motif. Despite album culture’s identification with middle-class women, it became curiously involved with ‘the pressing contemporary problem of how to represent – both politically and aesthetically – the urban poor, and beggars in particular’ (Harriman-Smith 2015, 551). Scrap-begging’s first significant appearance in print is an unsigned article by the popular humourist Horace Smith of Rejected Addresses fame, ‘Beggars Extraordinary! – Proposals for their Suppression’, published in The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal in January 1823 ([Smith] 1823). The speaker, a ‘scribbler’ and enthusiastic supporter of the Mendicity Society, proposes that mendicity ‘is not the exclusive profession of rags and wretchedness, of the cripple and the crone, but is openly practised by able-bodied and well-dressed vagrants of both sexes’ (61). The comfortably middle-class ‘beggars’ who deserve correction include wheedling spinsters collecting for charity and coercive book-borrowers, but the worst offenders are: the young and old ladies, from the boarding-school Miss to the Dowager Blue Stocking, who, in the present rage for albums and autographs, ferret out all unfortunate writers [. . .] and beg them – just to write a few lines for insertion in their repository. (64) The ‘rage’ for albums purportedly produces exclusively female ‘mendicants’ of all ages and respectable classes who are undiscriminating (‘Friends, aunts, cousins, neighbours, all are put in requisition’), importunately present their ‘neat morocco-bound begging-book[s]’ (‘Surely, Mr. Higginbotham, you will not refuse me’), and culpably ‘assum[e] that compliance costs nothing’ (64–5). The fantasised punishment, that ‘The ladies, old and young, should be condemned to Bridewell [. . .] there to be dieted upon bread and water until they had completely filled one another’s albums with poetry of their own composing’ (65), is a misogynistic form of contrapasso, where albumkeepers have a taste of their own medicine and learn how difficult it is to create art under duress and without payment. ‘Beggars Extraordinary!’ introduced the idea of the album-owner as beggar into popular print through the New Monthly Magazine’s wide readership and the piece was republished in Smith’s Scrapiana-like miscellany Gaieties and Gravities (Smith 1825, 2:266–75).

Frontispieces and Titles Scrap-begging’s primary graphic vehicle was lithographed single-page prints marketed as frontispieces or title pages for albums and scrapbooks. They were usually sold as

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monochrome prints then hand-coloured by a professional or the album-owner. Many scrap-begging prints survive in archives such as the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera (Bodleian Library, Oxford), the Page Collection (Manchester Metropolitan University), and the Yale Center of British Art, as well as in private collections. Most of my examples are from the John Johnson Collection. Some are still pasted at the front of albums, but many were preserved after the books were destroyed. Their favourable survival rate may say more about these odd images’ curiosity value than about their grassroots popularity among women. Although the scrap-beggar theme is mainly treated as an eccentric footnote in the history of early nineteenth-century visual culture, recent critics have read it as articulating album-owners’ views of themselves and of album-keeping. James A. Secord sees it as an ‘appropriately picturesque’ way for ‘well-bred ladies’ identified with charitable philanthropy to acknowledge ‘their own tendency to pester for contributions’. He locates the conceit of genteel women implicitly ‘claim[ing] to be led by the deserving poor’ in an iconographic tradition of ‘ironic reversals’ which symbolically contained ‘potentially disruptive activities by working people’ and so were ‘important in maintaining a sense of social stability’ (Secord 2006, 176). Deidre Lynch suggests that scrapbook owners ‘presented themselves, in a kind of cross-class masquerade, as poor petitioners’ (Lynch 2018, 16n). These suggestive readings overstate the album-owner’s agency in images which originate in a masculinist commercial print culture with vested interests in increasing the printed matter purchased for insertion in albums and in framing women’s arts and crafts as amateurish and silly. Commentators delighted in making albums and their owners the butt of satire and parody. Album culture was highly reflexive and selfconscious; as Pettitt notes, ‘the culture of the album, even as early as the 1820s, was already a familiar enough form to be aware of the comedy of its own conventions’ (Pettitt 2016, 27). Yet albums’ association with reflexivity, puns and wit does not mean that we should imagine women participants were always half-laughing at the practice. We should also question which aspects of ‘social stability’ are protected and which problematised when images dramatise gendered tensions through a ‘cross-class masquerade’. Scrap-begging iconography may instead be understood as a fantasy projection which album-owners enterprisingly navigated and accommodated. As Maidment suggests, ‘the rituals of teasing out contributions [. . .] suggest the extent to which a new class of consumers – genteel young women – were being drawn into the commercial networks of visual culture’ (Maidment 2007, 8). Prints designed as album frontispieces and titles have various subjects and are often reflexive, giving examples of visual and verbal content to contribute or modelling the book’s use. Short poems on ‘The Album’ or a trompe l’oeil open book are common (Allen and Hoverstadt 1990, 6). Richard Salmon’s ‘Specimens of Art’ is representative in creating a composition from the visual genres, artistic practices, image-types, tools and materials employed in making albums and scrapbooks (fig. 23.2). Scrap-beggar frontispieces have a peculiar interest because they directly mediate cultural stereotypes about album-keeping women. The figure stands (or sits) at the album’s threshold, a symbolic surrogate for the album-keeper and emblem of her request. The image-text articulates the owner’s request without her needing to speak, but also allows viewers to interpret it according to their own agendas. Even allowing for the tension between the language of organicism and friendship (‘My Album is a garden-plot, / Here all my friends

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Figure 23.2  Richard Salmon, ‘Specimens of Art’, Frontispiece. London: J. McCormick [1820–60]. John Johnson Collection, Trade in Print and Scraps 1 (5), Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence.

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may sow’) and the display of commodities and commodified iconography, ‘Specimens of Art’s’ presentation of women’s culture appears relatively neutral compared with the scrap-beggar’s embodiment and personifying of album culture. A range of scrapbeggar archetypes developed: a male discharged soldier, matronly woman, mother with children, attractive young woman, child, even a pet-dog. Several registers and styles typical of the transitional 1830s print aesthetic are also in play: caricature and the comic grotesque, social realism, sentimentalism and idealisation. In allying the beggar as sign of social disenfranchisement and dependence with the gendered marginality of the female album-owner, these images aim to neutralise the threat of cultural feminisation.

Edward Hull, Shakespeare and the Realistic Beggar Early scrap-beggar frontispieces depict a single figure startlingly at odds with the genteel female album-keeper and her circle. The first artist to popularise scrap-beggar iconography was Edward Hull (fl. 1820–34), a printmaker and drawing master based in Kennington, London. Hull’s print ‘A Thing of Shreds and Patches’, first published in 1823, went through several iterations (fig. 23.3 is the 1825 version). Hull’s male beggar appears grotesque beside the prevalent idealising album aesthetic – a disconcerting first figure to encounter in a young woman’s book. He is an archetype of vagrancy with stock attributes including begging wallet, crutch or staff, travelling cloak, ragged clothing, broken hat and physical disabilities (he is lame and blind). His one eye does not meet the viewer’s gaze and supporting himself on crutches debars him from extending his hand in the traditional begging gesture. Only the wallet’s text ‘SCRAPS thankfully received’ differentiates the figure from a destitute veteran of the Napoleonic Wars. This is a strikingly ambivalent icon of album culture. Despite his incapacity, the figure appears as much threat as object of pity. His stance is not propitiatory. His patched, ragged costume resembles that of Vice in the medieval mystery plays, and the epigraph recalls Hamlet’s scornful description of his usurping stepfather Claudius as ‘A king of shreds and patches’ (Shakespeare, III, iv, 104). Emblematising ‘Shreds and Patches’, the beggar is a satirical vehicle. The repurposed quotation suggests that the album too is pieced together and less than the sum of its parts. The wallet text invokes gratitude, but the man’s smirking expression ironises the formula, while his conspicuous disability at once neutralises the threat of masculine physical violence and figures an unsettling otherness. As an actor in the album transaction, the figure follows up the owner’s request with a half-humorous touch of menace to encourage compliance. His stark visual contrast to the female album-owner whose wishes he represents is an uncomfortable joke which works through ironic dissimilitude: much pleasanter to be asked for a verse or sketch by a genteel young woman than confront the incarnation of a social problem. Initially self-published from the artist’s home in ‘North Brixton’ in December 1823, the print caught the eye of entrepreneurial publishers, and next Christmas Hull produced a female counterpart for the Fleet Street stationer Rowe & Waller (Hull 1824). This time the Shakespearean epigraph was ‘A Snapper-up of unconsider’d Trifles’, Autolycus the rogue’s self-description in The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare, IV, iii, 26). Although the identification with a peddler, vagabond and pickpocket is unflattering, the shift from tragedy to romance is in line with the feminising and softening of the scrap-beggar over time. The woman beggar also wears a cloak, patched clothes, holds a stick and carries a bag. However, she is matronly, unthreatening and able-bodied. She makes a propitiating

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Figure 23.3  E. Hull, ‘A Thing of Shreds and Patches. Hamlet’. North Brixton/[London]: Rowe & Waller, March 1825. Lithograph. Wellcome Collection.

Figure 23.5  Edward Purcell, ‘Pray give a trifle’. Lithograph. London: S. & J. Fuller, 1827. John Johnson Collection, Trade in Print and Scraps 1 (10), Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence.

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Figure 23.4  Edward Purcell, ‘Pray give a trifle’. Engraving. London: S. & J. Fuller, 1826. John Johnson Collection, Trade in Print and Scraps 1 (12), Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence.

Figure 23.6  Anonymous, ‘Pray Remember Me’. Lithograph. [1820–50]. John Johnson Collection, Trade in Prints and Scraps 2 (4), Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence.

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gesture that corresponds with the bag’s modest, passively worded solicitation, ‘The smallest SCRAPS will be acceptable.’ She is a palatable intermediary, with her static pose, homely apron and headscarf, and air of a respectable countrywoman fallen on hard times. Hull rang the changes on his two beggars. He redrew the male ‘A Thing of Shreds and Patches’ (in reverse) for co-publication with Rowe & Waller in March 1825; ‘Printed by C. Hullmandel’ featured prominently as a guarantee of reprographic quality (fig. 23.3). The female beggar was also reworked (Hull 1827). Although the begging gesture is more overt and she looks the viewer in the eye, her expression is pleading, her clothes’ edges are gently scalloped, and the figure has been relocated from urban cobbles to a soft rural landscape. Hull redrew the male beggar for the prominent lithographic publisher Engelmann, Graf, Coindet & Co, for Christmas 1828 (Hull 1828). While the beggar’s attributes are unchanged – down to the clay pipe in his hatband – the face’s harsh lines are smoothed into neutrality, the body language denotes passivity and long-suffering, and the figure is aestheticised and distanced in a natural landscape. Whereas Hull’s scrap-beggar frontispieces reference vagrants’ traditional attributes and represent mature adults marked by hardship and poverty, the aesthetic rapidly became more polite and oriented to female consumers.

Edward Purcell’s ‘Gypsies’ The tendency to idealise, feminise and loosen the trope’s connection to street life and social issues was developed by competitors who re-imagined the figure as a romanticised gypsy. In redefining the scrap-beggar as an attractive dark-haired Romany or Traveller woman, such images crafted an ethnically exoticised identificatory fantasy designed to appeal to genteel album-owners while offering mildly erotic gratification for men who purchased the prints as gifts. However, the images kept in touch with more realistic beggar iconography to elicit a satirical commentary on album culture. This approach’s most influential proponent was Edward Purcell (fl. 1812–31), an Irish drawing master active as a lithographic artist in London in the 1820s. Purcell created several album frontispieces published by S. & J. Fuller and sold at their West End shop, the Temple of Fancy. Purcell’s ‘Pray give a Trifle’ decisively reduces the distance between the scrapbeggar and album-keeper, while keeping the grotesque vagrant type in play (fig. 23.4). The central figure is young, romantically pretty, elegantly posed. Her basket and broom are mere decorative props. She does not so much beg as gesture gracefully to the generic sign ‘Scraps thankfully received’, while her other hand points to the representative scraps spilling out of the bag (Purcell 1826). She presents a self-consciously rustic, idealised alter-ego for the album-keeper, a self-image exoticised by the bare arms, shoulders, decolletage and feet licensed by gypsy costume (Houghton-Walker 2014, Ch. 7). She fulfils Rickard’s generalisation that ‘The tone of the illustrations, clearly conceived as self-mockery, was of romantic poverty’ more convincingly than Hull’s figures. Yet ‘self-mockery’ is questionable when the images are made not by women album-owners but male print professionals. We might similarly resist the trope of feminine impoverishment, presented as playful and performative, but which registers an entrenched disparagement of female culture. Where Hull’s prototypical male beggar was tamed through physical disability, Purcell’s vapid woman beggar is bodily whole but symbolises an intellectual and artistic deficiency. Shakespearean allusion ceased to be necessary to legitimise the scrap-beggar. The image’s title – a beggar’s catchphrase, after the model of The Cries of London – was

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also heard in the streets and current in popular culture. In Elizabeth Inchbald’s popular play Lovers’ Vows (1798), Agatha the destitute single mother begs a country girl ‘My dear child, if you could spare me a trifle –’ (Inchbald 1798, 4). Translated from the real-world beggar/donor encounter to the album, the phrase recodes the euphemistic ‘trifle’ (coin) as a ‘slight composition’. Whereas Hull figured the desired scrap through patches on ragged clothes, here the dress is undamaged but pictorial and verbal scraps are represented explicitly and profusely; even the beggar’s sign is a scrap. The scrap’s iconographic translation from fragmentary textile is a reminder that paper was manufactured from rag and an economic as well as social value inhered in both kinds of scraps: the scrap-beggar evokes also her working-class sisters, the ragpicker and rag-sorter (Brylowe 2019). The idealised young woman contrasts with the background of caricatured vagrants gloating over papers – a satirical edge confirmed in the words ‘venom’ and ‘nonsense’ on the legible scraps. Purcell juxtaposes ideal and grotesque beggary, foregrounding the ideal (aligned with individual, genteel feminine subjectivity) by contrast with the grotesque (aligned with mass culture). By 1826 it was impossible to pretend that albumkeeping was an elite or original pastime, but the prominent flattering self-image tacitly distinguishes the individual from the many. Where the other beggars’ hunched postures, rags and crafty expressions signal stereotyped greed and cunning linked to Irish Traveller caricatures, the girl’s graceful bearing evokes the parlour’s polite mores. By implication, viewer and scrap-beggar have a shared appreciation of the reciprocal album transaction and can decode the polite performance. Yet the conjunction of two versions of beggary puts the girl’s sincerity into question. Is she an attractive decoy deployed in a confidence trick? Is she the acceptable face of unacceptable professional beggary and threatening ‘gypsy’ otherness? The image plays into the middle-class suspicion that a beggar is not a legitimate recipient of charity but exploits their goodwill from laziness or criminality. In this cynical interpretation, the pretty scrap-beggar is a front for the grasping grotesques, and the genteel album-keeper’s request is a species of fraud. When Purcell recast the ‘gypsy’ maid for the 1827 ‘Pray Give a Trifle’, the sexualised and commodified connotations were explicit (fig. 23.5). The implied viewer has shifted from the identificatory female album-owner to the reluctant male contributor who needs to be enticed (Purcell 1827). The girl is eroticised: more flesh is displayed, loose tendrils of hair, she wears an unstructured dress akin to dishabille, and her stylised facial features include flushed cheeks, rosebud mouth and large pleading eyes. The miscellaneous scraps have been replaced with a single image displayed on a begging plate: a fashionably dressed couple, the standing woman receiving a bowing man’s obeisance. This invokes album verses’ use of courtly conventions to construct an idealised model of gender relations, where the knight accedes to his lady’s commands (Matthews 2020). However, the woman’s dominance is exposed as a performance by its inversion in the beggar-girl’s subordinate kneeling position, looking up beseechingly at the viewer. Read as print culture’s self-interested reimagining of the album transaction, Purcell’s hyper-feminine gypsy beggars project a conflicted fantasy of feminine agency and commodification. Where the album-owner typically approached contributors in polite drawing rooms or parlours, the beggar is pictured at the wayside and in open country. The frontispiece offers a feminine alter-ego whose barefoot life symbolises freedom and mobility, yet her kneeling pose recalls the static incapacity of Hull’s male beggar. Further, although the grotesque beggars and Travellers are shrunk to distant indeterminate silhouettes, the mercenary impulses they symbolise are foregrounded. The girl resembles

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a hawker or pedlar at a roadside stall. The prints pinned up inside the tent recall book and printsellers’ windows and the makeshift displays of itinerant ballad and broadsidesellers – and, like her prints, the girl is displayed, commodified and available for purchase. The implication that the pretty scrap-beggar is a ‘front’ for baser designs and desires is confirmed by a variation, ‘Pray Remember me’ (Purcell [c. 1828]). Purcell again foregrounds the barefoot girl sitting at the roadside before an improvised shelter with the titular request nailed at the apex. She fixes the viewer with unnaturally large eyes and points to her empty hand, while her basket, containing a box marked ‘Secrets’ and overflowing with papers (labelled ‘Albums’, ‘Scraps’ and ‘White Lies’), makes clear what form the ‘remembrances’ should take. In the background two eligible bachelors hesitate at a fingerpost; one appears so struck by the girl’s appearance that his hat has fallen off. The image could be understood as emblematising the album transaction as a harmless flirtation were it not for two figures within the tent: caricatured elderly vagrant or Traveller women in caps drinking and gloating over the takings. The old women are easily overlooked because the tent interior is the darkest part of this uncoloured lithograph; but their very obscurity articulates a misogynistic unveiling of a ‘truth’ about the pretty beggar-girl, whose grotesque shadows expose either her concealed cupidity or future destiny. As an emblem of young women’s albums, this is a sour joke. Hull’s and Purcell’s works dominate the market for scrap-beggar frontispieces in the 1820s, the decade when making albums and scrapbooks expanded rapidly from an elite practice to an ‘albo-mania’ (Matthews 2020, Ch. 4). An 1829 Literary Gazette review gives a typical masculine perspective. Although the column is headed ‘Fine Arts. New Publications’, the opening gambit is that ‘We do not notice these as works of art’ (Anonymous, ‘Album Titles’ 1829). Instead, the writer describes Hull’s prints ‘with the view of doing good service to the public’ since ‘every one who can read, write, or draw, has now their album for the amusement of their reading, writing, or drawing friends’. Hull’s ‘Album Titles’ are convenient commodities which relieve contributors of their duties or pretentions to amateur art: ‘we are determined never to design another titlepage for any Lady’s album, when Messrs. Engelmann and Co are ready so kindly to afford us a supply’. It is not simply that designing bespoke title pages is troublesome, but that buying prints puts the transaction on a more transparent footing. The images described are recognisable from the Shakespearean mottos and scrap-begging formulae, as is the gender bias. Whereas the representative female scrap-beggar is ‘A very pretty gipsy-girl’, the male beggar is ‘worthy of Callot or De la Bella’. Through notable Renaissance artists of beggary, the French Jacques Callot (1591–1635) and Italian Stefano della Bella (1610–64), the male beggar is aligned with reputable male art historical tradition. Indeed, Callot’s etching ‘Beggar with Crutches and Wallet’ is a clear source for Hull’s prototypical male beggar (Callot c. 1622–3).

Mothers, Children and Dogs The scrap-beggar proliferated and diversified in print culture from the early 1830s. Album frontispieces were a steady seller and publishers commissioned novel variations on successful formulae. Established London booksellers, publishers and printers such as Rudolph Ackermann and Joseph Dickinson were joined by operators such as William Day, William Spooner, Godefroy Engelmann and G. S. Tregear. Some were not shy about appropriating popular images. A crudely drawn unsigned lithograph ‘Remember Me’ published by Orlando Hodgson rips off Purcell’s kneeling gypsy girl (Anonymous

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[1820?–40?]). There is a perfunctory tent and camp fire, she is a little more respectable (shoes, a less revealing costume), but her commercial purpose is unambiguous: she has an apronful of prints, prints displayed on a washing line, and more on the ground. The dominant trend remained unthreatening, attractive, usually female and increasingly juvenile figures filtered through an idealising and sentimental aesthetic. In William Spooner’s ‘The Scrap Collector’ (April 1831), a child-woman in straw hat and rustic dress appeals to the viewer, gesturing to the basket of scraps hooked over her arm (Allen and Hoverstadt 1990, 14). In ‘Pray remember me’ (fig. 23.6), a younger child in gypsy costume and red cloak walks barefoot along a country path, holding out her hat, which already contains one scrap, and her basket holds an album and more scraps (Anonymous [1820–50]). Alone in a rough, wooded landscape on a steep stony path, the child walks confidently knowing she is safe in a fantasy scene. Reconceiving the scrap-beggar as a child plays into print culture’s dominant narrative that albums and their arts are immature, amateurish and symptomatic of regressive cultural feminisation. It also mobilises the Romantic cult of childhood to neutralise the potential sexual impropriety of young women soliciting for contributions. However, scrap-beggar iconography also draws attention to the anxiety about women’s agency and sexuality which it aims to repress. Stylistically contrasting variations demonstrate artists’ deliberate address to different phases of women’s romantic and family lives when targeting them as consumers. William Derby’s undated lithograph combines the child-beggar with the putto motif popular in contemporary amateur arts (Derby [1800–50?]). The naked boy Cupid, identifiable by wings, quiver of arrows, bow and catapult, also wears a begging wallet (positioned to protect his modesty) with the familiar legend ‘pray give a trifle’. Here the ‘trifle’ denotes Valentines, cards printed with poems and floral motifs displayed in the bag and offered in the boy’s hand. As with Purcell’s gypsy-girls, Derby’s Cupid sells commercial products under the pretence of asking for donations. Derby was a reputable portraitist and copyist, and the print was produced by leading lithographer Charles Hullmandel. Cupid’s complicity with satirical commentary on women’s amateur arts is suggested by his mischievous expression and the background, where stick men climb precipitous promontories to offer their devotion to Venus, only to fall or throw themselves to their deaths. Catharine Muriel’s Commonplace Book (1824–35) at Yale has this frontispiece (Gowrley 2018, 6). By contrast, in another Hull title a gypsy woman in conventional red ragged cloak and yellow headscarf stands smiling with her hand extended against a background of open common, trees and tent. However, unconventionally, she carries two young children on her back in a papoose labelled ‘SCRAPS’, as the accompanying verse explains:



O’er hill and dale, with Children twain, Food (for the mind) intent to gain,   I wander forth forlorn. Then courteous Gentlefolks perhaps You’ll give some literary Scraps   My ALBUM to adorn. (Hull n.d.)

The verse ‘speaks’ for the album-owner in the guise of a vagrant mother seeking charity for her children. In this cross-class performance, the beggar defines herself as ‘other’

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by addressing the potential contributor as ‘Gentlefolks’. Yet the extrapolation of the metaphor – ‘literary Scraps’ decoded as intellectual ‘Food’ for consumption – conflicts with the visual figuration of children as human ‘scraps’. Hull probably devised this unusual maternal scrap-beggar to appeal to the married women who continued the practice from their single life. However, by alluding to real-life women beggars who used children to stimulate pity – and to conservative social policy cracking down on it – the image exposes its view of the album-keeper as a threatening ‘other’. The logic of changing the masculine realistic early scrap-beggar into a more safely commercial feminine type relatable to middle-class album-owners, and then into a child, reaches its conclusion in the motif of a begging dog. Domestic cats and dogs are common subjects for women’s amateur art and frequently appear in albums. Thus, in one lithographed frontispiece which uses the common reflexive subject of a trompe l’oeil album displayed with indicative graphic content (goldfinches, picturesque castle, botanical motifs), the open book depicts a kneeling girl holding a wheatsheaf, and a spaniel which sits up begging on a cushion captioned ‘scraps thankfully received’ ([Anonymous 1820–50]). The girl is a gleaner, harvesting texts and images, while the dog strikes a cute attitude for titbits. To iconise the request through the dog further neutralises the latent threat of the agentive female albummaker. This is a well-trained, non-verbal intermediary, whose docile domesticity and tail-wagging eagerness-to-please elides the troubling otherness of the human vagrant while suppressing animal otherness. The arc of iconographic development from male caricature to dog is not the whole story. Different scrap-beggars appealed to different purchasers, the images circulated concurrently, and were revived and repackaged. The entrepreneurial publisher G. S. Tregear commissioned his own stark version of the discharged soldier figure (fig. 23.7) in the early 1830s ([Tregear] 1833–5). Its title ‘The Gatherer’ and motto ‘A Snapper up of unconsidered Trifles’ both trade off printed ‘scrap’ discourse. The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction’s miscellaneous column ‘The Gatherer’ adopted as its epigraph ‘A snapper up of unconsidered trifles. Shakspeare’ from Hull (Anonymous 1822, 14; Anonymous 1829, 176). Tregear’s bitter beggar does not simply revive the soldier caricature (as shown by his military red coat) but offers an overdetermined coarse icon of scrap-beggary, bristling with mendicant attributes (staff, bag, backpack, wooden leg, bandaged head, patched and holey clothes), while prints and scraps protrude from hat, bag and pack. The British Museum’s copy is hand-coloured, as the lithograph could be bought plain from Tregear’s shop at 123 Cheapside, ‘Where a great Variety of Others are Published’.

Scrap-Beggar Rhetoric in Print and Manuscript Scrap-beggar allusions circulated widely in 1830s’ popular culture. In the Edinburgh Literary Journal, ‘Pertinax Primrose’ offered extracts from his ‘very uncommon-place book’, hoping readers would transfer them ‘to the albums kept either by themselves or their fair cousins’; both the fictional album and article are titled ‘A Thing of Shreds and Patches’ (Primrose 1830, 344). The trope’s currency is also apparent from texts which exploit satirical discourse that associates female album-keepers with figurative beggary and sociopolitical debates about mendicity. ‘The Adventures of an Album’, an it-narrative published in Louisa H. Sheridan’s innovative women’s annual The

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Figure 23.7  [G. S. Tregear], ‘The Gatherer. A Snapper up of unconsidered trifles’, 1833–5. London: G. S. Tregear. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Comic Offering (1831), is a popular source in recent studies (Secord 2006, 117; Maidment 2007, 7–8; Pettitt 2016, 24; Lynch 2018, 87–8), with good reason. The self-regarding album narrates its life story from its beginnings as an ‘Exclusive’ handmade by a modish London stationer bought by Miss Beaumont, through its fashionable heyday, to dusty neglect. However, commentators have not noticed an overt allusion to scrap-begging nor its decisive role in the album’s demise. In answer to Miss Beaumont’s incautious request, old Mr Caustic contributes a long poem ‘Common-place Beggars. Addressed by Mr. Rhyme-grinder, to the Society for the suppression of Mendicity in London’ (Anonymous, ‘The Adventures of an Album’

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1831, 280). Caustic’s punning indictment of ‘Common-place Beggars’ is patently inspired by ‘Beggars Extraordinary!’: But when I took up my abode in town, I found mendicity not yet put down. I don’t mean beggars in a tatter’d gown   With face distress’d: A small donation will their wishes crown,   And they’re at rest. Oh! No – the persons who my sorrows cause, Are beauties, dress’d in satins, silks, and gauze! Those lovely plagues, who haunt without a cause   Each hapless poet; Nor cease to persecute a man who draws,   When once they know it! (Anonymous, ‘The Adventures of an Album’ 1831, 283) Mendicity is here synonymous with feminine mendacity. There are no genuinely needy cases, the real public nuisance is album-owners soliciting for poems and drawings. Caustic’s gratuitously punitive sentence is almost verbatim from Smith: solitary confinement on bread and water in Bridewell prison, on an indefinite sentence (‘To stay ’till they could poetry compose / Enough to fill / Each other’s Albums’ [emphasis original]). The dialogue between printed and handmade images, texts and objects which characterises album culture within the broader Romantic media ecology is evident in the scrap-beggar’s handcrafted remediation. The dog motif is often copied. John Hearne’s commonplace book at Yale, begun in 1820, later acquired a hand-painted frontispiece of a spaniel begging next to a trompe l’oeil album displaying stock motifs (forgetme-nots and goldfinches); one ‘page’ is a flap which lifts to reveal the familiar legend ‘Scraps Thankfully Received’ (Gowrley 2018, 2–3). Composing a poem in 1837 for the album of William Wordsworth’s teenaged god-daughter, Rotha Quillinan, Leigh Hunt referenced the child-gypsy scrap-beggar by describing Rotha’s book as A golden begging-box, which pretty miss Goes round with, like a gipsey as she is, From bard to bard, to stock her father’s shelf, – Perhaps for cunning dowry to herself! (Hunt 1837a, fol. 11) Like Spooner’s ‘The Scrap Collector’, Rotha appears as an ambiguous child-woman whose innocence allows her to ask for contributions from her father Edward Quillinan’s literary friends, but who is teasingly suspected of using the book in anticipation of more mature desires (the ‘cunning dowry’). Hunt disseminated the allusion by publishing the poem in the New Monthly Magazine and collecting it in his works (Hunt 1837b, 420). Handmade album art’s tendency to domesticate and soften the beggar motif’s satirical and grotesque features is apparent in an accomplished mid-1830s watercolour

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frontispiece by ‘S.M.S.’ which uses lift-the-flap technology to play on the conceit of the album as a charitable foundation. An upstairs window opens to show a maid holding an album and a sign ‘Donations thankfully received’ (S. M. S. 1835). The joke is made explicit not only by the inscription ‘supported by voluntary contributions’ under the window, but also by stone statuettes of male and female figures in charity uniforms standing on plinths inscribed ‘Instituted by S. M. S.’ and ‘Anno Domini 1835’. The gendered scrap-begging dynamic is invoked: the female figure holds an open book and looks across to the male figure, who has a closed book under his arm and turns away. The transaction is taken off the street and domesticated, while the subordinate female is reimagined as a servant negotiating with the ‘visitor’ across the threshold. Contributed to an unidentified woman’s album in January 1831, Charles Lamb’s poem ‘The Scrap Book’ presents a different form of recuperative domestication and feminisation: When Mendicants, poor children of mishaps, Invite a guest, they make a feast of scraps; Where broken ends of meat – stale pie – tough chicken – Club to make up a tolerable picking. Not such the banquet which our Scrap Book brings; We drain the choicest essences of things: (Lamb 1831, ll. 1–6) Readers in the 1830s would immediately decode the mendicants feasting on scraps as a scrap-beggar allusion. However, in Lamb’s critique beggars are sympathetically figured as victims of circumstance (‘poor children’) whose destitution does not prevent them offering hospitality. Unlike the prints’ objectification of a lowly type, Lamb pictures a community of peers pooling resources. Lamb sustains the metaphor of the consumable scrap when he turns to the literal scrapbook, but in proposing the ‘cream’ of literary and graphic ‘dainty fragment[s]’ for this superior book (ll. 7–8), he denies the classed conflation of poor beggar with middle-class album-keeper. The refusal to play along with the ‘cross-class masquerade’ is explicit; the speaker concedes only one likeness between the book and ‘our first opening humble Simile’: ‘The banquet not upon ourselves depends, / We shine by Contributions of our friends’ (ll. 14, 15–16). The poem concludes in this collective voice, as gently flattering requests are cited (‘“from your pencil, Madam, a Design: / We know how well you colour [. . .]”’ (ll. 18–19) and the frame of reference remains firmly in the middle-class parlour. ‘By such small arts the Scrap Book grows and thrives’ (l. 21), where ‘small arts’ are both the contributions and the persuasive strategies which secure them. Lamb’s conclusion replaces the modish scrap-beggar with a traditional positive feminine analogy: Much like those curious Counterpanes, old Wives Their frugal Daughters taught, to raise their matches, – A Rainbow work, a Cloth of Splendid Patches. Chs Lamb, Enfield. 17th Jan. 1831. (ll. 21–4)

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The default satirical disparagement of scraps as waste is transformed as the ‘frugal’ recycling of ‘patches’ into a modestly transcendent ‘Rainbow work’ and homecrafted heirloom. The simile retains a hint of the commonplace that women solicit men to catch a husband (‘raise their matches’). However, the final phrase brings the poem full circle by refiguring what Lamb referred to in ‘A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars’ as ‘the Beggar’s robes, and graceful insignia of his profession [. . .] He weareth all colours’ into a Scrap Book like a patchwork quilt with profound affective meaning in matriarchal culture (Lamb 1822, 532). Lamb also stayed true to the poem’s affirmation of feminine handmaking and domestic values by not publishing it; it appears in print here for the first time. Where Lamb and the amateur artist S. M. S. defuse the scrap-beggar’s satirical and commercial agenda, the print reception of albums and their makers disparages the feminine amateur arts and proposes that women should leave art and literature to the professionals. Thomas Hood’s 1842 skit ‘A First Attempt in Rhyme’ describes a generic ‘Lady’s Album’ with many blank pages and supremely hackneyed pictures and texts desultorily scattered through. First in the list of pictorial usual suspects is ‘the Mendicant begging for Scraps in the Frontispiece’, followed by ‘a water-coloured branch of Fuchsia’, shells which ‘looked more like petrifactions of a cracknel’, a large green and red parrot (in ‘the same livery as the lady’s footman’ and related to that perching atop the easel in fig. 23.2) and a sepia Dutch landscape ‘which some wag had named in pencil as “a Piece of Brown Holland”’ (Hood 1842, 84). The texts are similarly parodically stereotypical, from ‘Extracts from Byron, Wordsworth, and Mrs. Hemans’ to sundry inept ‘original effusions, including a Sonnet of sixteen lines, to an Infant’. Hood’s purpose was humour, so participants in album culture were meant to take the joke in good part. Yet there is a sting to the satire, which presents generic images and texts as incompetent imitations of professional printed models. To take one example, the fuchsia sprig is indeed a staple floral subject in albums. How-to manuals such as James Andrews’s Lessons in Flower Painting (1836) presented an outline for copying or tracing, followed by a coloured version to imitate when painting. Andrews’s fuchsia and morning glory composition appears in various albums, including Sarah Mapps Douglass’s 1846 version in Mary Anne Dickerson’s book (Dickerson 1833–88), one of several albums produced by black abolitionist women in mid-nineteenth-century Philadelphia. As we have seen, scrap-beggar frontispieces were often sold plain, so that like the outlines in sketch manuals, ‘they merely require[d] colour (associated with femininity due to its sensuousness)’ (Sha 1998, 81): for Hood, the album-owner’s creative input is best limited to colouring in. As a grafting professional, Hood frames the album as desultory, clichéd, bad art, a fashion declining because lacking authentic creative energy, talent or imagination (the many ‘blank’ and ‘barren’ pages are reiterated). The ‘Mendicant begging for Scraps’ is exhibit A in that project.

Conclusion Recent studies of Romantic albums and scrapbooks reveal a complex, well-developed alternative women-centred sphere of varied and enterprising artistic, social and affective practices based on the gift and motivated by generosity and reciprocity, not importunity (Di Bello 2007; Avcıoğlu 2018). The proliferation of scrap-beggar iconography and discourse in print is powerful evidence of the album transaction’s

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cultural significance as an expression of women’s growing agency and the associated threat to societal norms. The album-keeper/contributor dynamic deserves to be taken seriously and understood as a meaningful act and attempt to promote the spirit of the gift against dominant market forces. Jacques Derrida characterised Mauss’s theory of the gift as ‘oriented by an ethics and a politics that tend to valorise the generosity of the giving-being’ and which ‘oppose a liberal socialism to the inhuman coldness of economism’ (Derrida 1992, 44). The growing modern scholarship on Romantic album culture revalorises the invitation to contribute to an album as predicated on an ideal of hospitality and friendliness which appeals to human generosity and trust. It symbolises going above and beyond the strict equivalence of commercial transactions, in which the economic value of every element is calculated. Contributors and album-keepers do each other favours, in the sense of a ‘gracious or friendly action due to special goodwill, and in excess of what may be ordinarily looked for’ (OED, n.), as part of a circuit of affective and artistic generosity, reciprocity and inclusivity.

Note  1. The chapter discusses many prints from the John Johnson Collection. Where the publication date is unknown, the catalogue assigns dates when the publisher is active. In the bibliography, the abbreviation JJC/TPS stands for John Johnson Collection, Trade in Prints and Scraps.

Bibliography Ackermann. [1830–58]. ‘[Album title page, depicting a group of young girls holding out their albums]’. London: Ackermann and Co. JJC/TPS 1 (1). Allen, Alistair and Joan Hoverstadt. 1990. The History of Printed Scraps. London: New Cavendish Books. Andrews, James. 1836. Lessons in Flower Painting: A Series of Easy and Progressive Studies, Drawn and Coloured after Nature: Complete in Six Parts. London: Charles Tilt. Anonymous. 1812. ‘Olio. No. 1’. The Lady’s Monthly Museum; or, Polite Repository of Amusement and Instruction . . . By a Society of Ladies n.s. 12 (April): 196–7. Anonymous. 1822. ‘The Gatherer’. The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 1 (1) (2 November): 14–16. Anonymous. 1824. Scrapiana; Or, Elegant Extracts of Wit; Being a Collection of Humorous Pieces in Prose and in Verse. 5th ed. London: T. and J. Allman. Anonymous. 1825. Scrapiana Poetica. Part 1. By the Author of Juan Secundus. London: John Miller. Anonymous. [1820?–40?]. ‘Remember me’. Lithograph. London: Orlando Hodgson. JJC/TPS 1 (16). Anonymous. [1820–50]. ‘Scraps Thankfully Received’. Lithograph. JJC/TPS 1 (2). Anonymous. [1820–50]. ‘Pray Remember Me’. Lithograph. JJC/TPS 2 (4). Anonymous. 1829. ‘Album Titles’. In ‘Fine Arts. New Publications’. The Literary Gazette: A Weekly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts (24 January): 58. Anonymous. 1829. ‘The Gatherer’. The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 14 (389) (12 September): 176. Anonymous. 1831. ‘The Adventures of an Album’. In The Comic Offering; Or Ladies’ Melange of Literary Mirth, edited by Louisa Henrietta Sheridan, 251–85. London: Smith, Elder, & Co.

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Avcıoğlu, Nebahat. 2018. ‘The Culture of Albums in the Long 18th Century’. Journal18 6 Albums special issue (Fall), Brylowe, Thora. 2019. ‘Paper and the poor: Romantic media ecologies and the Bank Restriction Act of 1797’. Literature Compass 16 (2), Callot, Jacques. c. 1622–3. ‘Beggar with Crutches and Wallet’. Etching. (last accessed 13 May 2022). Derby, W. [1800–50?]. ‘Pray Give a Trifle’. Lithograph. JJC/TPS 1 (6). Derrida, Jacques. 1992. Given Time: 1, Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: Chicago UP. Di Bello, Patrizia. 2007. Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England: Ladies, Mothers and Flirts. Aldershot: Ashgate. Dickerson, Mary Anne. 1833–88. Album, The Library Company of Philadelphia, (last accessed 13 May 2022). Garvey, Ellen Gruber. 2012. Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford UP. Gowrley, Freya. 2018. ‘Reflective and Reflexive Forms: Intimacy and Medium Specificity in British and American Sentimental Albums, 1800–1860’. Journal18 6 (Fall): 1–22. Harriman-Smith, James. 2015. ‘Representing the Poor: Charles Lamb and the “Vagabondiana”’. Studies in Romanticism 54 (4) (Winter): 551–68. [Hood, Thomas.] 1842. ‘A First Attempt in Rhyme’. New Monthly Magazine and Humorist (September): 84–5. Houghton-Walker, Sarah. 2014. Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period. Oxford: Oxford UP. Hull, E. 1823. ‘Scraps Thankfully Received. A Thing of Shreds and Patches. Hamlet’. (December). North Brixton: Hull. ———. 1824. ‘A Snapper-up of unconsider’d Trifles’. Lithograph. London: Rowe & Waller. JJC/TPS 1 (22). ———. 1825. ‘Scraps Thankfully Received. A Thing of Shreds and Patches. Hamlet’. (March) Lithograph. London: Hullmandel. JJC/TPS 1 (7). ———. 1827. ‘A Snapper-up of unconsider’d Trifles’. Lithograph. London: Rowe & Waller. JJC/TPS 1 (23). ———. 1828. ‘A thing of shreds and patches’. Lithograph. London: Engelmann, Graf, Coindet & Co. JJC/TPS 1 (8). [Hull, E.] [n.d.] ‘O’er hill and dale, with Children twain’. Lithograph. Page Collection, Harry Page compilation album 6, Special Collections, Manchester Metropolitan University. Hunt, Leigh. 1837a. ‘On the Album of Rotha Quillinan’. In Rotha Quillinan album, Wordsworth Trust, WLMS 11/57–60/57, fol. 11. ———. 1837b. ‘Lines Written in the Album of Rotha Quillinan’. New Monthly Magazine 50 (July): 420. Inchbald, Elizabeth. 1798. Lovers’ Vows, a Play, In Five Acts. From the German of Kotzebue. London: Printed for G. G. and J. Robinson. John Johnson Collection. 2008–21. John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera. Oxford: Bodleian Library, (last accessed 13 May 2022). Keats, John. 1957. Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 21 September 1817. In The Letters of John Keats 1814–1818, edited by Hyder Edward Rollins, 162–6. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Lamb, Charles [as Elia]. 1822. ‘A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis’. London Magazine 5 (30) (June): 532–6.

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Lamb, Charles. 1831. ‘The Scrap Book’ (17 January 1831). Montague collection of historical autographs. Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Lockhart, J. G. 2012. Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. Volume 6. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Lynch, Deidre. 2018. ‘Paper Slips: Album, Archiving, Accident’. Studies in Romanticism 57 (Spring): 87–119. MacKay, Lynn. 1997. ‘The Mendicity Society and Its Clients: A Cautionary Tale’. Left History 5 (1): 49–64. Maidment, Brian. 2007. ‘Scraps and Sketches: Miscellaneity, Commodity Culture and Comic Prints, 1820–40’. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 5: 1–25.

Matthews, Samantha. 2020. Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP. Pettitt, Clare. 2016. ‘Topos, Taxonomy and Travel in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Scrapbooks’. In Travel Writing, Visual Culture, and Form, 1760–1900, edited by Mary Henes and Brian H. Murray. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Primrose, Pertinax. 1830. ‘A Thing of Shreds and Patches’. The Edinburgh Literary Journal 12 (83) (12 June): 344–6. Purcell, Edward. 1826. ‘Pray give a trifle’. Engraving. London: S. & J. Fuller. JJC/TPS 1 (12). ———. 1827. ‘Pray give a trifle’. Lithograph. London: S. & J. Fuller. JJC/TPS 1 (10). ———. [c. 1828]. ‘Pray Remember Me’. London: S. & J. Fuller. British Museum, BM 1991, 0615.90, (last accessed 13 May 2022). Rickards, Maurice. 2000. ‘Scrapbook/album’. In The Encyclopedia of Ephemera: A Guide to the Fragmentary Documents of Everyday Life for the Collector, Curator, and Historian, edited and completed by Michael Twyman, 285–6. London: British Library. [S. M. S.] 1835. ‘Supported by Voluntary Contributions’. Watercolour. JJC/TPS 2 (12). Salmon, Richard. [1820–60.] ‘Specimens of Art’. Frontispiece. London: J. McCormick. JJC/TPS 1 (5). Secord, James A. 2006. ‘Scrapbook Science: Composite Caricatures in Late Georgian England’. In Figuring It Out: Science, Gender and Visual Culture, edited by Ann B. Shteir and Bernard V. Lightman, 164–91. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England. Sha, Richard C. 1998. ‘“Keeping Them Out of Harm’s Way”: Sketching, Female Accomplishments, and the Shaping of Gender in Britain’. In The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism, 73–104. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. [Smith, Horace.] 1823. ‘Beggars Extraordinary! – Proposals for their Suppression’. New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 8 (31) (January): 61–5. Smith, Horace. 1825. Gaieties and Gravities; A Series of Essays, Comic Tales, and Fugitive Vagaries. 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn. Smith, John Thomas. 1817. Vagabondiana; or Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the Streets of London; with Portraits of the Most Remarkable, Drawn from the Life by John Thomas Smith, Keeper of the Prints in the British Museum. London: J. and A. Arch. Southey, Robert. 1821. Letter to Charles Wynn, 5 November 1821. In The Collected Letters of Robert Southey Part 6: 1819–21, edited by Ian Packer and Lynda Pratt, (last accessed 13 May 2022). [Tregear, G. S.] 1833–5. ‘The Gatherer. A Snapper up of unconsidered trifles’. London: Tregear. British Museum, BM 1991,0615.93, (last accessed 13 May 2022).

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24 Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Poetry: Mise-en-Page and the Visual Rhythms of Seriality Alison Chapman

T

he explosion in Victorian print coincided with a distinctive visual turn, in which material format became an overt marker of a title’s identity and content in a saturated market. Both serials and books heavily invested in their format, including wrappers, bindings, typography, illustrated title page, frontispieces, illustrations and textual ornaments, and distinctive volume size. In particular, the design of the mise-en-page (page layout) had an overt rhetorical, dramatic and performative function, with especial prominence given to illustrated poetry that capitalised on the space around poetic lines.1 With the industrialisation of printing, and the mass expansion in illustrative reading material, repeated mise-en-page patterns in periodical print exploited the close proximity between illustration and letterpress (which could now be printed on the same bed of type rather than separately), cultivating a reading community attuned to complex visual codes. This chapter begins by tracing the rise in prominence of the mise-en-page of illustrated poetry, which emerged as serial print was being formed and formalised in the early nineteenth century, stabilising the huge profusion of the serial’s miscellaneous content and format even as the concept of what constituted illustration and the serial remained slippery.2 While critics have recently explored the materiality of illustrated periodicals (Jung 2012; Maidment 2010, 2019; Kooistra 2002, 2019), the importance to readership of repeated formats over multiple serial instalments remains unexamined. This chapter focuses on the materiality of print, and especially the miseen-page of illustrated poetry, in what is often termed the ‘golden age’ of illustration and in some key Romantic precursors: illustrated periodicals and poetry volumes, and the multiple editions of Samuel Rogers’s Italy, which all establish patterns of iterated material format that evolve into mid-Victorian middle-class illustrated magazines, especially Once a Week (1859–80) and Good Words (1860–1911). Illustrated poetry was a striking feature of this new media ecology, and up until the end of the 1870s an astonishing proportion of poems were illustrated: 40 per cent in Once a Week and 48 per cent in Good Words. In comparison, the earlier major precursor of mid-Victorian illustrated poetry, the literary annuals, where poets were commissioned to write for engravings after paintings, had fewer illustrations. The Keepsake (1828–57), for example, included engravings for 17 per cent of poems over its entire run.3 The patterning of repeated page layout formats over a large quantity of illustrated poetry immersed and trained readers in complex visual iconography, establishing a visual rhythm within multiple kinds of seriality (such as annual, monthly,

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weekly), and forging communities cultivating participatory, comforting and affective practices of reading.4 Victorian debates over a market flooded with print that was dominated by wood engravings also registered an anxiety over quantity as well as quality and, for scholars, analysing the extent of illustrated material can be problematic. The in-progress Digital Periodical Poetry Project, for example, which indexes all poems and poetry translations into English in a wide range of late Romantic and Victorian periodicals, currently includes over 1,630 illustrated periodical poems out of 15,414 poems (Chapman 2021).5 To enable users to search illustrated poems and evaluate change over time, the project encodes into TEI all illustrations by kind (such as head and tail pieces, illustrated capitals, photographs, portraits), placement on the page (for example centrally, above or below, adjacent, facing the poem), components (such as settings, objects, actions, concepts, living things), and semantic descriptions.6 Search results from this markup indicate a shift in kind and quantity of mise-en-page designs in the golden era of middle-class illustrated magazines that reveals recurring layouts shared across periodical issues and between different periodical titles. In this new mass print media, cultures of visuality are contingent on different kinds of serial time, determined by the varied frequencies of periodical publication (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually), creating visual rhythms to poetry layouts.

Romantic Precursors The relationship between the visual cultures of Romantic and Victorian literary print was partly established through recurring types of illustration layouts, especially in poetry volumes, illustrated magazines and pictorial newspapers, and literary annuals. Although critics often trace Romantic illustrated serial print as Victorian periodical precursors (Houfe 1978, Ch. 3; Kooistra 2002; Maidment 2010, 2019), in fact Romantic-era poetry volumes with wood and steel engravings also created striking patterns of material practices. In particular, 1820s and 1830s magazines and newspapers exploited readers’ appetite for wood engraving, often with repetitive patterns of format and especially illustration layout, including The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction (1822–47), with its prominent woodcut under the title header, and the comic Figaro in London (1831–9), which regularly included a full-page caricature related to the leading article, which was a precedent for Victorian periodicals (Houfe 1978, 52). The emerging inexpensive weeklies, Maidment notes, had a similar format despite their miscellaneous contents (Maidment 2010, 2019). The beginnings of pictorial journalism were also associated with distinctive layouts, such as the Observer (1791–), which included woodcuts from the 1820s, and later the sensational multi-page illustrations in the Illustrated London News (1842–1989), launched with the involvement of subeditor John Timbs, who previously served as editor of The Mirror of Literature. The huge success of the Penny Magazine (1832–45) relied on its wood engravings, many done by John Jackson, a former apprentice of Thomas Berwick, whose son, Mason Jackson, in turn became the art editor of the London Illustrated News (Maidment 2009). But the weekly Penny only illustrated three poems overall, preferring to reserve engravings for prose contributions (Chapman 2021). The importance of poetry’s distinctive visualised branding was established by literary annuals, capitalising on luxurious and highly recognisable material formats, from the first British title, The Forget-me-Not (1823–47). By 1830 the annual market was

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crowded: forty-three British titles, according to Katherine D. Harris (Harris 2015, 281). The annuals each offered repeated illustrative and paratextual format, in the bindings, ornamental inscription plates and title pages, and full-page illustrations, with a supreme self-consciousness about the significance of their unique format. The first volume of The Keepsake, for example, has an editorial preface that attests the new annual’s distinctiveness of ‘design and scope’ in ‘a crowd of literary annuals’: ‘to render the union of literary merit with all the beauty and elegance of art as complete as possible’ (Ainsworth 1828, v–vi). This volume also includes an inaugural poem about beauty in poetry and engravings in the keepsakes (‘To—’), and Leigh Hunt’s well-known genre-defining essay ‘Pocket-Books and Keepsakes’. Literary annuals were self-consciously invested in a visual format that gave cohesive identity to miscellaneous content, in particular the high-quality full-page engravings paired with poems, placed before the start of the poem to establish the image’s primacy. Full-page illustrations were embedded in a visual ecology that was also multisensory, material and affective, appealing to the eye and the touch, and that encouraged family reading and intimate gift exchange oriented around the book’s physical appeal. Everything about the annual required the reader to pay attention to the material design, from gilt-edged pages (in The Keepsake and other titles) that framed the inside pages with a golden shimmer to multiple rotated full-page engravings that necessitated turning the book and breaking eye contact with the letterpress in order to view the picture. The sequential issue of these volumes also signified a self-consciousness about seriality: each volume was issued early, for the Christmas market the year before, and the date stamp of each separate volume, implying ephemerality, is complicated by its relationship to the preceding volumes and the marketing of the annuals as luxuries to be treasured rather than trashed. Some titles were also issued in different formats, such as the larger size of The Keepsake including engravings on India paper (Ray 1976, 41). Reader participation was embedded into their design, signified prominently in the titles’ imploring affective injunctions to keep the books (and the gift giver) safe and not to forget them. The emergence of the literary annuals in the 1820s and 1830s is part of what Richard Cronin terms a ‘lacuna’ between Romanticism and Victorianism that belongs properly to neither era while also complicates both (2002: 2, 3–4). The flourishing of the annuals in this ‘shadowy stretch of time’ (2002: 1) also demonstrates the uneven development of visual culture through the Romantic and Victorian era, as pre-1840s illustrative practices were precursors to, as well as distinctive from, later developments that were also contingent upon technological advances in printing. Certainly, illustrative patterns in poetry volumes emerged in the Romantic era as integral to repeating mise-en-page formats, especially of interpretative vignette woodcuts and textual ornaments, and some publishers became associated with specific page designs. Eye-catching examples are afforded by two luxury illustrated poetry editions printed by William Bulmer & Co., with generous woodcuts depicting landscape and animals that were partly designed and all engraved by John and Thomas Berwick: Poems by Goldsmith and Parnell (1795) and William Somerville’s The Chase (1796). The 1795 edition Advertisement boasts that the volume is designed to exemplify the highest standards of ‘the various beauties of Printing, Type-Founding, Engraving, and PaperMaking’ (v–vi), singling out the ‘delicate effects’ of wood engraving (viii). The 1796 companion edition is designed with similar illustrative styles and layout, and the same intention is articulated in its preface of demonstrating wood engraving and printing as

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high art forms (‘To the Patrons of Fine Printing,’ n.p.). In both volumes, the pastoral woodcuts feature recurring placements of head and tail pieces and title page vignettes, although the earlier volume also has full-page woodcuts designed by J. Johnson. Some later Romantic-era poetry volumes established even more cohesiveness with visualised mise-en-page and, while not in a formal series, implicitly invited readers to view similar verbal-visual codes over different parts. In the University of Victoria’s Special Collections, for instance, is a volume that binds together eleven separate slim books of humorous poetry by a variety of authors and with three different printers, all illustrated with engravings after designs by Robert Cruikshank, with seven dated 1830 and four dated 1831 (Taylor 1830, Montagu 1830, The Devil’s Visit 1830, Montcrieff 1830, The Antiquated Trio 1830, By the Author of ‘York and Lancaster’ 1830, Dibdin 1831, Margate 1831, Brighton!! 1830, Cowper 1831, Egan 1831).7 These low-brow books, issued almost like a series but not quite, share the same poetry genre. But what primarily connects them is Cruikshank’s caricature style and the repeated visualised codes embedded into the mise-en-page (frontispieces, illustrated title pages, full page rotated illustrations, tailpieces), forming a visual serial rhythm across separate nonsequential volumes, training readers in the patterning of visual codes across separately published but interconnected material. Another important example for establishing rhythms to poetry’s format and miseen-page across multiple print iterations is Samuel Rogers’s Italy, a Poem, an important but little recognised precursor to Victorian illustrated poetry. Rogers’s Italy belongs to the culture of multiple connected publications, and was remarkable for the vigor with which Rogers himself revised and expanded the narrative poem from Part 1 (1821–2), publishing many versions and even purchasing and destroying two thousand copies of his 1828 reissue to make more changes (Powell 1983, 2–3), and reinventing the book in 1830 with the inclusion of lavish high-quality steel engravings mostly after Turner and Stothard. Italy went through further illustrated versions, including a luxury 1838 quarto edition containing engravings on India paper, and editions with different illustrations such as Moxon’s 1839 edition (with engravings after woodcuts by Landseer, Callcott, Eastlake, Unwins, and retaining some by Stothard) and Baudry’s European Library 1840 edition (with completely different unsigned illustrations). By 1830, the publication of illustrated poetry with repeated visualised material formats, issued over regular and irregular time intervals, was well established, creating ideal conditions for the 1830 illustrated edition to be one of the bestselling poetry books of the nineteenth century, selling four thousand copies in a fortnight (Thomas 2011, 372). Rogers worked tirelessly to brand his poem for celebrity, consulting Tennyson, for example, because he recognised Tennyson’s success as ‘the coming poet’ who could ensure Italy’s posterity, and apparently engaging Turner to design for his poem so as to achieve poetic fame while capitalising on the reading public’s thirst for illustrations (Tennyson 1897, 72). John Ruskin remarked that the vignettes of his copy of 1830 Italy, a present for his thirteenth birthday, ‘determined the main tenor of my life’, beginning his passion for Turner’s art and prompting an illustrated poetical account of his own tour of Italy in imitation of Rogers (Ruskin 1907, 107, 111). The 1830 Preface terms the illustrations ‘embellishments’ (iv), and immediately under this phrase places the first engraving, after Stothard, of a female figure holding a swaddled infant (fig. 24.1). This phrase was widely used for Romantic-era illustrations and, rather than implying beautiful ornaments that are merely supplemental to the

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Figure 24.1  Thomas Stothard, ‘[a figure of a woman holding a child]’, Italy, A Poem, by Samuel Rogers. London: T. Cadell and E. Moxon, 1830, p. iv. Special Collections and Archives, University of Victoria. poem, in fact frames the vignettes as integral to a book’s visual and material culture, as Haywood, Matthews and Shannon argue about the connotations of ‘embellishment’ (2019, 2–3). The immense success of this illustrated edition into the Victorian era suggests that the ‘embellishments’ were essential to the book’s appeal, so that viewing and reading become intertwined in the book’s very material design. The overall effect of the edition’s visual appeal is the interspersed patterning of the engravings with the poem, offering Italy as a poetic space in separate but connected segments – softened picturesque access to the poetic and visual spaces of Italy, as the aspirational, mobile and leisurely eye of the reader follows the voice of Rogers’s implicitly autobiographical narrator as their guide. While the narrative arc of the long poem’s movement through Italy gives this 1830 edition a marked cohesion, the episodic narrative also appeals to the contemporary popularity for the illustrated miscellany, a popularity which grew exponentially in the Victorian era. This edition’s miscellaneous quality is established by the mix of hybrid poetic form (travel narrative, personal recollection, history), occasional interspersed prose sections, chapters on specific topics (fireflies, banditti, Roman pontiffs) interrupting the flow of the travelogue, a few engravings after designs by artists other than Stothard and Turner, a few full-page illustrations, vignettes sometimes positioned in the middle rather than end of poetry sections, and a lengthy concluding notes section. This miscellaneity combines both progression and interruption within the poetic narrative and the visual format, creating a supremely mobile effect for the reader: a paradoxically dispersed and cohesive immersion into the poetic spaces

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of Italy. And the doubled effect is replicated in the verbal-visual interplay between the ‘embellishments’ as integral to and also separate from the letterpress, a doubling similar to McCue’s sense of the ‘intimate distance’ between the material volume and Italy (McCue 2019, 173). The vignettes enhance this effect, as a small illustration with faded edge that, as Gordon N. Ray observes, ‘seem fairly to float upon the page’ (Ray 1976, 16). In a print culture where the mise-en-page was increasingly important, multiple issues and editions enhance the readers’ ability to interpret visual codes through a mass of material, impressing a rhythm onto repeated patterns. The layout patterns also signify and emphasise Rogers’s episodic travelogue form of progress and pause over time: a dynamic that defines Victorian seriality (Hughes and Lund 1991, 63) and, in the uneven development of visuality, dominates shifts in literary genre and print culture. Without itself being a serial, the material format of the 1830 edition of Italy, as well as its multiple connected versions, signify seriality at the very moment the concept of illustrated periodical print was increasingly stabilised as a print genre.

Mid-Victorian Illustrated Magazines Illustrated periodical poetry from the mid-1850s developed increasingly overt patterns of recurring mise-en-page designs dependent on wood engravings. The visual culture of poetry opened up an immersive printed world of multiple, complex verbal and graphic codes with much closer integration of illustration with letterpress. Kooistra, like Ray, describes Victorian poetry’s wood engravings evocatively in terms of a dissolution effect, as ‘floating worlds in a sea of transience’, referring to their distinctive design amidst prose’s denser letterpress (2019, 65). This framing of periodical poetry as occupying a special graphic and conceptual space develops Caley Ehnes’s argument that regular poetry in Good Words prompts the reader into regular contemplative pauses (2012). Kooistra contends that wood engravings are specific connected spaces, part of the serial’s ‘dialectic of transience and permanence’ that ‘creates beauty out of fragments’ (2019, 69, 74). Indeed, fragmentation was essential to the work of the engravers who, as Gerry Beegan notes, had to divide a wood block into smaller components in order to meet the huge demand and tight deadlines for illustrations (1995, 264–5). The art and business of Victorian wood engraving, Bethan Stevens argues, is inherently associated with an uncertain authorship status between mechanical production and artistic creation, which she relates to the engraver’s negative or relief process of cutting around lines (2019). The difficult manual work of the engravers, detailed by Beegan and Stevens, sits uneasily with the aesthetic floating effect of the printed engraved image. Establishing a magazine’s identity became paramount for editors and publishers, given the increasing cultural anxiety, particularly expressed in essays on popular periodicals, about the quantity and quality of print in this new media ecology. Although periodical poetry was denigrated by Victorian critics and authors as mere sentimental filler, pot-boilers for poets who longed for the higher status of a volume of original poems, as Hughes points out, poems still conferred literary esteem within ephemeral print (2010). Creating identifiable repeating page layouts for illustrated poems enhanced this prestige, by emphasising the graphic space of the poem, implying poetry’s cultural value and legitimacy through complex designs for often minor and unknown poets, and branding a magazine’s unique identity in a saturated market through a distinctive miseen-page. This tension between filler and prestige is associated with wood engraving’s

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conceptual status, as noted by Stevens and Kooistra, as troublingly doubled and paradoxical: for Kooistra an ‘ongoing dialectic of transience and permanence’ (2019, 69), and for Stevens a form of ‘ghostwriting’ (2019, 1–2) whereby their engraved lines carve out negative space in the relief printing process. The uncanny doubleness of the illustration repeatedly punctuates the profusion of serial print, structuring the reader’s experience of regularly consuming magazines, and making illustrated poetry a focal point in an overwhelming flood of graphic codes. Illustrated poetry works to establish as well as interrupt the multiple temporalities of the periodical (Chapman 2015), with mise-en-page patterns recurring as a function of seriality, establishing a comforting and affective visual rhythm. Although conventionally dismissed by critics in favour of literary content, the material format and design of separate issues and collated annual volumes – each offering different but related physical objects and reading experiences – mapped a way through the ‘flow of images’ (Beegan 1995, 271) that washed over the reading population, serving to establish a hierarchy of knowledge and information through complex visual codes. Illustrated poetry dominated the rise of literary magazines and, as we have seen, the most prominent titles, Once a Week and Good Words, published a huge number of poems with a large proportion illustrated. Their initial issues immediately establish a rhythmic pattern to the illustrated poem’s mise-en-page. Once a Week, for example, prominently featured two illustrated poems in the first issue that both set a pattern for recurring design layouts. Shirley Brooks’s meta-textual ‘Once a Week’ (figs. 24.2 and 24.3), the inaugural poem that calls itself ‘some lightest lines of rhyme’ (Brooks 1859, 1), draws overt attention to the periodicity of illustrated poems, the complex interrelationship between poem and illustration, and to the mise-en-page itself. In addition to the decorated title there are three inset wood engraved illustrations after John Leech: a headpiece vignette at the top of the first column (which the poem refers to by placement and content in stanza 4) and, on the second page, a half-page illustration over the width of two columns, and then a concluding tailpiece in the bottom right column.8 The illustration placement prefaces and concludes the poem within the poem’s doubled column space, and also interrupts the middle of the poem with a more prominently sized illustration. The poem and illustrations also overtly refer to each other. The first illustration is gestured to in stanza 4, where the speaker instructs the reader to look at the image of Clara Horner at the opera: ‘Observe her, please, up in the left-hand corner: / Type of the dearest of our English dears’ (Brooks 1859, 1). ‘Type’ denotes that Clara symbolises ideal English womanhood, but also implies that the letterpress, set of course in metal type, works alongside the act of the reader’s looking, or observation, with the image. The second illustration features a young woman carrying a folded issue of Once a Week under her arm, referring to the stanza immediately below, on the left column, detailing how a banker leaves his work to retreat to his garden, while his daughters bring him cigars, an iced drink and an issue of Once a Week. The first words of the stanza offer a verbal pointer to the illustration above: ‘This King was in his counting-house at morning’ (Brooks 1859, 2). The verbal-visual codes of the layout only work by this close meta-textual proximity. And the final illustration, placed beneath the poem’s final stanza, exemplifies ‘the lesson of this page of ours’ and ‘the morals of our Once a Week’, that the magazine gives readers distance from the world, offering peace, quiet, and ‘holier thoughts’ (Brooks 1859, 2), in its depiction of a family at the seaside with the wife sitting on the beach

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Figure 24.2  Shirley Brooks, ‘Once a Week’. Illustrated by John Leech. Once a Week series 1, vol. 1, no. 1, 2 July 1859, p. 1. Special Collections and Archives, University of Victoria.

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Figure 24.3  Shirley Brooks, ‘Once a Week’. Illustrated by John Leech. Once a Week series 1, vol. 1, no. 1, 2 July 1859, p. 2. Special Collections and Archives, University of Victoria.

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reading a magazine issue. This illustration also gestures back to the last stanza on the preceding page that tells of the ‘Young Wife’ on the seashore kissing her husband’s cheek as he takes a restorative day trip and as they have with them an issue of Once a Week. Each stanza’s repeated concluding phrase, ‘Once a Week’, refers both to the magazine’s family-centric ideology, a material issue of the magazine, and the weekly cycle of reading. This inaugural illustrated poem prepares readers of this new multimedia print for visual codes embedded in the page layout, self-consciously showing off the close proximity of letterpress and illustration as a magazine feature. Inset illustrations recur through Once a Week, interrupting the double columns of poetry and prose, often with multiple wood engravings. The fact that the inaugural poem features three inset designs primes the reader for this visual code; indeed, in the first year of Once a Week, inset illustrations dominate, as opposed to full-page designs, and some with multiple complex wood engravings. A major mise-en-page pattern of inset illustrations positions one prominent wood engraving centrally, interrupting the reading flow within the double poetry columns, all set out on one page. This layout is established in the second illustrated poem to the first issue, Tom Taylor’s ‘Magenta’, illustrated by John Everett Millais, and soon becomes a prominent pattern for other periodicals. ‘Magenta’ has two stanzas above and two below the engraving, laid out in adjacent columns, with numbered stanzas to aid the reading sequence (Taylor 1859, 10). The woman lying prostrate in the foreground mourns a dead soldier killed in the famously bloody Battle of Magenta, Italy (4 June 1859), as banners outside celebrate the French-Sardinian victory against the Austrians. Her arms clutch a newspaper, where she has presumably read of the battle while crowds in the Parisian ‘illumined streets’ march triumphantly. Readers of this first issue of Once a Week, dated 2 July 1859, would be reading about the battle in other newsprint too, such as the two-page report in the Illustrated London News, also published that same day and featuring a large illustration (‘The Battle of Magenta’ 1859). This illustrated poem also self-consciously refers to the new illustrated print media, with its intervention on news reports of the war through the perspective of domestic bereavement. In this first magazine issue, the comic and serious poems establish a layout pattern whereby poetry and illustration are in close proximity, and require reading together. The device of the inset illustration adjacent to and interrupting the poem’s space on the page establishes a rhythmic pattern of recurring yet varied visual-verbal codes, overt because they self-consciously interrupt conventional reading patterns and stanza ordering, and the poems and engravings often gesture to each other. The first issues of Good Words begin including illustrated poems from the eleventh number, establishing as with Once a Week a repeated style of page layout, generally in this period with large inset illustrations occupying prominent page space above the poem or (following the trend also established by Once a Week) centrally within the poem. In the first 1860 collated volume all but three of the seventeen illustrations have this placement: two are rotated facing page illustrations, in the style of the annual mise-en-page, and one has a ‘let in’ design, which began another kind of distinctive recurring layout, in which a full-page wood engraving leaves space for all or part of the poem. Kooistra demonstrates how designs in the Dalziel Brothers proof book, containing illustrations for Alexander Strahan’s range of magazines (including Good Words), has plentiful examples of this layout (Kooistra

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2019, 70–1). In ‘let in’ mise-en-page the illustrations graphically and conceptually contain and interrupt the poem, usually also presenting poem and illustration as one design unit within the magazine’s generic lined page borders, rather than a series of modular spaces as with other page designs. This type of illustrated mise-en-page was prominent in Good Words, and eventually also in other magazines. Often the poem’s place in the layout has a symbolic value, guiding the reader to interpret the poem and illustration dynamically, implying that the space of the poem is a portal into the world of the illustration, offering the illustration as poetic and the poem as visual, and creating a visual rhythm across issues and titles. This first ‘let in’ instance in Good Words is Harriet Mary Teulon’s ‘Autumn’, illustrated by John W. McWhirter, which places the poem at the bottom centre of the full-page illustration of an avenue of autumnal trees (Teulon 1860).9 The poem celebrates the spiritual value of autumnal decay that promises Christ’s redemptive grace, compared to light breaking through darkness as ‘a golden flood’. This seasonal lesson depends on seeing the autumnal scene spiritually, and contrasting the cold and damp (representing sin) with golden clouds (representing Christ’s redemption). And, in this combined poetic and visual parable, the reader’s engagement with the illustration is overtly referenced as a ‘scene’ that is lingered over longer because of the sullied joy: ‘The eye can longer rest on scene like this, / Than that which tells of more unsullied bliss’. The avenue of trees leads the eye off centre, left and upwards towards a dark slender figure at the end of the path, with light illuminating from behind the trees. The wood engraving’s striking scored lines emphasise the message about dark and light, particularly as the engraver’s role is to make marks on the wood block that, in the relief process, become white spaces in the printed design, and the distinctive visual aesthetic of wood engraving is the play of black and white lines and spaces. Charles Turner’s ‘Ascent of Snowdon’, illustrated by J. Mahoney for Good Words (fig. 24.4), also has a self-conscious ‘let in’ placement, positioning the poem in the lower right corner of the page, surrounded by an illustration of climbers ascending the summit (Turner 1870). The reader’s eye must be active here too, moving between poem and illustration, just as the sonnet’s narrative about the ascent privileges the view of the climbers from the vantage point of the ‘poor wight’, the weaker climber who waits and watches for his friends to climb and return. The poem is placed in the layout from the position of that viewer, waiting for his friends among ‘the shining threads / Of mountain spiders’ and ‘breezy ferns’. Both ‘Autumn’ and ‘Ascent of Snowdon’ privilege the poem’s dramatic element and also the reader’s dynamic vantage point. These kinds of ‘let in’ layouts tend to narrativise the poetry, while also offering the short poem as an introspective lyrical and graphic pause within the issue. Within mass serial print culture, the importance of these layouts lies in their sheer quantity: patterned throughout literary magazines, the distinctive mise-en-page rhythms create a participatory role for the reader, intrinsic to the process of rendering dramatic narrative elements in a poem, while also offering the graphic space of the poem as a recurring lyric pause in an expanse of prose. Published thirty years after the first illustrated edition of Rogers’s Italy, the miseen-page for ‘Ascent of Snowdon’ offers a contrast to the layout of Turner’s alpine vignettes for Rogers’s ‘The Great St. Bernard’. While versions of Italy represent a patterning of multiple formats across irregularly published versions, the 1830 volume also has distinct patterns within its fifty-five interpretative vignettes, with a dominant

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Figure 24.4  Charles Turner, ‘Ascent of Snowdon’. Illustrated by J. Mahoney. Good Words 11, 1 March 1870, p. 201. Special Collections and Archives, University of Victoria. layout of head and tail pieces to each verse chapter, interspersed with some variation in the mise-en-page. Turner’s St Bernard chapter headpiece (fig. 24.5) gives a scenic view of the renowned alpine church and hospice with mountains behind, and his tailpiece (fig. 24.6) depicts an episode from the verse narrative where the body of a girl is recovered by monks and moved to the hospice mortuary. The vignettes are set off from the letterpress, serving as an introduction and conclusion to the setting and action of the poem, but they also offer a dynamic of pause and movement that underlines the tension in the poetry between the speaker’s introspection and the

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Figure 24.5  J. M. W. Turner, ‘The Great St. Bernard’. Italy, A Poem, by Samuel Rogers. London: T. Cadell and E. Moxon, 1830, p. 11. Special Collections and Archives, University of Victoria. journey which structures the travelogue, suggesting that the illustrated mise-en-page establishes a rhythm that guides the reader into decoding generic as well as visual codes.10 The hospice, for Rogers’s speaker, gives a spiritualised and restorative pause on the mountain journey, a sense ‘As if all worldly ties were now dissolved’ (13) and so, finally, the speaker is rejuvenated like the travellers: ‘Restored, renewed, advancing as with songs’ (16). The headpiece frames the sublime mountainous landscape setting, with the borderless vignette dissolving into the space of the page above the poem like visual portal into the verse chapter in which the narrator descends the mountain to St Bernard’s hospice, implying the vignettes also have a restorative power over the

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Figure 24.6  J. M. W. Turner, ‘The Great St. Bernard’. Italy, A Poem, by Samuel Rogers. London: T. Cadell and E. Moxon, 1830, p. 16. Special Collections and Archives, University of Victoria. reader. The tailpiece vignette depicts the mortuary chapel mentioned briefly in the middle of the ‘St. Bernard Pass’ section, telling of the sad effect produced by seeing ‘A lonely chapel destined for the dead’ (13). Turner’s related design appears three pages later. In Rogers’s poem the chapel, with its ‘mournful company’ (13) of shrouded dead who have perished on the mountain, is an emblem for those lost on a journey, which Turner’s vignette interprets with a specific scene of a dead girl carried on a stretcher by monks with two dogs in the foreground. The sanctified restoration of the traveller becomes, with Turner’s tailpiece immediately below, a more sombre kind of rest, circling back to the headpiece scene of alpine sublimity.

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In a narrative poem about a journey through the geographical space and legendary history of Italy, the vignettes give a dynamic and recurring pause and progression, deepened by the dissolving design of the borderless vignettes, establishing the mise-enpage as a generative space that guides the reader to decode visuality and form together. Such a mobile gaze between illustration and poem, dependent on a dynamic between proximity and distance, is also evident in Mahoney’s illustration to Charles Turner’s poem (who bore no relation to J. M. W. Turner), although intensified by the corner space reserved in the illustration for the letterpress. Here, the ‘let in’ poem has a more unified graphic and conceptual place in the layout: demarcated by the black corner line of the woodcut, but integrated because incorporated into the magazine page by the generic double-ruled typographical border. The 1830 vignettes for Rogers’s Italy were an important precursor to later Victorian magazine illustrated poetry, whereby the ‘intimate distance’ (to adapt McCue’s phrase) between illustration and poem becomes a generative tension between lyric and narrative, progression and pause, contingent on the temporality and ephemerality of magazine time itself. These visual rhythms of repeated layout patterns, linked through the mass of serial print, also implies that poetic genre is contingent on patterns of spatial form embedded in page design as well as on conventions of literary features. For Good Words, as a religious nondenominational magazine, the distinctive ‘let in’ designs also condition the readers to let in visual codes as a regular devotional practice, conferring spiritual value to poetic visualised forms that emerge over time. As distinctive visual patterns were established in mid-century magazines, poetry’s mise-en-page developed deeper and more overt linkages across issues, often without common semantic markers such as a unifying title, implying that the reader was expected to memorise layout design across time. The first prominent example is a chain of twelve illustrated pastoral poems published in Once a Week on each calendar month for 1866 on the first (and occasionally the second) weekly issue for each month, featuring four poets and five illustrators, and achieving seriality through the related seasonal content and shared illustrative and poetic codes. The designs for January (fig. 24.7) and February (fig. 24.8), for example, both ‘let in’ part of the poem within the wood engraving, signifying the closeness of letterpress and illustration in the prominent hand-drawn lettering of the names of the month embedded centrally in the seasonal landscape (R. 1866, Thornbury 1866), a design echoed by three later poems in the cycle. This poem series follows common visual codes with variation: ten one-page illustrated poems, and two poems with stanzas continuing onto a second unillustrated page; all illustrations display the name of the month as part of their design, the illustrations are positioned at the top half of the page, with five poems ‘let in’ to the illustration graphic space, and the others set off; the illustrations repeat similar visual codes and themes from the poems; the poetic form, like the visual features, has repeated formal similarities, such as recurring rhyming patterns and an idyllic pastoral genre. The 1866 Once a Week issues also published, of course, many other poems: 123 poems overall in 1866, including 61 illustrated poems (Chapman 2021). The seasonal cycle of illustrated poems about seasonal rural change and ephemerality, offered repeated mise-en-page rhythms that held together for readers the heterogenous visual-verbal layout of this new media culture while also giving comforting familiarity. The importance of the periodical’s visualised rhythms intensified from the 1880s, as layout became increasingly experimental, more deeply identifying serials with a

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Figure 24.7  ‘January 1866. “Out in the Snow”’. Illustrated by Edward Hull. Once a Week series 2, vol. 1, no. 1, 6 January 1866, p. 28. Special Collections and Archives, University of Victoria.

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Figure 24.8  Walter Thornbury, ‘February. The Hunting Field’. Illustrated by Edward Hull. Once a Week series 2, vol. 1, no. 5, 3 February 1866, p. 140. Special Collections and Archives, University of Victoria.

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visualised signature marker, such as the highly complex integrative designs in the New Girl magazine Atalanta (1887–97) where the letterpress and illustration are interwoven in ways that challenge conventional critical terminology and encoding taxonomies. Other late Victorian periodicals reacted against the material format and commercialisation associated with mass magazine print, as with The Century Guild Hobby Horse (1886–92) and The Yellow Book (1894–7), which both developed innovative material formats and a ‘typographical poetics’ where the poem’s graphic space is materialised as intrinsic to its poetical form (Chapman 2018, 60–7). These reactions suggest the profound influence of mid-century ‘golden age’ Victorian magazines that forged visual rhythms of the mise-en-page across different kinds of serial time, foregrounding the active role of the reader in the collaborative enterprise of poet, illustrator, engraver and editor. The mise-en-page patterns of illustrated poetry selfconsciously establish complex recurring visual codes, producing an expansive concept of poetic form dependent on serial time and graphic space, and offering comforting and affective spaces for the reader in a media culture based on the twinned aesthetics and commodification of visuality. Inherited as part of an uneven development from the visualised material formats of Romantic print culture, Victorian illustrated poetry practices moved to standardise the miscellaneous visual rhythms of seriality through repeating formats of mise-en-page patterns. Nonetheless, the profusion of serial print continued unabated. Progression and pause, vertiginous and familiar, pervasive and filler: illustrated serial poetry is at the centre of the nineteenth-century visual turn.

Notes I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for generous funding that supported the digital project on which this chapter is based, as well as my project team at the University of Victoria.  1. On the rhetorical function of the mis-en-page see Maguire (2020). Mise-en-page also refers to material features such as typography, column layout and textual articulation (Smith 2010). For a discussion of the material book’s components, see Duncan and Smyth (2019).   2. On the definition of Romantic illustration, see Haywood et al. (2019, 2–6), and Thomas (2011, 355–6). On the formation of the serial, see Maidment (2014, 21–3).   3. Figures derived from the main search page in Chapman 2021, which indexes all poems and translations into English in these periodicals and others, and includes a facsimile browser and illustration search page, . Once a Week folded in 1880, but Good Words continued until 1911 with only a modest reduction in the number of illustrated poems (32 per cent between 1880 and 1901).   4. Unillustrated Victorian periodical poetry also offered patterns of layout, especially related to a poem’s position and size on the page (Chapman *forthcoming).   5. Note that the definition of illustrated poems includes generic ornaments such as illustrated initial letters.   6. See for the illustration search page.   7. University of Victoria Library call number NC1479 C97 1830.   8. See also Chapman 2020 for a discussion of this poem as part of the self-conscious multimedia magazine print culture.   9. The poem is pseudonymous; attribution from Chapman 2021. 10. For the aesthetic and political relationship between rhythmical patterns and genre in the nineteenth century, see also Levine 2015.

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Bibliography Ainsworth, William Harrison, ed. 1828. The Keepsake for 1828. London: Thomas Davison. Beegan, Gerry. 1995. ‘The Mechanization of the Image: Facsimile, Photography, and Fragmentation in Nineteenth-Century Wood Engraving’. Journal of Design History 8 (4): 257–74. Brighton!! A Comic Sketch. 1830. London: William Kidd. Brooks, Shirley. 1859. ‘Once a Week’. Illustrated by John Leech. Once a Week series 1, 1 (1) (2 July): 1–2. By the Author of ‘York and Lancaster’. 1830. Steamers v. Stages; or, Andrew and His Spouse. London: William Kidd. Chapman, Alison. 2015. ‘Virtual Victorian Poetry’. In Virtual Victorians: Networks, Connections, Technologies, edited by Veronica Alfano and Andrew M. Stauffer, 145–66. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2018. ‘The Matter of Form: Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Poetry and the Periodical Press’. In The Edinburgh Companion to Fin-de-Siècle Literature, Culture, and the Arts, edited by Josephine M. Guy, 46–69. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. ———. 2020. ‘Victorian Poetry’. In The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature, edited by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer, 11–21. New York: Routledge. ———. Forthcoming. ‘Filler Poems: Synecdoche and the Serial Rhythms of Victorian Poetry’. In Victorian Verse in Everyday Life, edited by Lee Behlman and Olivia Moy. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Chapman, Alison, ed. 2021. Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project. (last accessed 27 January 2022). Cowper, William. 1831. The Yorkshire Hunt; Or, An Extraordinary Chase, of the Parson and the Cat (In the Wolds of Yorkshire). London: Alfred Miller. Cronin, Richard. 2002. Romantic Victorians: English Literature 1824–1840. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dibdin, Charles. 1831. The High-Mettled Racer. London: William Kidd. Duncan, Dennis, and Adam Smyth, eds. 2019. Book Parts. Oxford: Oxford UP. Egan, Pierce. 1831. Matthew’s Comic Annual; Or The Snuff-Box and the Leetel Bird: An Original Humorous Poem. London: Alfred Miller. Ehnes, Caley. 2012. ‘Religion, Readership, and the Periodical Press: The Place of Poetry in Good Words’. Victorian Periodicals Review 45 (4) (Winter): 466–87. Goldsmith, Oliver, and Thomas Parnell. 1795. Poems by Goldsmith and Parnell. London: W. Bulmer and Co. Harris, Katherine D. 2015. Forget Me Not: The Rise of the British Literary Annual, 1823–1835. Athens, OH: Ohio UP. Haywood, Ian, Susan Matthews and Mary L. Shannon, eds. 2019. ‘Editors’ Introduction’. Romanticism and Illustration, 1–21. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Houfe, Simon. 1978. The Dictionary of British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists 1800–1914. Woodbridge: Baron Publishing. Hughes, Linda K. 2010. ‘Inventing Poetry and Pictorialism in Once a Week: A Magazine of Visual Effects’. Victorian Poetry 48 (1) (Spring): 41–7. Hughes, Linda K., and Michael Lund. 1991. The Victorian Serial. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Jung, Sandro. 2012. ‘The Illustrated Pocket Diary: Generic Continuity and Innovation, 1820– 1840’. Victorian Periodicals Review 45 (1) (Spring): 23–48. Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. 2002. ‘Poetry and Illustration’. In A Companion to Victorian Poetry, edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman and Antony H. Harrison, 392–418. Oxford: Blackwell.

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———. 2019. ‘Floating Worlds: Wood Engraving and Women’s Poetry’. In The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Poetry, edited by Linda K. Hughes, 59–78. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton UP. McCue, Maureen. 2019. ‘Intimate Distance: Thomas Stothard’s and J. M. W. Turner’s Illustrations of Samuel Rogers’s Italy’. In Romanticism and Illustration, edited by Ian Haywood, Susan Matthews and Mary L. Shannon, 171–95. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Maguire, Laurie. 2020. The Rhetoric of the Page. Oxford: Oxford UP. Maidment, Brian. 2009. ‘Jackson, John (1801–1848)’. In Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, edited by Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, 314. Gent and London: Academia Press and The British Library. ———. 2010. ‘Dinners or Desserts? Miscellaneity, Illustration, and the Periodical Press 1820–1840’. Victorian Periodicals Review 43 (4) (Winter): 353–87. ———. 2014. ‘Imagining the Cockney University: Humorous Poetry, the March of the Intellect, and the Periodical Press, 1820–1860’. Victorian Poetry 52 (1) (Spring): 21–39. ———. 2019. ‘The Development of Magazine Illustration in Regency Britain: The Example of Arliss’s Pocket Magazine 1818–1833’. In Romanticism and Illustration, edited by Ian Haywood, Susan Matthews and Mary L. Shannon, 1–21. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Margate: A Humorous Poem. 1831. London: William Kidd. Montagu, H. W. 1830. Monsieur Mallét: Or, My Daughter’s Letter. A Random Record. London: Thomas Griffiths. Montcrieff, W. T. 1830. Old Booty! A Serio-Comic Sailor’s Tale. London: William Kidd. Powell, Cecilia. 1983. ‘Turner’s Vignettes and the Making of Rogers’s Italy’. Turner Studies 3 (1): 2–13. R. 1866. ‘January 1866. “Out in the Snow”’. Illustrated by Edward Hull. Once a Week series 2, 1 (28) (6 January): 28. Ray, Gordon N. 1976. The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790 to 1914. New York: Pierpont Morgan Library. Rogers, Samuel. 1830. Italy, A Poem. London: T. Cadell and E. Moxon. ———. 1838. Italy, A Poem. London: Edward Moxon. ———. 1839. Italy, A Poem. London: Edward Moxon. ———. 1840. Italy, A Poem. With Cuts. Paris: Baudry’s European Library. Ruskin, John. 1907. Praeteria. London: George Allen. Smith, Margaret M. 2010. ‘Mise-en-page’. In The Oxford Companion to the Book, edited by Michael F. Suarez and H. R. Woodhuysen. Oxford: Oxford UP. Oxford Reference. Somerville, William. 1796. The Chase. A Poem. London: W. Bulmer and Co. Stevens, Bethan. 2019. ‘Wood engraving as Ghostwriting: The Dalziel Brothers, Losing One’s Name, and Other Hazards of the Trade’. Textual Practice: 1–33. Taylor, John. 1830. Monsieur Tonson. London and Edinburgh: Alfred Miller and Constable & Co. Taylor, Tom. 1859. ‘Magenta’. Illustrated by John Everett Millais. Once a Week series 1, 1 (1) (2 July): 10. Teulon, Harriet Mary. 1860. ‘Autumn’. Illustrated by John W. McWhirter. Good Words 1 (38) (September): 593. Tennyson, Hallam. 1897. Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir. 2 vols. London: Macmillan and Co. The Antiquated Trio. 1830. Walks About Town: A Poem, in Two Cantos. London: Effington Wilson. ‘The Battle of Magenta’. 1859. Illustrated by M. Beauce. Illustrated London News 35 (981) (2 July), unpaginated.

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The Devil’s Visit; A Poem, From the Original Manuscript. 1830. London: William Kidd. Thomas, Sophie. 2011. ‘Poetry and Illustration: “Amicable Strife”’. In A Companion to Romantic Poetry, edited by Charles Mahoney, 354–73. Oxford: Blackwell. Thornbury, Walter. 1866. ‘February. The Hunting Field’. Illustrated by Edward Hull. Once a Week series 2, 1 (5) (3 February): 140. Turner, Charles. 1870. ‘Ascent of Snowdon’. Illustrated by J. Mahoney. Good Words 11 (1 March): 201.

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25 Romantic Caricatures and Comics Jason Whittaker

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he growth of caricature and grotesque cartoons during the Romantic period are not, with the benefit of hindsight, a particular surprise. The eighteenth century had been a golden age of satire in Britain, while innovations in print culture and the book trade – combined with increasing literacy rates among the general public – created a wider market for the publications of artists such as Gillray, Rowlandson and Cruikshank. What is less predictable is how the works of the Romantics themselves would influence a later development: comic books and graphic novels. As such, this chapter is divided into two parts: the first considers the rise of cartoons and caricatures during the Romantic period; while the second explores the influence and reception of Romantic artists, especially that of William Blake, during the post-war period.

Romantics and Caricature Aristotle famously remarked in his Poetics that ‘Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life’, and the depiction of the follies of mankind has long been represented in literature, painting and sculpture to provoke laughter, what Marteinson calls that ‘most peculiarly human behaviour observed in nature’ (as cited in Marteinson 2017, 15). It was following the Renaissance, however, that a particular conflation between the act of comedy and its depiction in caricature became more clearly defined, so much so that the origins of terms such as ‘cartoon’ came to be absorbed into the notion of comedy. John Evelyn in his diaries (published in 1684) referred to cartoons as preparatory studies for artworks by Tintoretto and Raphael, in the possession of the Duke of Norfolk (Diaries 1955, III:567 and IV:312). In this, the first recorded use of the word in English, he drew on the French carton which in turn originated in the Italian cartone, from carta or paper. This was pretty much entirely its use throughout the eighteenth century. Steele in The Spectator, for example, called attention to the ‘Cartons [sic] in Her Majesty’s Gallery at Hampton-Court’ (Spectator, 226 (1)) while Walpole, in his Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762), which relied heavily on George Vertue’s notebooks, recalled how Frederic Zucchero, having been forced to flee Rome, ‘went into Flanders, and made cartoons for tapestry’ (Walpole 1798, 121). The notion of a cartoon as a humorous illustration, especially regarding comics, was not consolidated until the mid-nineteenth century, most notably when Punch announced the publication of Punch’s Cartoons in 1843. Illustrators of the Regency period, therefore, would not have understood their comical prints as cartoons, although they would have been very familiar with the notion of caricature. The Italian art of caricatura had its origins in Leonardo da

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Vinci’s depictions of figures with deformities and exaggerated features, a style that was immensely influential during the following centuries. Although not necessarily referred to as such, many of the grotesque and comical illustrations of chapbooks from the seventeenth century onwards are easily recognisable as fellow travellers in the tradition of caricatura. Thomas Wright, in his history of caricature and the grotesque, observes that the state of English visual (as opposed to verbal) caricature was much enlivened by interactions with Dutch society, where the practice had been stimulated considerably by the anti-Catholic art of Romain de Hooghe in particular. De Hooghe was more than happy to employ his graver against British subjects such as James II, but that the practice exploded with a series of pamphlets surrounding the recital and publication of Henry Sacheverell’s The Perils of the False Brethren (1709). In the subsequent pamphlet wars between Whigs and Tories, Sacheverell’s Tory partisans denounced caricatures as ‘things brought recently from Holland’ (Wright 1875, 436). Whatever the particular truth of this, the practice was popularised during the eighteenth century, with artists such as Hogarth producing popular comical and grotesque exaggerations in a format that was brought to its pinnacle (or sunk to its depths) in the work of Gillray, Rowlandson and Cruikshank at the turn of the nineteenth century. By the end of the eighteenth century, then, there was a strong tradition of comical art in Britain, and Ian Haywood notes how the ‘intervisual richness of caricatures’ from this period brought with it additional sophistication (Haywood 2013, 5). Thus, for example, in a print by Cruikshank from 1817, ‘Law versus Humanity or a Parody on British Liberty’, which depicted the trial for criminal libel of William Hone, the artist invokes blasphemy by depicting Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough as a comically grotesque example of judicial inhumanity in contrast to Hone’s radical innocence. By depicting himself in the cartoon as the ‘recording angel’, Cruikshank alludes to both Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and a print by Gillray from 1791 that used a longer quotation by Sterne as its source for a parody of the sentimental work of the Reverend Matthew William Peters. The dense allusiveness of such print culture from the Romantic period, then, demonstrates a complex web of social, political and aesthetic allusion that has tended to be overlooked. For Haywood, the visionary transformative effects of caricature, which rely acutely upon the activity of the artist’s imagination, alongside its anti-authoritarianism, make it possible to argue for the merits of the form as a kind of ‘renegade Romanticism’ (Haywood 2013, 6). Although by no means the first English caricaturist, James Gillray was the artist who came to define the genre. Born in Chelsea in 1756, his early biographer John Landseer described him as ‘the greatest of caricaturists’, while Thomas Wright described him as a man ‘whose name was destined to become familiar as household words in his own country and in foreign courts’ (Wright 1873, 2). Although he originally trained as a letterpress printer, it was following his admission to the Royal Academy as a student in 1778 where, according to Wright, he probably learned the arts of engraving that would make him so formidable a political cartoonist. No figure was safe from Gillray’s burin, and while the French Revolutionaries – and later Napoleon –experienced the most scabrous of his attacks, along with their English supporters, the Whigs led by Charles James Fox, various members of the royal family and the Tories under William Pitt were also subjected to his scathing, cynical art. For the main part, as Douglas Fordham observes, Gillray believed in the superiority of Western culture and British patriotism, yet his art was always complex and even ambivalent (Fordham 2010, 73–4).

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Landseer’s short account of Gillray in The Athenaeum related a curious incident: while the artist was ‘intimately acquainted’ with Gifford and Canning, and ‘publicly a Tory’, when drunk he would frequently propose the health of the artist Jacques-Louis David ‘on his knees’ (The Athenaeum, 667). Fordham suggests that while their style was very different, the political purpose of the two men as ‘artist-patriots’ was much closer (Fordham 2010, 74), an affinity which Angus Fletcher observed could occasionally converge in the depiction of the ‘symbolic power structures of their day’ (cited in Fordham 2010, 74). Landseer went so far as to argue that Gillray did not ‘desert to the Tories’ but was instead ‘pressed into their service’ (Athenaeum, 667): although there is no evidence to support Landseer’s attempt to redeem the reputation of his friend who ended his days in alcoholism and insanity, it appears that the Conservative government’s pension did not buy his complaisance. The richness of Gillray’s prolific genius makes selecting any one image for discussion invidious, but his satire of one minor notorious celebrity of the 1790s, largely forgotten now, offers plenty of insights into his method. ‘The Prophet of the Hebrews, – The Prince of Peace, Conducting the Jews to the Promis’d-Land’ (fig. 25.1) was issued as a hand-coloured print in March 1795, and depicts Richard Brothers, dressed as a sansculotte, leading a group of Jews towards fiery gallows bearing the inscription ‘The Gate of Jerusalem’. Brothers, who had served in the British navy during the 1780s before being honourably discharged, experienced a series of divine revelations which showed

Figure 25.1  James Gillray, ‘The Prophet of the Hebrews, – The Prince of Peace, Conducting the Jews to the Promis’d-Land’, 1795. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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the fall of London, or Babylon the Great, and which, in 1793, led him to proclaim himself the prophet of a new religion and a descendant of the House of David. A year later, with financial support of one Captain Hanchett, George Riebau printed Brothers’s A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times, a title which had been rejected by the Swedenborgian printer Robert Hindmarsh because, among other things, it predicted the death of the king (Hampshire-Monk 2005, 293). Brothers believed that he would lead the ten lost tribes, a spiritual community that included many British believers, who would gather together in 1795, at which point George III would abdicate his throne to Brothers and a great exodus to Palestine would begin. Arrested for treason in 1795, Brothers was imprisoned as criminally insane, although increasing dissatisfaction with the war in France and his prediction of the violent death of Louis XVI led to a wide readership for his works and acceptance among some that he was divinely inspired. The arrest of Brothers took place on 4 March 1795, a day before Gillray’s print: the hasty issue of the design was almost certainly intended by the artist and his publisher to capitalise on the sudden notoriety of Brothers rather than as an immediate commentary on the explicit accusation of treachery. Drawing on the growing reputation of the eccentric prophet, Gillray depicts Brothers, his clothes ragged and torn, rays of light beaming like horns from his brow, leading the lost tribes of Israel as he shoulders a sack containing the figures of the politicians Fox, Sheridan and Stanhope. There is much of the typical grossness of the artist’s designs, with anti-Semitic tropes prevalent in the depiction of the Jews led by a pedlar, and Brothers’s own face possessing the simian traits that Gillray often used to portray French revolutionaries. There is no doubt that Brothers is a false prophet, leading his followers to their doom and infected with the folly of the French Revolution, and yet there are surprising elements within the print. Not only does Brothers step upon the crowned heads of beasts reminiscent of the Red Dragon and Great Beast from Revelation, he also crushes the face of the Pope who is cast in among what are by implication the false monarchs of Europe. Likewise, although the print is vulgarly anti-Semitic, one of his followers has a ballad falling from her pocket, which reads: ‘Isabell Wake a new Song to the tune of a Two penny Loaf’. This, a reference to Isabella Wake who had brought Brothers a loaf each week when he was imprisoned in Newgate in 1792, could display her ignorance in believing the prophet’s promise that she would be great in his blessed kingdom for such an act, yet it also calls to mind Christ’s sermon on the mount in Matthew 5: 5 where he tells the crowd: ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.’ The lost tribes are fools to follow Brothers, but their folly is greater because they are led astray by the real villains of Gillray’s print: the pro-French Whigs under Fox and his crew. After all, Brothers did not simply lead the Jews back to Palestine, but the British Jews who had been lost for millennia. While Gillray fathered the art of British caricature, its significance was more fully established by two other artists who led the way in titivating the public with gibes cast against leading figures of the day during the Regency period. Through the work of Cruikshank and Rowlandson, readers of increasingly popular periodicals and newspapers came to expect cartoons and caricatures as a regular part of the media, laying the foundations for publications such as Punch. Thomas Rowlandson was born in the same year as Gillray, but his longer career (he died in 1827) meant that he was able to present a more expansive view of the Regency period. Born in the City of London, the Rowlandson family moved to Richmond, Yorkshire shortly afterwards when his father

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was declared bankrupt. As his biographers, Matthew and James Payne, observe, early life was probably difficult for the family, but he was able to attend school in London following the bequest of an uncle and later took classes at the Royal Academy. While he was extremely prolific as an artist (producing over a thousand prints), few of his letters have survived. Although, as the Paynes point out, the extensive nature of his prints dealing with the life of London drinking and gambling, as well as bawdy and erotic prints which were censured in the Victorian era, indicate that he knew the less salubrious quarters of the city in intimate detail. As Kate Heard observes in her catalogue of Rowlandson’s art in the Royal Collection, the artist’s association with Tobias Smollett was an echo of that between Hogarth and Henry Fielding (and, indeed, a precursor to Ralph Steadman’s later connection to Hunter S. Thompson), which further extended Hogarth’s and Gillray’s art of caricature as the emphasis of grotesque features. Although Rowlandson’s erotica may represent the logical outcome of his artistic endeavour as the seduction of the viewer through voyeurism, these are also often more clearly bawdy than grotesque. As a comic artist, his slices of London daily life are more indicative of his caricature style, such as ‘New Invented Elastic Breeches’ (1784) or ‘Dinners Drest in the Neatest Manner’ (1811) (fig. 25.2). While Gillray’s illustrations were dominated by political events of the day, many of Rowlandson’s prints capture instead the fashions and foibles of Georgian London. In the illustration of the latest sartorial invention, two assistants struggle on chairs to fit the tight pair of breeches on

Figure 25.2  Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Dinners Drest in the Neatest Manner’, 1811. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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a stout man whose gourmand excesses are caught in both his portly frame and portcoloured face. In Dinners Drest, Rowlandson plays on the anxieties of fashionable society who, when dining out, could never be sure how their meals were prepared. In the print, which (as with many of Rowlandson’s more ribald productions) was sold by the publisher Thomas Tegg for a shilling, a grotesque cook rolls out the pastry for a pie with phlegm and snot dripping from his face onto the food; in the background, a slovenly kitchen maid does not notice the rat that escapes from the dish she is reaching up to carry. As opposed to the topical political scandals of the day, Rowlandson is often more concerned with the evergreen comedy and anxieties of the London ton, with a less misanthropic eye towards his subjects. George Cruikshank’s father, Isaac, was a caricaturist who took on his son as an apprentice. Isaac produced a series of anti-Jacobin cartoons that would have been immediately familiar to the audience that consumed Gillray’s work, such as his 1792 print ‘The Friends of the People’, which depicted Thomas Paine and Joseph Priestley amassing weapons for violent revolution as a spectral devil with the features of Charles Fox looked on. By the time that George Cruikshank came of age, however, British patriotism had become complicated by the ongoing scandals of the Regency, which did not disappear with the Prince Regent’s accession to the throne as George IV. As such, in 1820, Cruikshank received a bribe not to caricature the new king. His early biographer, Thackeray, observed that his only ‘effort as a party politician’ came via his cartoons against the Prince Regent, although some early images of Napoleon were done in the ‘regular John Bull style’ made familiar by Gillray and Rowlandson, but that his portraits of Tom and Jerry, two men about town who enjoyed themselves somewhat recklessly in Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821) was closer to his passions. Certainly, by the 1830s, Cruikshank as an artist turned to book illustration, almost certainly to escape the aesthetic judgements of the artistic elite which had confined Gillray’s reputation, producing some of his most famous work for Dickens during that decade, such as Sketches by Boz (1836) and Oliver Twist (1838). Unlike his father, Cruikshank succeeded in pivoting towards a more respectable artistic career at a time when satirical caricaturists were still held in relatively low self-esteem, for all that their prints were consumed by a mass market. Nonetheless, by the end of his life, his former profession was slowly becoming more respectable as cartoonists such as John Leech and Joseph Keppler fed the demands of an insatiable periodical press, a press that could make or break the careers of politicians who had to rely on the votes of an ever-increasing electorate. But Cruikshank was always more than a political caricaturist, with one of his most famous illustrations providing an enduring – and far from flattering – image of Lord Byron. ‘Fare Thee Well’ was issued by John Johnston, a publisher based in Bishopsgate and then Cheapside, London, who specialised in satires and, like Cruikshank, received a payment of £75 in 1819 not to publish prints against the then Prince Regent (Gatrell 2006, 537). Johnston made use of both Cruikshank’s and Rowlandson’s skills for works such as The Tour of Doctor Syntax Through London (1820), an imitation of William Coombe’s earlier The Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picaresque. Johnston issued the cartoon as a broadside, the illustration by Cruikshank taking up half the page with Byron’s poem, ‘Fare Thee Well’, printed beneath (fig. 25.3). Byron had written the poem the day after the preliminary Separation Agreement with his wife, Annabella Milbanke, was signed on 17 March 1816. He sent the poem to

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Figure 25.3  George Cruikshank, ‘Fare Thee Well’, 1816. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Annabella two days later and it was printed by Murray for private circulation on 8 April that year, but was soon reproduced, without authorisation, in ‘A Sketch’ for the Champion newspaper on 14 April. As W. Paul Ellidge relates, it was the scandalised public outcry caused by the publication of ‘A Sketch’ that caused Byron to flee for Dover and thence to the Continent on 25 April (Ellidge 1986, 44). Johnston hurried out the broadside by the end of the month, with Cruikshank’s illustration showing the poet accompanied by three women, two in various states of déshabillé, as an oarsman rows them to a waiting ship. As Byron romantically chants lines from his verse to his wife and newly born daughter on the shore, one of the women grabs his leg and pleads for him to sit on her knee while two sailors leer at the scene and remark that ‘may I never take another bit of shag if they ain’t fine vessels’. The double entendre to the pleasures of smoking and sex are accompanied by another indulgence: the stock of ‘old Hock’ wine alongside Byron’s notorious drinking cup made from a skull. Whatever the poet’s high-minded spiritual allusions, the cartoonist and observer are not fooled by Byron’s capitulation to the demands of the flesh. The three women, according to E. C. Mayne, were intended to be Drury Lane actresses. Byron had shares in the theatre and boasted to his wife of his mistresses there, and one of the women is labelled ‘Beauteous Mrs Mardyn’. After the publication of Cruikshank’s caricature, Charlotte Mardyn wrote to the Morning Chronicle protesting against the slander connecting her to Byron, and Byron himself later declared her innocent of any wrongdoing (Medwin 1966, 42). Certainly, she had no connection with Byron’s departure, but such niceties of fact meant little to either Cruikshank or Johnston. The cartoon for ‘Fare Thee Well’ is a piece of tabloid muckraking that, along with the Champion exposé, was more than willing to drag any of Byron’s associates into the gutter: Cruikshank’s genius, for all the vileness of the fallout for Charlotte Mardyn in particular (who was booed off the stage during subsequent performances), was that it laid bare Byron’s cant that he was so critical of in others. The Regency period, then, as Gatrell, Haywood and others point out, was a golden age for caricature that also demonstrated the potential for cartoons as a vehicle of mass media distribution and representation. What the medium provided, however, was a single, captured image of an event, a compressed story that would become familiar to newspaper and magazine readers over the next two centuries, but which was limited in its narrative abilities. It was with the rise of sequential arts and comic strips that would allow for a novel variation in the reception of Romantic art and poetry.

Comics and the Reception of Romanticism The development of caricatures and satirical prints during the Romantic period was only tangential to what we would know as comic books. As already noted, the transition to cartoons as we would understand them took place during the mid-nineteenth century via publications such as Punch, which had its origins in The Monthly Sheet of Caricatures established in 1830. Throughout the Victorian period, across Europe and in the United States, magazines such as Harper’s Weekly, Il Fischietto and Fliegende Blätter established the cartoon as a mainstay of political commentary. Another development, however, and one which would become particularly important to the reception of the Romantics was the emergence of comic books and graphic novels.

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Although the rise of comics can be traced to eighteenth-century print culture, their impact on Western culture was most felt during the twentieth century. The so-called ‘golden age’ of comics is typically dated from the appearance of Superman in Action Comics in 1938. While pulp magazines had been popular during the previous decade, the significant change that takes place after Superman’s debut is that these titles are based on sequential art, with stories presented via a series of panels and images. As Will Eisner explains, comic books effected a new mode of reading via the montage of word and image that can experiment with a number of effects, such as breaking with the traditional format of reading from left to right, or treating text as a graphic element on the page (Eisner 2008, 2–3). Although there are some crossovers with the techniques employed by earlier satirists such as Gillray and Cruikshank, the development of these formats into sequential art was what allowed later generations of artists to transfer the Romantics into a new medium. As such, this section will consider both straightforward translations of Romantic texts into the format of the graphic novel, as in the reworking of Coleridge’s poetry, and more diffuse examples of the reception of William Blake as a popular precursor to comic book writers and artists of today. Comic book adaptations of books began to appear during the twentieth century, with the Bible being the unsurprising candidate for different editions. The precursor of these were heavily illustrated versions aimed at children which began to appear in the nineteenth century and early twentieth-century popular adaptations such as The Story of Jesus, published by The John C. Winston Company in 1921. Likewise, pulp fiction novels and characters were ripe for transfer to what were known as ‘Tijuana Bibles’: small publications, usually eight pages or so and frequently erotic or even pornographic in their content; less racy versions in the 1930s included adaptations of Flash Gordon and Tarzan. In the post-war period, comic versions of novels became an increasingly common staple, with the US series Classics Illustrated producing a number of such titles from The Last of the Mohicans and Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde in the 1940s to Frankenstein and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in the twenty-first century. One of the more recent releases by the company is a version of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, published in 2015 as number 61 in the series and offering an interesting transliteration of the original stanzas into dramatic prose. The illustrations (not attributed) are in the standard style of the series, appealing to the rather ersatz, mid-twentieth-century ‘traditional’ comic style that, while being inoffensive, is far less memorable than the dramatic illustrations to the poem made by Gustave Doré in 1875. A much more interesting rendition is provided by Hunt Emerson’s version, published by Knockabout Comics in 2007. What is immediately noticeable is that Emerson employs a distinctively ‘comical’ style, one closer to the funnies of publications such as The New Yorker rather than the more serious graphic novel format used by Marvel and DC in more recent decades. Thus, the bulbous-nosed mariner, for example, shoots the albatross with a rubber tipped arrow, while the desolate wastes of ice and snow are portrayed via sight gags of lollies and ice creams. Outside of adaptation, one Romantic above all others has shaped the development of modern comics. Except for Gillray, whose influence is primarily located in the gloriously ignoble art of satirical cartoons, the most important artist to have influenced later graphic novels is William Blake. The reason is obvious: Blake’s own combination of images intrinsically intertwined with his illuminated words via his invention of stereotype printing has clear echoes of the principles of sequential art.

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However, considering Blake’s attempts to convey a sense of eternity rather than the passage of time means it is better thought of in terms of W. J. T. Mitchell’s phrase, ‘composite art’, the combination of word and image that is not intended to lead the reader through a temporal narrative but rather enable them to appreciate the role of Blake’s mythological archetypes such as Orc and Los (Mitchell 1978, 34). Despite this, however, the style of Blake’s illustrations, drawing heavily as they did on the principles of neoclassical art with muscular, elegant figures, are immediately recognisable as part of a tradition reaching from Pheidias’ designs for the Parthenon to the superheroes of Marvel and DC Comics. There is also another way in which Blake has influenced later comic book writers and artists, in that his idiosyncratic political, religious and psychological viewpoints established an important attitude for those who wished to follow his dictum: ‘I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans’ (Jerusalem 10:20, E153). The earliest reference to Blake in mainstream comics was not the most auspicious. In the March 1978 edition of Spider-Man written by Chris Claremont and illustrated by Dave Hunt and John Byrne, Spider-Man and Tigra: At Kraven’s Command!, Blake’s presence is reduced to that common trope of Marvel comics – the pun. Swinging into action, he appears beneath the title: ‘Tigra, Tigra, Burning Bright’. Much more significant uses of Blake appear in the 1980s, particularly in the work of British artists such as Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison. One of the first references to Blake in Moore’s work is in the 1982 series V for Vendetta, published in the comic Warrior, in which the eponymous hero recites lines from Blake’s famous stanzas from Milton: A Poem (better known as the hymn ‘Jerusalem’) as he seeks revenge on those members of a totalitarian state whose experiments turned him into a powerful superhuman. By 1987, in his astonishingly ambitious series Watchmen, Moore presents a simple but profound invocation of ‘The Tyger’ that was a world away from the glib jokes of Claremont, Hunt and Byrne. In the fifth episode, ‘Fearful Symmetry’, Rorschach is captured and his identity revealed, the entire chapter operating as a mirror image that represents the duality of its anti-hero as a force of both good and evil, a marriage of heaven and hell. By the time he came to write From Hell, the story of Jack the Ripper in which the infamous serial killer is obsessed with the Romantic artist’s arcane myth-making and psychogeography, Moore’s knowledge of Blake was clearly extensive, invoking allusions to the poet from a range of diverse texts such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion and Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion. As Roger Whitson observes: ‘The sublime intensity of William Blake acts to reestablish Moore’s radical sense of self, and to produce that self in a celebrity circuit of prophetic anger and postmodern textual play’ (Whitson 2006, 7). Similarly, M. Cecilia Marchetto Santorun observes that Moore frequently references Blake in interviews and ‘is often considered today an ambassador of Blakean poetics’ (Marchetto Santorun 2020, 2); while Matthew J. A. Green sees throughout Moore’s work a Blakean contrary through which ‘the imagination’s potential to redeem is bound up with its capability for destruction’ (Green 2016, 272). While Gillray and Cruikshank may have laid the foundations for the modern art of the cartoon, Blake is much more attractive to comic book artists because his archetypal heroes offer more complex political and psychological versions of the superheroes that became popular during the twentieth century. While Moore’s Watchmen is probably the most famous use of Blake’s poem, one that is perhaps even more interesting is Grant Morrison’s and Steve Yeowell’s Zenith,

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which adopts ‘The Tyger’ as its motif for its first series while also responding to Watchmen. Although Morrison had been writing comic strips since the late 1970s, it was with Zenith that he achieved his first notable success. Published as a weekly strip in 2000 AD in 1987, Zenith was also Morrison’s first sustained superhero series and, as Greg Carpenter observes, a polemical, revisionist take on the ‘dark’ superheroes of Moore and Frank Miller. A deliberately shallow and sarcastic character, Zenith is a Gen-X superhero who initially decides to promote his career as a pop singer rather than fight the forces of darkness. Carpenter notes that, in contrast to the vast majority of readers of Watchmen, Morrison has long been critical of both Moore’s storytelling and some of his essential thematic approaches, and that those elements that appear most derivative about Zenith intentionally parody the action and events of Watchmen. Thus, Ozymandias is reconfigured as Scott Wallace (a thinly disguised version, as Carpenter observes, of Richard Branson), an idealistic businessman who, due to concerns about environmental pollution and corruption, has decided to commandeer nuclear missiles to destroy London. Yet, Carpenter points out, the purpose of this parody is ‘not to repeat a good idea, but rather, from Morrison’s perspective, to critique a bad one’, the bad idea being, as Morrison writes in Supergods, that ‘the world’s smartest man would do the world’s dumbest thing after thinking about it all his life’ (as cited in Carpenter 2014, 205). The Blakean references are made explicit in the first part of the series, titled Tygers, and which namechecks Blake’s poem on the tombstone of the first British superhero – Maximan, intended to fight the Nazis during the Second World War but whose descendants had rebelled and become hippies in the counterculture. Nor would this be Morrison’s only use of Blake in reference to Nazism. When he first published ‘The New Adventures of Hitler’ in a Scottish arts magazine, Cut, in 1989, there was a huge controversy, with Pat Kane, one of the magazine’s editors, condemning the strip. Morrison’s satirical story detailed the life of young Adolf Hitler in 1912, offering a counter-factual history where he had spent his time in Liverpool with his sister-inlaw, Bridget Dowling (the Irish-born wife of Alois Hitler, Jr who did, indeed, live in Liverpool with Alois before they split at the outbreak of the First World War). The first episode opens with a close-up of feet walking, slowly panning out to reveal the figure of Hitler, alternating with panels of choirboys singing the opening verse of ‘Jerusalem’. Ultimately, as with Moore’s V for Vendetta, the satire is not against Germany but rather what plenty of commentators in the late eighties saw as the increasingly reactionary Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher; and ‘Jerusalem’ was familiar enough for most readers to recognise its significance as a trope of the English establishment. Although Moore and Morrison represent what has become a fairly mainstream British appropriation of Blake as a hip, free-spirited and countercultural (sometimes even libertarian) icon, this is not the entirety of his use by comic book artists, especially in terms of independent comics which have enjoyed something of a resurgence in recent years. While they are frequently critical of the superhero genre – in particular Moore, who lambasted the continuing influence of Marvel and DC as ‘culturally catastrophic’ in a 2014 interview – both authors have also continued to largely work within that genre. Before turning to very different understandings of Blake as a more quotidian commentator, however, it is worth briefly mentioning one of the most unusual examples of the use of his work in a superhero comic. ‘The Tyger’, an edition

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of The Punisher published in February 2006, with a story supplied by Garth Ennis and art by John Severin, is an origin story for one of the most morally complex figures in the Marvel universe. While the original incarnation of Frank Castle as a brutal vigilante from his first appearance in 1974 had declined considerably in popularity by the 1990s, Ennis’s desire to recreate the Punisher less as a superhero and more as a gritty anti-hero offered an opportunity to explore a very different kind of backstory to that usually encountered in traditional comics. ‘The Tyger’ presents the young Castle as a boy in love with poetry, whether the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam or Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’. The introduction of the works of William Blake, however, present a unique opportunity for a discussion of reception theory, as when Frank and his teacher, Father David, argue over the meaning of the line ‘Did he who made the lamb make thee?’, echoing Stanley Fish’s invocation of the disagreements of Kathleen Raine and E. D. Hirsch over the meaning of the poem (Fish 1980, 339–40). Father David insists that there must be, finally, an authoritative answer to the question, but Frank disagrees, supporting Fish’s appeal to meaning residing in the act of interpretive communities. While Frank sees a force in nature ‘that would not know mercy, nor remorse, nor even the concept of stopping’, a model for his future self, in Vietnam he also encounters a tiger which does stop him in his tracks so that, instead of killing it as a threat, he is awed by this sense of sublimity and beauty. ‘The Tyger’ is particularly significant as one of the few episodes of The Punisher that avoids the extreme level of violence that punctuate the series and, on its own, could almost be taken as a representative of the anti-superhero comic art that operates outside the Marvel and DC universes. An approach that eschews the concept of the superhero is Her Infernal Descent, published in 2018, and which is one of many re-interpretations of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante’s epic poem, particularly its first part, Inferno, as well as influencing writers as diverse as T. S. Eliot, Osip Mandelstam and Jorge Luis Borges, has inspired classical (Puccini, Liszt) and popular (Nine Circles, Depeche Mode) music, video games – most notably Dante’s Inferno (2010) – and has been illustrated repeatedly by artists such as Gustave Doré, Salvador Dali and, of course, William Blake. The connection between Blake and Dante is explicitly explored in the comic written by Lonnie Nadler and Zac Thompson and illustrated by Kyle Charles, Dee Cunniffe and Ryan Ferrier, in which it is the Romantic poet who assumes the role played by Virgil in Dante’s earlier epic. Her Infernal Descent charts the journey of a lonely widow into hell to find her family and begins with the unnamed protagonist in her home, void of the life once given to the place by her husband and children but full of the detritus of material that reminds her of them. She herself is ageing, visibly sinking into despondency and unable to rouse herself from the deadening effects of loss, and the opening pages engage simply and beautifully with an all-too-ordinary form of grief. In the first episode, ‘Denial’, while climbing into an attic to pack away the mundane stuff of the lives of her dead family, she encounters Blake who will be her spirit guide through hell. In a reverse of the scene in Alan Moore’s From Hell, when William Gull (Moore’s Jack the Ripper) appears as a ghost to Blake and inspires the original The Ghost of a Flea, Blake rears up before her in the attic space to tell her that he has spoken to her family in hell and that she now can accompany him there. Sceptical at first, she soon agrees to let him lead her into a portal to the underworld. The selection of William Blake as the archetypal guide to the underworld is a brilliant conceit, demonstrating

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a deft understanding of pop culture appropriations of the Romantic as the author of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. What is especially significant, however, is that in contrast to just about every version of appropriation of his work and ideas considered previously, Blake and the hero of Her Infernal Descent are thoroughly quotidian heroes, their conflicts being those of the search for meaning in an apparently uncaring and cruel universe rather than against monstrously powerful super beings who fight like the angels and devils of Paradise Lost. This everyday Blake, familiar as the poet of ‘London’ and of Auguries of Innocence rather than the author of the mythic struggles of the four Zoas, is more frequently found in independent contemporary British and American comic artists rather than those employed by Marvel or DC, and the final example to be considered here is John Riordan’s series, William Blake, Taxi Driver. Riordan pitched the series to the deputy art director of Time Out magazine in 2007, offering a regular comic strip in which William Blake – reincarnated as a London cabbie – was able to pick up all kinds of customers due to his remarkable visionary powers, including Gilbert and George, Milton and Boudicca. As Riordan observes, the process of creating a weekly comic strip in which Blake was the only regular character meant that he ended up with a very labour-intensive process requiring substantial amounts of research into every passenger (Riordan 2020, 15). If Aristotle’s notion of comedy was that it represents the worst of mankind, Riordan’s more gentle and absurdist humour instead posits the ordinariness of a cockney Blake against the pretentiousness of his rides, offering a marriage not so much of heaven and hell as one very much down to earth compared to those with their heads in the clouds. When it is John Milton paying the fare, the taxi driver asks him whether he is a tourist to which the blind poet answers, ‘I come to justify the ways of God to men.’ Blake’s response is pure Riordan: ‘Nice work if you can get it . . . Is that right or left?’ There is, however, a remarkable poignancy in many of the strips that were produced for Time Out, for example, one in which Blake recounts details from his biography (fig. 25.4). Although the house where he was born in 1757 has since been torn down, the cabbie drives his nameless fare through a city where visionary figures such as the Ghost of a Flea and angels wearing hoodies in the trees of Peckham Rye present themselves as casually as the pedestrians, tourists and tower blocks. As Blake tells his passenger, ‘There’s an energy to London, comes out of the stones, out of its history.’ It is entirely unsurprising that Blake has been the Romantic most extensively adapted to the format of comic books: he is, after all, the godfather of the format in some respects. There have, of course, been a number of appropriations of other Romantic poets, such as John Keats – whose La Belle Dame Sans Merci was turned into a popular comic by Julian Peters in 2019 – or Byron, who is a notable influence (along with David Bowie, Grace Jones and Prince) for the drummer Lord Byron in Brenden Fletcher’s and Annie Wu’s Black Canary series (2015–16). In the vast majority of cases, the use of Romantic literature is via translation into the format of sequential art, a modern version of the illustrated collections provided by artists such as Doré in the nineteenth century. In some cases, however, what comic books and graphic novels are more interested in capturing are the more varied flavours of Romanticism, whether as a source of astounding stories (as with Emerson’s satirical rendition of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner) or the ability to create systems amid the contraries of the imagination.

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Figure 25.4  John Riordan, William Blake, Taxi Driver, 2007. Reprinted with permission of the artist.

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Bibliography Blake, William. 1988. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Edited by David V. Erdman. New York: Doubleday. Carpenter, Greg. 2014. ‘Grant Morrison, Watchmen, and the Art of the Polemic’. Sequart.

(last accessed 21 May 2021). Eisner, Will. 2008. Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Ellidge, W. Paul. 1986. ‘Talented Equivocation: Byron’s “Fare Thee Well”’. Keats-Shelley Journal 35: 42–61. Evelyn, John. 1955. The Diary of John Evelyn. 6 volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fish, Stanley. 1980. Is there a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Fordham, Douglas. 2010. ‘On bended knee: James Gillray’s global view of courtly encounter’. In The Efflorescence of Caricature, 1759–1838, edited by Todd Porterfield. London: Routledge. Gatrell, Vic. 2006. City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London. London: Atlantic Books. Green, Matthew. 2016. ‘A darker magic: heterocosms and bricolage in Moore’s recent reworkings of Lovecraft’. In Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition, edited by Matthew Green. Manchester: Manchester UP. Hampshire-Monk, Iain. 2005. The Impact of the French Revolution: Texts from Britain in the 1790s. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Haywood, Ian. 2013. Romanticism and Caricature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Heard, Kate, ed. 2013. High Spirits: The Comic Art of Thomas Rowlandson. London: Royal Collection Trust. Landseer, John. 1831. ‘Mr Landseer’s Apology for James Gillray’. The Athenaeum, no. 207, 667–8. Marchetto Santorun, M. Cecilia. 2020. ‘“Terrible monsters Sin-bred”: Blakean monstrosity in Alan Moore’s graphic novels’. In Monsters: interdisciplinary explorations of monstrosity, edited by Sibylle Erle and Helen Hendry. London: Palgrave. Marteinson, Peter G. 2017. On the Problem of the Comic: A philosophical study of the origins of laughter. Ottawa, ON: Legas. Medwin, Thomas. 1966. Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron. Edited by Ernest J. Lovell, Jr. Princeton: Princeton UP. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1978. Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry. Princeton: Princeton UP. Payne, Matthew and James Payne. 2010. Regarding Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827): His Life, Art & Acquaintance. London: Hogarth Arts. Riordan, John. 2020. ‘Billy Blake’s Cab, or, The Vehicular Form of William Blake’. Vala 1: 12–6. Walpole, Horace. 1798. The Works of Horatio Walpole. London: G. G. and J. Robinson. Whitson, Roger. 2006. ‘Panelling Parallax: The Fearful Symmetry of William Blake and Alan Moore’. In William Blake and Visual Culture, edited by Roger Whitson and Donald Ault. ImageTexT 3, no. 2. (last accessed 23 May 2022). Wright, Thomas. 1873. The Works of James Gillray, The Caricaturist: With the history of his life and times. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. 1875. A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art. London: Chatto and Windus.

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26 Cultural Manifestations of Romanticism on the Contemporary Screen Hila Shachar

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hile the last few decades of cinema have seen competing discourses to Romantic ideologies of identity, creativity and subjectivity, Romanticism has never left the contemporary screen. Romanticism is often adapted on the contemporary screen through an underlying assumption about Romantic definitions of individuality, the creative imagination and dominant tropes of the visual sublime in art as they are aligned with both. In my recent study of literary biographical films, I explore how contemporary literary biopics often define the figure of the author through Romantic ideologies of individuality, even if they may explore diverse historical settings (Shachar 2019, 15). I concluded this study by indicating how we can move the analysis of Romanticism on the contemporary screen beyond the study of biographical films about authors’ lives, as Romantic definitions of individuality and creativity pervade a diverse array of films, and, as I suggest, ones that are primarily centred on narratives of female subjectivity in our own modern era (180–7). It is this direction I wish to explore in this chapter, by examining cultural developments in the representation of Romantic ideologies on screen, specifically in the last two decades of cinema. This cinematic exploration of Romantic ideologies is threefold: it comes as direct representations of biographical films about Romantic authors; adaptations of later nineteenth-century novels; and new narratives, set in the contemporary era. In all three manifestations, Romantic ideologies of subjectivity, creativity and gender inform the representation of feminine subjectivity, and in doing so, tap into a significant area of cultural analysis of how contemporary cinema reworks these tropes. The recent exploration of Romantic tropes in cinematic terms can be better understood when we compare the ways in which Romantic authors and their texts were adapted for the screen throughout the 1980s and 90s. This earlier production context was deeply entwined with the contemporary heritage industry’s agenda, which inevitably shaped how the lives of Romantic poets were presented to audiences (see Hewison 1987; Higson 2003; Monk 1995; Pidduck 2004; Sadoff 2010). Feeding into the commodification of the English country house as a tourist destination and national fetish, the plethora of Jane Austen adaptations in the 1990s, for instance, reflects audience expectations while delineating key terms in the presentation of Romantic-period subjects. Indeed, films such as Gothic (1986) and Rowing with the Wind (1988), which take as their subject-matter the biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and Lord Byron, as well the creation of the novel, Frankenstein (1818), employ a representational politics of heritage. Such costume dramas often use, in Andrew Higson’s

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words, a ‘pictorialist museum aesthetic’ or picturesque mode of visual representation borrowed from traditional painting, which neutralises and sanitises the past to make it palatable for mass consumption (2003, 39). From my own research, a dominant shift in approach comes later; this shift does not abandon a picturesque or Romantic aesthetic, but rather, it appropriates and extends it in a manner that I describe as revisionist, primarily focusing on women’s lives and subjectivities. A film such as Bright Star (directed by Jane Campion, 2009), is a prime example of such a shift. While ostensibly adapting the biography of the Romantic poet, John Keats, Bright Star reframes his biography, his work, and Romantic ideologies of creativity and subjectivity, through the feminine consciousness of the object of his affection, Fanny Brawne. I have analysed this film in previous publications (see Shachar 2019, 64–71; Shachar 2013, 204–10), and extend it here, by exploring the ways that Romanticism on screen has been shaped by a re-evaluation of how we represent feminine subjectivity in film. This approach also requires a cultural shift and re-evaluation of how we approach films that tackle feminine identity, creativity and subjectivity beyond the narrow limits of ‘niche’ cinema, created and intended mainly for ‘female’ audiences. Instead, recent films that both appropriate Romantic lives, works and ideologies, and extend them in the present era, require audiences to acknowledge that women’s lives and subjectivity can in fact represent the wider ‘human experience’, in a similar way that masculine subjectivity has been used to universalise the human experience in the wider arts in multiple historical eras in Western culture. I will use the 2017 literary biopic, Mary Shelley, directed by Haifaa al-Mansour, as a ‘springboard’ for discussion around contemporary films that employ Romanticism in varied adaptational forms. This adaptation of Shelley’s biography, and specifically, her creation of her most well-known work, Frankenstein (1818), speaks back to previous adaptations such as Gothic (1986), where her creativity was explored through a more simplified ‘lens’, and Bright Star (2009), where feminine creativity takes centre stage in the representation of Romanticism, and moves it into issues that shape other recent films which may not appear to be directly aligned with the Romantic period per se. The underlying representational and visual logic of the films I will be exploring in this chapter is informed by the aesthetic and ideological categories of the sublime (see Burke 1998, 51–79) and the beautiful (see Burke 1998, 81–114), which also underpinned much of the cultural logic of the English Romantics’ own works and lives. These categories are perhaps most famously theorised by Edmund Burke, in his 1757 treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Anne K. Mellor’s study of Romanticism and gender is useful here for how we can approach the films to be discussed in this chapter. As she points out, masculine theories of creativity and the imagination, and ‘[m]asculine English Romanticism’ per se, have ‘long been associated with . . . what the Romantic writers called “the sublime”’ (1993, 85). As she explains, the ‘concept of the sublime promoted by eighteenth-century theorists and the male Romantic poets’ is ‘gendered’ male, with the binary concept of the beautiful being aligned with the feminine body and feminised domestic spaces (85). I will explore both the aesthetics of the sublime and the beautiful in this chapter in separate sections, analysing how Romantic painting and philosophy are appropriated in contemporary films on behalf of a female subjectivity through the visual terrain of the colour blue when it comes to the sublime, and the colours white and pink when it comes to the beautiful.

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Alongside Mary Shelley (2017), the films I will be analysing in this chapter include The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), Bright Star (2009), Jane Eyre (2011), Little Women (2019), and Emma. (2020). In exploring these films, I seek to demonstrate that the way Romanticism is ‘alive’ in contemporary cinema is much like Frankenstein’s monster in Shelley’s novel: as a complex bricolage of Romantic parts and ideas, collated together to ask wider questions about creativity, subjectivity, gender and identity within a contemporary culture that has both inherited Romanticism in the visual arts, and continues to rework it.

Sublime Blue: Solitude and Feminine Subjectivity In the opening scenes of Mary Shelley (2017), we are given cues as to how we should ‘read’ her individual creative subjectivity. Leaning against her mother’s (Mary Wollstonecraft) gravestone, we see a 16-year-old Shelley (played by Elle Fanning), struggling to write fiction. Her father, William Godwin, later mentions that she is struggling to find her own creative ‘voice’ because she is imitating other people’s. The film links these struggles to find an individual creative voice and an internal subjectivity with the problematic subsuming of Shelley’s identity with her dead mother’s and the distraction of domestic tasks. Shelley steals time to write out in the ‘fresh air’, as she calls it, while avoiding domestic work laid out for her by her stepmother. The opening scenes therefore set up an ideological logic whereby the lack of differentiation between motherhood, domesticity and feminine subjectivity is rendered a problem that Shelley must overcome. Ostensibly, this creates a dynamic that would seem to be the opposite of the one found in Bright Star (2009), where the domestic artistry of Fanny Brawne – sewing – is depicted in the opening scenes of the film as a competing discourse of creative identity to the literary masculine ‘voice’ of Keats and his male poet friends. The opening scene of Bright Star depicts Brawne sewing in contemplative solitude, shot in detailed, extreme close-ups. These reverential close-ups are usually reserved for the ‘pen in hand’ thematic motif and visual trope in literary biopics, which functions as a visual ‘stand-in’ for the ideological veneration of the solitary mind of the author, constructing a Romantic subjectivity built on the masculine drama of the inquiring and perceiving individual imagination (see Shachar 2019, 28–42). As I have previously argued, Bright Star elevates what have historically been considered menial feminine chores to the realm of ‘high’ art, to compete with Romantic masculine poetry as the true site of Romantic subjectivity (Shachar 2019, 64–71). This representational politics is part of director Jane Campion’s aim of showing the unacknowledged labour and art of women, by suggesting that the beautiful domestic which is aligned within Romantic ideology as the feminine counterpart to the masculine sublime, is actually a sublime site of creativity that has been marginalised (see Thomas 2010, 10). The enclosed bedroom in which Brawne sews in solitude, the reverential hush and the extreme close-ups of her needle moving in and out of fabric as an act of solemn artistic ‘prayer’, essentially remove the distinction between the domestic and sublime (fig. 26.1). It would seem, by contrast, that Mary Shelley seeks to focus attention back onto the masculine Romantic sublime, found outside the confines of the domestic home. However, upon closer inspection, these films’ explorations of feminine subjectivity through the act of creation are two sides of the same coin. While Campion refashions

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Figure 26.1  The sublime domestic needle in solemn close-up. Bright Star, 2009, directed by Jane Campion, Pathé Renn Productions/Screen Australia/BBC Films/UK Film Council. the feminine domestic as the sublime, al-Mansour suggests the masculine sublime was never purely ‘masculine’ to begin with, and that the feminine struggle to find a ‘voice’ is both the product of the marginalisation of women, and one that moves beyond gender. Both films blur the traditional gendered binaries associated with the creative solitary imagination, suggesting a more ‘fluid’ representation of the gendered politics embedded in such a subjectivity. This fluidity is articulated visually and ideologically in both films, and in others, through the colour blue. In Bright Star, Brawne’s contemplative, artistic act of sewing occurs in a cocooned domestic space, shot in a blue tint. This blue tint features in many other films that explore feminine subjectivity. Here, it melds the solitariness associated with the detaching and detached hue of blue with the domestic, where we see the metallic, shiny-bluish tint of the needle creating art, shot in a similar manner to the revered authorial pen in other literary biopics. It is clear that Campion and her cinematographer, Greig Fraser, are creating a visual dynamic that merges interior spaces of the feminine domestic with the interiority of the solitary ‘struggle’ of the outside sublime, usually explored through and within an ‘infinite’, ‘transcendent’ nature, to use Mellor’s words in describing the masculine sublime in art (1993, 98, 101). We see this metallic blue tint expanded and refracted in Mary Shelley in a later scene, where Shelley, sent to Scotland by her father to ‘find her voice’ in the solitude of expansive nature, goes on a ‘trip’ into ‘infinite nature’ with Isabel Baxter, the daughter of her father’s friend, in the middle of the night. Under a tree, the two young women discuss their dead mothers. Baxter reveals that she seeks to bring her mother back to life through a seance, while Shelley replies that she believes she killed her mother via her own birth. The focus then moves away from Baxter, with Shelley’s face framed in close-up in solitude against the darkness, with the camera following her individual

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gaze upwards, in a symbolic transcendent move. The camera then takes up Shelley’s own uplifted gaze and shows us her consciousness filtered through her eyes and through the sublime, so that we see what she sees. As she gazes up at the expansive landscape of the star-dotted night sky, we see these stars forming metallic blue shapes in constellations that visually mirror electronic wavelengths, alongside blue spots of light, framed in an extreme wide-shot. There could not be a more visually evocative representation of the masculine Romantic sublime. Here, we are shown a direct representation of what Mellor has called the ‘sublime experience of heroic (masculine) struggle with the infinite’ (1993, 98). But the image takes us beyond nature, into our own scientific and technological age. The blue dots and symbolic wavelengths decorating the infinite natural sky resemble the reflected and refracted screens of phones and laptops in our own age, lining the dark crevices of our night-time landscapes with signs of solitary perception through shiny modern surfaces. This visual alignment of sublime nature with the rise of science and technology is confirmed when these same images from the metallic-dotted night sky are shown again later in the film when Shelley, heavily pregnant with her first child, Clara, sits in an audience with Percy Bysshe Shelley and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, watching a performer demonstrate the scientific theory of galvanism. As the camera moves to an extreme close-up of the electric blue wavelengths created by him as he tries to animate a dead frog on stage, the film drops its audience, and Shelley, into complete contemplative silence, as we are taken into her individual consciousness and mind, showing us the first ‘sparks’ of her creative ‘voice’ coming to life (fig. 26.2). It is clear in the film that these creative sparks spring from her previous ambivalence about, and desire for, her dead mother, all while she is pregnant herself. That is, Shelley’s creative interest in galvanism is sparked because she remembers the discussion she had with Baxter in the expanse of a sublime nature about whether it is possible to bring the dead back to life. Motherhood and the domestic, then, are aligned with a discourse of overreaching solitary individualism – the kind of heroic individualism championed by masculine Romantic poets in their veneration of lonely wandering characters who stretch the

Figure 26.2  The first electronic ‘sparks’ of creative feminine individuality. Mary Shelley, 2017, directed by Haifaa al-Mansour, HanWay Films/BFI/ Parallel Films/Gidden Media.

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boundaries of the natural and supernatural (see Abrams and Stillinger 2000, 13–15). Ironically, the closer Shelley moves to creating life herself, the more she must move away from previous domestic conceptions of motherhood and feminine subjectivity, which wholly subsume her with other people, spaces and creative ‘voices’. Like Bright Star, the film depicts a discourse of feminine subjectivity built on an expansion of masculine Romantic sublime subjectivity, moving it into a more fluid metaphorical screen space that deliberately confuses traditional Western binaries. Emma Wilson has explored the symbolism of the colour blue in Western cinema by way of Julia Kristeva’s colour theorisation in Desire in Language, and it is worthwhile quoting some of her analysis here: ‘All colours, but blue in particular . . . have a noncentred or decentering effect’ . . . she [Kristeva] states, in dim light, short wavelengths prevail over long ones, thus, before sunrise, blue is the first colour to appear. This primacy given to blue – at the start of the day and at the start of the perception of light – is also linked by Kristeva to biological development where she surmises that centred vision (the identification of objects) comes into play after colour perceptions . . . all colours, but blue in particular as the first colour perceived by the child’s retina, take the adult back to the stage before the identification of objects and individuation. (Wilson 1998, 349; quoting Kristeva 1980, 225) We see this logic in visual action in Mary Shelley, as blue is the first colour to appear in the night sky before sunrise; the first Shelley perceives through her screen ‘retina’ as a young woman before finding her individual ‘voice’ in that process of perception that comes before individuation; and we see blue again when she perceives the first wavelengths of galvanism, acting as the first ‘sparks’ of her solitary individuality, to be ‘born’ in full later on in the film after she has lost her baby. But while heavily pregnant in this scene, and still imitating the artistry of others while longing for her dead mother, the film suggests Shelley, like other women, is still stuck in a simplified model of Romantic identity dependent upon repetition of the traditional masculine sublime without its innovation into a ‘fluidity’ that removes gendered binaries. This is Romantic and ideological terrain that has been explored in the representation of other contemporary heroines on screen. For example, in Sofia Coppola’s 1999 adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s 1993 novel, The Virgin Suicides, one of the key explorations of feminine subjectivity occurs when we are taken into the visual terrain of blue. Lux Lisbon, one of the teenage protagonists of the narrative, loses her virginity in the middle of the night on the American football field of her high school during her prom. This contemporary coming-of-age narrative critiques the wider Western culture in which feminine identity and subjectivity are ‘emptied’ out of meaning as blank canvases for masculine minds, here represented by the suburban neighbourhood boys fascinated by the beautiful Lisbon sisters, who all commit suicide by the end of the film. As Todd Kennedy points out, the identities of the sisters ‘exist only insofar as they are defined as the objects of masculine desire’, with the girls’ ‘only viable option’ being suicide, because they have already been erased, culturally speaking, as individual human beings (2010, 44). However, as with many of Coppola’s films, she appropriates a well-known cliché to focus attention onto the interiority of female subjectivity, and here she does so through a direct mirroring of Romantic philosophical and visual art. When Lux later

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wakes up alone in an early dawn landscape of pure blue, she is positioned with her back towards the camera within an extreme wide shot that turns the American football field into the terrain of ‘infinite’ Romantic nature. This image is a direct visual allusion to Caspar David Friedrich’s famous Romantic painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), right down to how Lux mirrors the figure’s bodily pose in the painting as he stands before an expansive landscape, used as a prime example of sublime subjectivity in the visual arts (fig. 26.3). As Coppola has a history of appropriating well-known paintings in her cinema, I would suggest this allusion is not an accident, and is embedded within a politics of reclaiming female subjectivity through Romanticism. When Lux wakes up against a sublime landscape, she embodies Kristeva’s theorisation of blue as ‘decentring’ – a process of perception that comes before, and as part of, the struggle for ‘individuation’. Lux’s body has been both joined together with, and split apart by, the masculine body and gaze throughout the film, but when she wakes up in solitude, bathed in the cool blue tint of the early sunrise, she creates her ‘self’. That is, she is symbolically and ideologically differentiated from the space of the domestic suburban home, and from the space of the masculine gazes of the boys of her neighbourhood (and by extension, from the gaze of the audience). We then see her riding home in a taxi alone, and her face is inaccessible to our own inquiring gaze behind the blue glass of the car window. We can only make out the shine of her eyes and her Prom Queen tiara, hung from her mouth as she bites it in contemplation. All these reflective shiny surfaces that distance her from us, and give her space to think in solitude, and all the blue tones that likewise detach her body and mind from the masculine ideologies of control she endures, echo Shelley’s blue-spotted night sky, and her ‘spark’ of creativity through electric wavelengths on the dark space of the stage, and of course, Brawne’s interior blue space of individual domestic creativity. This could also be connected to how the 2011 adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Victorian novel, Jane Eyre (1847), directed by Cary Fukunaga, fractures the linear bildungsroman narrative through a flashback structure that is mediated via a Romantic sublime blue. The film begins mid-point in the novel’s narrative, when a distraught Jane leaves Thornfield Hall on what was supposed to be her wedding day. Jane Eyre has traditionally been adapted on screen as romance, where Jane’s proto-feminist desire to find an independent identity is reworked on behalf of traditional heterosexual union (see Stoneman 1996, 107–14, 135–8). Here, the film reminds us, by appropriating Romantic painting, that Jane’s narrative is one of individual struggle. In numerous successive shots, we ‘see’ the terrain of female subjectivity explored through another visual mirroring of Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818). We see Jane, played by Mia Wasikowska, positioned with her back towards the camera against a sublime blue landscape shown in extreme wide shots to create a sense of ‘infinity’, recalling both Friedrich’s famous Romantic painting, and also, Lux in The Virgin Suicides (1999) (fig. 26.4). Jane’s struggle to locate an identity is similar to Lux’s, and it suggests a realm of feminine creativity that moves beyond art, or creating something else, to creating one’s own self – almost like ‘mothering’ one’s own subjectivity, rather than being associated with someone else’s. What is occurring in all of these films is a dialogue about where we locate creativity, what individuality entails when mediated by gender, and how we can explore ways of moving beyond gendered definitions of them that might incorporate a modern concept of fluidity that negates inherited binaries. What is also occurring in these films is a

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Figure 26.3  Lux (Kirsten Dunst) as a feminine Romantic wanderer. The Virgin Suicides, 1999, directed by Sofia Coppola, Paramount Pictures/American Zoetrope/ Muse Productions/Eternity Pictures.

Figure 26.4  Jane (Mia Wasikowska) battling sublime blue landscapes. Jane Eyre, 2011, directed by Cary Fukunaga, BBC Films/Ruby Films/Universal Pictures/Focus Features.

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visual dialogue in blue about the need to carve out a feminine solitude, creativity and individuality that does not detach women from themselves, but rather, detaches from inherited conceptions of their appropriated bodies, subjectivities and identities for the use of the masculine creative mind. These dialogues refashion the Romantic sublime from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for our own contemporary era. As Kathleen M. Kirby has explored, the subjectivity that is associated with the masculine Romanic poets and the sublime is an extension of Enlightenment and Humanist individualism, whereby the internal coherence of the self is championed by a struggle with the outside world (1996, 45–7). Because this struggle has been gendered masculine in Western culture, the Romantics also built it upon the subsuming of the female body and mind into literal spaces (see Mellor 1993, 88–90; Burke 1998, 81–114). That is, while women are merged with space – they become ‘mother nature’, or a beautiful ‘ornament’ in the domestic home – men struggle against space, eventually asserting their individuated dominance over it. As Kirby points out, this requires women to occupy very little literal and metaphorical space artistically in Western culture, or in narratives of sublime creation of the self (1996, 53–4). The films considered here tackle this history, and give us visual representation whereby such a space is occupied by and for women. In doing so, they also ironically show us the continuing relevance of Romantic thought for our contemporary arts. What happens though, when the terrain of the beautiful is appropriated through a similar revisionist logic?

Beautiful White and Pink: Adapting the Feminine Body One of the significant aspects that feeds into the contemporary screen representation of the Romantic beautiful as both a visual aesthetic and gendered ideology, is the utilisation of the beautiful within online and digital ‘spaces’. Before I analyse films that explore the beautiful, it is necessary to examine how the consumption of screen adaptations online has shaped the cultural and cinematic understanding of Romanticism through a focus on the Burkean beautiful. Mellor’s analysis of the beautiful in the Romantic era summarises how Burke both helped define, and reflected, his culture’s ‘hegemonic domestic ideology’ (1993, 109), built on essentialist gender binaries, whereby the feminine is associated with beautiful objectification: As he constructed the category of the beautiful, Burke also constructed the image of the ideal woman . . . Beauty is associated with ‘the mother’s fondness and indulgence’ . . . beauty is the sweetness Burke explicitly identifies with breastmilk . . . Beauty, for Burke, is identified not only with the nurturing mother but also with the erotic love-object, the sensuous and possessable beloved . . . Identifying beauty with the small, the diminutive. (108; see Burke 1998, 100–1) It is precisely this image of ‘ideal’ femininity as comprised of domestic comfort and diminutive eroticism that we encounter in contemporary consumption of adaptations online. That is, online consumption of the feminine is shaped by the Romantic legacies of the Burkean beautiful. I have previously analysed how fans often ‘consume’ costume films and screen adaptations on social media and online platforms by taking still photography from

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key scenes, breaking them down into miniaturised imagery, and then applying ‘muted, soft, pastel, romantic, and washed-out filters’ onto such imagery (Shachar 2019, 55). It is no coincidence that the specific scenes which are turned into the diminutive, erotic and domestic images outlined by Burke as defining the beautiful, are, overwhelmingly, of the female body and its attached domestic spaces. Specifically, such imagery includes fragmented feminine body parts which prise the female body open for consumption as an object of erotic and domestic beauty, with film stills of women’s necks, hands, breasts, waists, hips, bottoms, eyes, lips and so on. Added to this fragmentation, is a consistent aesthetic, where pink tones intermingle with white-washing photographic filters over screen imagery, aligning the objectified feminine body with a colour scheme of soft pinks and pure whites, that erase harsh lines through digital filters, highlighting how Burke’s conception of the ‘ideal woman’ as soft, smooth and small, is continuously repeated in modern online culture (see Shachar 2019, 55–9). Adaptations of Jane Austen’s works, and her metaphorical body via actresses who play her in biographical films, overwhelmingly form the terrain of the Romantic beautiful through online consumption (see Shachar 2019, 55–9). Chris Louttit has argued that the reason why is to do with the wider cultural perception that an Austen aesthetic universe, so to speak, has been constructed by film adaptations as a prime site of ‘romantic’ femininity and domesticity (2013, 175–6). I have extended Louttit’s own study of fan culture and online consumption of screen adaptations by exploring how online marketplaces and independent craft stores aimed at female (and mainly, white, Western, middle-class) consumers have commodified this ‘image’ created around Austen and her work, by ‘branding’ Austen as a global metaphor for domesticated feminine beauty (see Shachar 2019, 55–9; Luckman 2013, 265). This has resulted in literal domestic products and beauty wares carrying the ‘brand’ of Austen, and borrowing their aesthetic from film adaptations of her works (Shachar 2019, 57–8). In turn, fan culture and online commodification of Austen as a brand of the Romantic beautiful has fed into subsequent film adaptations of her life and works, and there is an ongoing cultural, economic and aesthetic dialogue between what Austen film adaptations represent, and what fans consume and create themselves online, each feeding off the marketability of the other, and essentially, off the female body (Shachar 2019, 58). An example of how this plays out on screen comes in the 2020 film adaptation of Austen’s Emma., directed by Autumn de Wilde. This film structures the exploration of Emma’s identity through a canny utilisation of the Burkean and Romantic beautiful, and an implicit cultural understanding of how Austen’s work is consumed by fans beyond the film screen. The film literally fragments the narrative, and its scenes, into ready-made still images that can easily be ‘collected’ and consumed online. Each section, showing a different season, begins with still imagery by cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, depicting Burkean beautiful scenes, where Emma’s body is aligned with flowers, beautiful statues and art, idealised domestic interiors, and minutelyframed ornaments. Indeed, the film’s opening scenes depict Emma (played by Anya Taylor-Joy) through a ‘dreamy’ soft filter, who is visually aligned with white floral arrangements as she wanders within domestic interiors dressed in pure white, like a walking marble statue come to life. One of the stills from the film that has been used to market it online replicates this image of Emma as the perfect feminine ‘statue’, as it depicts her shot from above as she stares at a pure white statue of a woman, while mirroring the statue, dressed in white herself (fig. 26.5). While it is possible to read

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Figure 26.5  Emma (Anya Taylor-Joy) as a beautiful Burkean statue. Emma., 2020, directed by Autumn de Wilde, Perfect World Pictures/Working Title Films/ Blueprint Pictures/Focus Features/Universal Pictures. this visual alignment ironically, within the context of the film’s own aesthetic and the intense focus on presenting Taylor-Joy’s body as a romantically beautiful one, it also defines her body (and by extension, her actress’s body) as a work of art to be likewise consumed by our gazes. Her diminutive size in this still image, created by the extreme high angle of the photography, suggests that she exists for us to enjoy as a ‘small’ erotic object of domestic comfort and beauty, straight out of Burke’s Romantic treatise. Like the pure white she often wears in the film, she is emptied of meaning in terms of an internal subjectivity, and turned into an ‘blank’ canvas upon which the audience can project their desires. It is striking how this screen representation and online consumption of Austen not only highlight the Romantic beautiful in contemporary culture, but also the continuing cultural and ideological relevance of how female Romantic poets negotiated hegemonic categories of gender. Mellor has explored, for example, how the Romantic poet Letitia Landon utilised the category of the beautiful through the ‘commercial production of herself as an acquirable artifact of beauty’ (1993, 111), where she ‘commodified herself’ through her physical public image in paintings of her ‘as a purchasable icon of female beauty’ (112). In many Austen adaptations and their online consumption, we see this same ‘commercial production’ of feminine beauty. However, Mellor also points out that within her poetry, Landon often undermines ‘the very construction of femininity upon which her poetry was grounded’ by appropriating and imploding the Burkean beautiful (120). I want to likewise explore how other screen representations of feminine subjectivity complicate the beautiful via their appropriation of it. One of the ways that recent films complicate the Romantic beautiful is by inserting intertextual visual allusions to paintings of women in Western art into their own

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representations of female consciousness and subjectivity, in order to then ‘empty’ these previous images of meaning, and then reinscribe their meaning. Mary Shelley is a prime example, as the key dramatic moment in the film’s narrative when Shelley is beginning to write Frankenstein occurs immediately after she is shown, along with Lord Byron, contemplating the painting, The Nightmare (1781) by Henry Fuseli. This famous painting depicts a woman dressed in a sheer white gown, draped in a submissive and erotic position on a bed, with her arms thrown above her head, jutting her breasts outwards in an open invitation to the viewer’s gaze, while an incubus sits on her chest. The incubus can be associated with the wider masculine gaze in art – with an ideological ‘creature’ who feeds off women’s bodies, identities and subjectivities. It is almost redundant to state that Western conceptions of femininity in art are often built upon the idea that women are empty blank canvases waiting to be filled with ‘meaning’ (see Gilbert and Gubar 1979, 3–44) by the inquiring masculine pen, paintbrush, imagination and, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have famously stated, ‘penis’ (1979, 9). We have a visual representation of this logic in this scene as Shelley, staring coolly at the painting, ponders out loud to Byron how her mother, a radical feminist, was willing to subsume her life for the love of the man who created this painting. Byron then launches into an arrogant monologue about love, and Shelley is unimpressed. Their discussion as they stand and talk before this painting recalls Byron’s assertion in, Don Juan (1819), that love is a ‘woman’s whole existence’, subsuming female identity within masculine desires (1996, 977: Canto I, Stanza 194). The film’s Shelley literally takes up the ‘white-canvas’ attire of the objectified female body in the painting, and the politics of the subsuming of feminine identity embedded metaphorically with it through the theme of her dead mother, and uses it to create a new subjectivity for herself, and for her screen ‘sisters’. Dressed in the same attire as the woman in the painting, we see Shelley begin to write Frankenstein within the confines of her bed. Rather than this being an eroticised or domesticated space, it becomes an expansive one that is visually ‘stretched’ into the infinite night sky of earlier sublime scenes of the natural landscape through shots of her words hitting the virgin white paper. That is, domestic interiors and white costumes are not beautified here, but rather are ‘stained’, quite literally, by her creative literary genius as the solitary sublime struggle with the self we have come to associate with blue hues in the film. We see successive shots of dark and dynamic ink blots hitting the white page, and then moving around on it like a literary embryo growing before our eyes. In between, we see shots of Shelley holding her dead baby Clara, and then her empty arms when the baby disappears. Shelley is here ‘birthing’ her novel, but the film is not representing this as a stand-in for her lost child; instead, it depicts such a ‘birth’ as stemming from the experience of a sublime domesticity and an appropriated beauty that complicates the gender binaries constructed through the Burkean beautiful. Shelley ‘stains’ the beautiful whiteness of the eroticised, blank female body, and the beautiful Regency and Romantic ‘statue’ of Austen films; and she also ‘stains’ the idea that the female body is to be merged with a comforting domesticity, forever at the service of children, men and other people’s consuming desires. Instead, it is her desire which is fed here as her pen creates inky-blue/ black ‘breast-milk’, to appropriate Burke’s words, that is not in the service of her baby, or men, but in the service of her own imagination. Al-Mansour and her cinematographer, David Ungaro, appropriate clichés of feminine objectification in art, cinema and literature, inherited from the Romantic

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Figure 26.6  Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) complicating the fragmented female body. Lost in Translation, 2003, directed by Sofia Coppola, American Zoetrope/ Elemental Films/Focus Features. period, and evacuate them of meaning here. This is a representational strategy utilised in Coppola’s films. The best example comes in one of her most well-known films, Lost in Translation (2003). Scarlett Johansson’s Marilyn Monroe-like beauty as the film’s protagonist, Charlotte, is utilised in the opening scene, but in a deliberately obscured way that appropriates Western artistic traditions. We see a close-up image of Charlotte’s hips and bottom in sheer, pink underwear, lying horizontally in bed (fig. 26.6). This image is a direct adaptation of John Kacere’s 1973 painting, Jutta, which depicts the fragmented bottom of a woman in sheer underwear. While we initially receive an eroticised and fragmented image of the female body cocooned in the domestic space of the bed, harking back to Burke’s aestheticisation of the feminine as a ‘smooth’, ‘small’, pleasuring and domestic space (1998, 102–12), we nevertheless do not get to see it clearly. As Lucy Bolton has argued: The pink-panties shot is reminiscent of many similar body-shots of women on-screen. . . . In Lost in Translation, however, the image of the pink panties is incrementally overlaid with the film’s title: this signals that the usual meanings of on-screen femininity may be effectively ‘lost’ in their translation into a new filmic mode that foregrounds female subjectivity. (2015, 104) This insightful point could be usefully extended. Just as Coppola obscures Lux’s face behind the blue surface of the car window in The Virgin Suicides, not allowing the audience to consume the body of her female protagonist in this moment of vulnerability and individuation, so too does she obscure and overlay the typical image of a Burkean beautiful body at the precise moment when the audience’s gazes are primed to consume it. In the rest of the film, we are instead shown different ways of approaching female

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subjectivity, as Charlotte’s consciousness is built by showing us how her individuated selfhood is created not by being looked at, or being subsumed into spaces, but by experiencing spaces through her own perceiving and inquiring gaze. In one expressive scene, we see Charlotte’s face aligned symmetrically with the vertical line of a train window, as she tries to interpret the world around her while travelling alone in Japan. Like Lux, she compels us to consider that this body, that could have been potentially fetishised in horizontal submissive lines in the eroticised space of the domestic bed, akin to Fuseli’s painting, in fact has a consciousness that is seeking to understand the world around her; a consciousness to which we have no access, and which we cannot possess or consume through our gazes. Instead, it is Charlotte’s gaze that is prioritised. Rather than a horizontal line of submission and eroticism, Charlotte navigates interiors (trains) and domestic (bedrooms) spaces in the film with a ‘vertical’ alert gaze that is experimenting with its surroundings. This representation aligns with Coppola’s statement that ‘[m]y movies are not about being, but becoming’ (quoted in Rickey 2013). Women are rarely allowed to be ‘becoming’ people in Western culture and art – they are rarely allowed to be nuanced, contradictory and multilayered beings who can grow, and therefore, own a threedimensional consciousness and subjectivity upon which the sublime rests philosophically and ideologically. They are also rarely allowed to experience solitude or loneliness artistically from a multilayered perspective that forms part of this exploration of the self. In Lost in Translation, as Charlotte navigates multiples domestic spaces alone through a visually blue-tinted consciousness, she essentially ‘empties’ the eroticisation, objectification and subsuming of her identity via the initial pink-panties image. What are we left with then, after the emptying of the beautiful on screen in these cinematic incarnations of Romantic ideologies? It is here that I wish to return to the theme of motherhood, as this subversion of inherited Romantic definitions of gender, identity and subjectivity requires that an appropriated Romanticism allows screen heroines to be their own ‘mothers’ – to nurture and ‘birth’ an individuality which does not wholly let go of the Romantic past, but which does envisage a new aesthetic for female subjectivity in the future. This final point can perhaps be encapsulated via the dialogue that occurs between the endings of the recent adaptation of Little Women (2019), directed by Greta Gerwig, and that of Mary Shelley. Both films’ ending scenes show us female heroines who stare longingly at the works they have ‘birthed’ from their creative minds – their novels – from behind the glass of a window. Recalling Lux’s needs for solitude through glass, I am also reminded of Jo’s earlier comment in the film to her mother: ‘I am so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it! But – I am so lonely.’ This of course recalls Byron’s statement that a woman’s purpose is to love, that she is defined in relation to others alone; as it also reminds us, that culturally, women’s identities have been subsumed into a wider ideology where nuanced solitude is not an option. Jo articulates a modern frustration, built on the appropriated back of Romantic ideology – she yearns for the transcendent solitude of the masculine sublime as much as she yearns for the nurturance of the beautiful. This is symbolically communicated when in the ending scene, her book moves from behind solitary glass and is handed to her; she clutches her book, bound in bright red leather (a colour amalgamation of pink and white), close to her lower body, in an erotic, but also, nurturing gesture of comfort. As a symbol of her individuality and unwillingness to be fit for only love, but

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also, of her desire to move beyond loneliness, the book becomes at once a transcendent and beautiful object in the film. Unlike Jo, however, the screen Shelley does not get to touch her bright red book, but instead, her real child tugs at her hand while she gazes longingly at it in the final image of the film. In these films, feminine desire, individuality and subjectivity are displayed through multiple contradictory images and meanings, as at once tied to the domestic, but also alone, as at once desiring the ties that bind women to other people above their own interests, and which show them avenues away from such a definition of their selves. These contradictions are the natural products of complex films that appropriate and extend the sublime and the beautiful, and Romantic authors, texts, philosophies and ideas, for a contemporary age. In doing so, they show us that Romanticism is very much alive in our modern culture, and that the ideas, authors and art that arose in the Romantic age continue to haunt and reverberate on our contemporary screens.

Bibliography Abrams, M. H., and Jack Stillinger. 2000. ‘Introduction: The Romantic Period 1785–1830’. In The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period, edited by M. H. Abrams and Jack Stillinger, 7th ed., 2A: 1–21. New York and London: Norton. Al-Mansour, Haifaa, dir. 2017. Mary Shelley. Australia/UK/Luxembourg/USA: HanWay Films/ BFI/Parallel Films/Gidden Media. Bolton, Lucy. 2015. Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Burke, Edmund. 1998. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Edited by Adam Phillips. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. Byron, Lord George Gordon. 1996. Don Juan (1819). In British Literature 1780–1830, edited by Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak, 954–1046. Orlando: Harcourt Brace. Campion, Jane, dir. 2009. Bright Star. UK/Australia/France: Pathé Renn Productions/Screen Australia/BBC Films/UK Film Council. Coppola, Sofia, dir. 1999. The Virgin Suicides. USA: Paramount Pictures/American Zoetrope/ Muse Productions/Eternity Pictures. ———. 2003. Lost in Translation. USA/Japan: American Zoetrope/Elemental Films/Focus Features. De Wilde, Autumn, dir. 2020. Emma. UK/USA: Perfect World Pictures/Working Title Films/ Blueprint Pictures/Focus Features/Universal Pictures. Friedrich, Caspar David. 1818. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Oil on canvas. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Fukunaga, Cary, dir. 2011. Jane Eyre. UK/USA: BBC Films/Ruby Films/Universal Pictures/Focus Features. Fuseli, Henry. 1781. The Nightmare. Oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit. Gerwig, Greta, dir. 2019. Little Women. USA: Columbia Pictures/Regency Enterprises/Pascal Pictures/Sony Pictures. Gilbert, Sandra. M. and Susan Gubar. 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Hewison, Robert. 1987. The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London: Methuen. Higson, Andrew. 2003. English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama Since 1980. Oxford: Oxford UP. Kacere, John. 1973. Jutta. Oil on canvas. Louis K. Meisel Gallery, New York.

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Kennedy, Todd. 2010. ‘Off with Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur’. Film Criticism 35 (1): 37–59 Kirby, Kathleen M. 1996. ‘RE: Mapping Subjectivity’. In Bodyspace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality, edited by Nancy Duncan, 45–55. New York: Routledge. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP. Louttit, Chris. 2013. ‘Remixing Period Drama: The Fan Video and the Classic Novel Adaptation’. Adaptation 6 (2): 172–86. Luckman, Susan. 2013. ‘The Aura of the Analogue in a Digital Age: Women’s Crafts, Creative Markets and Home-Based Labour After Etsy’. Cultural Studies Review 19 (1): 249–70. Mellor, Anne K. 1993. Romanticism & Gender. New York; London: Routledge. Monk, Claire. 1995. ‘The British “Heritage Film” and Its Critics’. Critical Survey 7 (2): 116–24. Pidduck, Julianne. 2004. Contemporary Costume Film: Space, Place and the Past. London: BFI. Rickey, Carrie. 2013. ‘Lost and Found’. Directors Guild of America Quarterly. (last accessed 11 April 2021). Russell, Ken, dir. 1986. Gothic. UK: Virgin Vision. Sadoff, Dianne F. 2010. Victorian Vogue: British Novels on Screen. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Shachar, Hila. 2013. ‘Authorial Histories: The Historical Film and the Literary Biopic’. In A Companion to the Historical Film, edited by Robert A. Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulescu, 199–218. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2019. Screening the Author: The Literary Biopic. Cham and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Stoneman, Patsy. 1996. Brontë Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. London: Prentice-Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf. Suárez, Gonzalo, dir. 1988. Rowing With the Wind. Spain: Ditirambo Films/Warner. Thomas, Paul. 2010. ‘Brown vs. Brawne: Bright Star’. Film Quarterly 63 (3): 10–3. Wilson, Emma. 1998. ‘Three Colours: Blue: Kieslowski, Colour and the Postmodern Subject’. Screen 39 (4): 349–62.

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27 Looking Back Through Fashion: Regency Romances and a ‘Jumble of Styles’ Hilary Davidson

And what costume shall the poor girl wear To all tomorrow’s parties Why silks and linens of yesterday’s gowns To all tomorrow’s parties. (Lou Reed, 1966)

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n the popular imagination, Jane Austen’s works are synonymous with Regency fashion in the early nineteenth century, where delicate yet feisty heroines with bosoms heaving from white muslin dresses are pursued by dashing, financially well-endowed heroes with leather-clad thighs and manly cloaks. High-waisted ‘empire’ line gowns and Austen-style costuming proliferate amongst ever-growing communities ranging from casual costumers to dedicated re-enactors. These neo-Regency aesthetic visions are themselves constructed on refigurings of dress in Austen’s day, influenced by later creators’ work – notably twentieth-century historical romance novelist Georgette Heyer – and the constant screen adaptations of Austen’s writing. The Netflix series Bridgerton has further increased the popularity of fantasy Regency styles. However, the twenty-first century’s Regency costume salad tossed from historic dress elements itself echoes the deep, Romantic interest in other times and places underlying many clothing styles during the Regency itself. This chapter examines these relationships between conceptions of modern and historical Regency style in dress, and how both epochs express a nostalgic, romantic, multilayered relationship with the past and the Other. I concentrate on British female clothing in the ‘long Regency’ period, c.1795–1825, as connected with Jane Austen, her legacy and fandom, and keep the modern focus on the Anglosphere. These years also represent what costume re-enactors understand as the Regency (Smith and Stannard 2016). Austen, it can be persuasively argued, is neither a Romantic nor a romantic author. She questions and satirises contemporary Romantic tropes throughout her novels – although always with her trademark ironic ambivalence – and her plots equally undermine accepted literary conventions of love and marriage on the way to happily ever after. Through passionate fandom, constant screen adaptation and ‘cultish devotion’, however, she can now equally be argued as the epitome of romanticised writers (Wootton 2018, 537). Adaptations frequently remove Austen’s metaphorical tongue from her cheek and present seriously what she wrote ironically. Her work is always concerned with finding balance between calm, rational sense, and romantic,

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personal sensibility, which epitomises in prose what was happening in the wider cultural landscape. The long Regency saw a transformation from classicism, based on order, harmony, balance, rational structure and perfection, towards the feeling, individualistic, intuitive, picturesque Romanticism that so many have struggled to define since the 1830s even as the movement flourished. Throughout, I distinguish between upper- and lower-case R ‘romantic’ although the concepts are linked. For my purposes, Romanticism refers to the cultural movement this volume is concerned with. Besides the qualities just listed, it comprises a concern with nature and the natural, and related emotions in response, but also with the fantastic and imaginative. This manifested particularly in an interest in times unlike the present day, including antiquarianism, general historicism and the Gothic, as well as the wild, exotic unknown the Other represented in myriad forms. The traits ‘romantic’ encompasses here mean the more dilute common usage in the recent century or so. Although still concerned with passion, beauty, imagination, sentiment and a yearning for the past, the focus is more on affection, escapism, idealised love and positive emotions, losing much of the awe, terror and tragedy found in Romantic solitude and the sublime.

Style: Historical Regency and Regency Historicisms Regency women’s dress encapsulates a period of significant and lasting change from eighteenth-century styles that set the template for nineteenth-century dress, and Romantic-era aesthetics. Most notably, from about 1794 the fashionable waistline rose from its natural position to under the bust, where it settled until around 1815. From then waistlines gradually dropped until they resumed the bodily waistline around 1825. At the same time, voluminous women’s skirts started being made with less fabric, reaching a straight, columnar effect around 1800. Sleeves also shortened to the upper arm and became increasingly rounded or puffed into the 1800s. As eighteenth-century stiff boned stays disappeared, less boned, soft corsets were worn instead, which revealed both breast shapes for the first time in centuries and thus contributed to impressions of risqué nakedness. Figure 27.1 shows a fashion plate of 1807 with all Regency dress’s key signifying elements. The neckline remained low for day and evening gowns (high for morning gowns). A new form of coat dress (pelisse), or a short jacket (spencer) accompanied Regency gowns, often topped by the new face-framing bonnet. Shoes lost their heels and became flat until the 1840s. In textiles, the rise of ubiquitous white cotton Indian muslins was complemented with British-manufactured cottons, silks, wools, and from about 1808, machine-made net and lace fabrics which ushered in a new period of transparency in clothing. Front-opening gowns slowly became usually back-opening by around 1810, allowing more innovative treatments of the smooth front bust (Davidson 2020). The characteristic high waistline was not christened an ‘empire’ line until the early twentieth century, after Napoleon’s First Empire (1804–15). Also known as the Directoire style, the under-bust waistline reappeared in fashion from 1907 to around 1914, a modern romanticisation which forever connected the style with fashion from a century earlier. The historical ‘empire’ line, as O’Brien points out (2010, 247), does not correspond neatly with the political time frame, nor with the Prince of Wales’s Regency (1811–20), nor the American ‘Federal’ period after the 1775 Revolution.

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Figure 27.1  ‘Fashionable Morning & Evening Dress as Worn in October 1807’, La Belle Assemblée, London, 1 November 1807. Hand-coloured etching on paper. Gift of Dr and Mrs Gerald Labiner, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (www.lacma.org). Instead, the name creates a floating, a-geographical vision of the past defined primarily by a construction detail. The waistline became a period in itself. As the Napoleonic Wars marked a definitive break with eighteenth-century culture, so the First World War permanently changed Western society and fashion. The empire line accompanied a fashion simplification, shucking off piles of Edwardian dress frou-frou to become comparatively streamlined in a short time. There is a corresponding freshness and modernity in Regency dress. It too made a break with stiff, artificial silhouettes, then concerned itself with an idealised relationship

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to the natural body. Applying art historical terms to fashion, the linear, austere, classical aesthetics of c. 1800 exploited the body’s shape by draping over a ‘natural’ form. By 1820, the shift towards a more expressive, curving, consciously feminine Romantic or Gothic style was firmly established, exploiting the gown’s shape. The revealing dress of their forebears retrospectively shocked later Victorians. An Austen niece recalled primly in the 1860s that her aunt ‘from various circumstances was not so refined as she ought to have been from her talent & if she had lived 50 years later she would have been in many respects more suitable to our more refined tastes’ (Le Faye 2004, 279). The genteel snobbery suffusing the full recollection echoes the perception of ‘refinement’ in fashion during the flowering of fanciful, sentimental Romantic style c. 1820–50. Fashion had shrunk during the Regency, and it started to expand again in garments that grew steadily more embellished, hourglass-shaped, structured and voluminous during this period (fig. 27.2).

Figure 27.2  Timeline of women’s fashions from 1812 to 1834 showing the expansion of Romantic fashion. Detail of Women’s fashion in every year from 1784–1970, Imgur.

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However, Romantic-era dress does not have the same appeal to re-enactors worldwide as Regency styles, and Jane Austen’s legacy is largely responsible, along with the comparative ease and modernity of the empire line. Although Romanticism in dress bloomed from the end of the Regency, I argue in the next section that it is the aesthetic seeds planted with such fertility during the Regency which allowed them to grow strong roots in the following decades, and that the Regency period established Romantic concepts as fashion fundamentals.

Fashion’s Romantic Nostalgias While the first 1907 empire line romanticised historical dress of a century earlier by making a fantasy of the past, it also paralleled strong trends in fashion during the Regency period itself. Just as distance in time now gives Regency fashion a kind of glamour – the word was introduced in its modern sense during the period by Sir Walter Scott (Wilson 2007, 96) – so the growth of historicism throughout the later eighteenth century found full expression in Regency dress, and would become a central feature of Romantic dress (Basset 2016). Fashion fantasies bridged distances in time and space to embody concepts of the classical ancient world; of the Gothicised baroque, Renaissance and Middle Ages; of exoticism and the picturesque foreign and Oriental brought closer by the ongoing wars. European modes simultaneously cast off fashion’s immediate past, yet sought further back in history for old dress to be made new again, reflecting in clothing many of Romanticism’s core aesthetic concerns. Jeffrey Nigro (2010) considers ‘the jumble of period styles in [. . .] Regency Gothic attire’ to be ‘attributed to a lack of knowledge and of access to historical visual materials’. Regency dressers had few histories of their own costume for inspiration – a changing situation as proper historical studies of western European fashions began in the later nineteenth century. However, engraved plates of elite dress had proliferated throughout the early modern period, culminating in late eighteenth-century fashion magazines. Genre plates series concurrently presented working people as intriguing subjects, along with a wide variety of ‘Others’ in non-urban or European costumes. By the Regency period, gentry consumers of print media were used to looking at visual representations of both contemporary fashions and costumes of other places. Something of the cumulative ‘jumble’ effect of the Other manifesting in clothing is found in an 1809 observation of ‘Grace Baillie [who] was with us with all her pelisses, dressing in all the finery she could muster, and in every style: sometimes like a flowergirl, sometimes like Juno; now she was queen-like, the Arcadian, then corps de ballet, the most amusing and extraordinary figure’ (Byrde 1992, 28). Regency dress was enamoured of incorporating Otherness into its gowns. It thereby became the dish in which all the ingredients of Romanticism could be baked. The past and the Other were part of a selection of garments to put on, indiscriminately levelled in an eternal, nostalgic present, yet fleeting as the fashion moment. And for the first time, the templates of fashionable women’s dress were founded on historic styles. Historians acknowledge the strong late eighteenth-century influence on art and then fashion from a new appreciation of the Greek and Roman classical world (see Rauser 2020). Although the appeal was supposedly its geometric order and austere formality, especially by contrast with rococo frivolity, Byrde contends that the idea of dressing up like an antique maiden in Greco-Romanesque style was essentially a romantic impulse

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unrooted in appreciation of the underlying design principles of ancient cultures (1992, 23). Classical influence pervades Regency fashion discourse (Arnold 1970), coalescing from 1780s trends for white, simply draped gowns called the ‘robe à la gaulle’ or ‘chemise à la reine’. Light, flowing muslin dresses echoing classical columns and statues (Rauser 2020) became a sartorial norm after the French Revolution to dominate by around 1800. Fashion descriptions abound with references to nymphs, goddesses and similar Golden Age or mythological figures, making the clothing something more like costume. The style’s popularity also had commercial foundations: vigorous marketing and design strategies employed by a cotton industry at the height of its economic powers [that] drew attention to the scholarly adaptation of Greek, Roman and Egyptian archaeological finds to elements of contemporary design, including fashion [. . .] may have had a more direct effect on the popularity of a relatively cheap and practical style. (Breward 1995, 122) Classical style required much practical labour to maintain its illusions, for all its supposed simplicity, and its fantasy of the past was underpinned by practical mercantilism. White muslin gowns manifesting a Romantic antique Other may have had closer, more contemporary inspiration. India was the source of muslin textiles, and an area where high-waisted white garments were long established in both male and female dress. The empire-line gown may have been as much an Orientalist influence as a classical one, as period sources suggest (Davidson 2019a, 269). The new shawls essential to Regency style (fig. 27.1) were also originally Kashmiri, soon domesticated by manufacturers eager for a lucrative market share. A fascination with – and fabrication of – eastern ideas and styles, an amalgam of Asian, African and Middle Eastern cultures, had influenced fashion for centuries. The Orient, as a concept, was ‘understood as a shapeless yet conveniently identifiable set of signs and values’, a vague place of otherness, ‘marker of the outwardly exotic and the globally connected’ (Geczy 2013, 16). Fantastical Eastern dreams provided a banquet of exotic difference which Regency fashion-makers ate from greedily. The Mediterranean world was simultaneously part of this broader ‘East’ for Regency Britain. As long intra-European conflict period highlighted these areas, military campaigns inspired new styles to recharge Orientalism’s cultural power. The ‘Mamalouc’ cap Jane Austen wore in 1799 reflected the wider Mameluke trend in fashion – named for a knightly caste in medieval Egypt – popularised after North African campaigns from 1798. This early Egyptomania was merely one of the extensive exotic elements in Regency fashion. Turbans (fig. 27.3) entered the dress lexicon as a feminine accessory from the 1790s, especially for intellectual or literary women – it was a signature look for Madame de Staël, for example. War also created an explosion of books on foreign costume. The contemporary influence of other places and strange clothing customs pervaded fashion and each new action in the theatres of war offered aesthetic inspiration (Davidson 2019a, 233). These printed missives helped bring the foreign into drawing rooms and dressmakers’ establishments and rendered them part of the Romantic style palette. Through the sensationalist historicism of Gothic taste, what was excitingly exotic now included the European past. Medieval, Renaissance and baroque aesthetics were newly mined by culture makers and made their way into dress. This fantasy nostalgia

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Figure 27.3  Sampson Towgood Roch, Portrait of Priscilla Bertie, 21st Baroness Willoughby de Eresby, c. 1815 after a miniature by [George?] Saunders painted in 1810, gouache on paper. [UK] Government Art Collection. for times earlier than the present day yet later than antiquity heralded 1820s Romantic dress. Renaissance dress details such as ruff collars, pointed stomachers and lace ‘Médici’ collars opening at the front inspired by Henri IV’s queen Marie de’ Medici (Mackrell 1998, 35–6), accompanied numerous puffs and paned details imitating Tudor slashed clothing. The very popular ‘vandyke’ (fig. 27.4) style of pointed trimmings evoked both Anthony Van Dyck’s Stuart court paintings, and medieval arches. As early as 1802, novelist Fanny Burney made fun of her own old-fashioned dress in France by calling herself a ‘gothic Anglaise’ (1905, 222) while George IV wore Elizabethan- and Stuart-inspired garments at his coronation in 1821 (Wild 2019, 179). In France, the backwards gaze onto fashion’s past was summarised in the later nineteenth century as le style troubadour, developed by Empress Joséphine as court dress (Mackrell 1998). Even the name ‘romance’ hails from the medieval chivalric poetic verse tradition, inherently rooted in contemporary visions of the past. Art and culture embraced the historical epic, most notably in Britain through Sir Walter Scott’s romantic poems and later novels. Scott, and Maria Edgeworth, are acknowledged during this time as establishing the Western historical novel. The genre requires a degree of cultural self-reflection to consider the past from the future. Although historical novels were based in proximate locales and facts, they still cast a glamourised nostalgia over the nation’s ancestry. Scott’s fictional, romanticised Scotland influenced dress, inspiring even Joséphine. Fashion plates are scattered with Scotch bonnets and scarves, shawls and tunics in plaid, responding to the new interest in the northern country as the 1800 Act of Union started shaping a wider British

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Figure 27.4  Fashion plate, ‘Parisian Evening Dress’, London, 1 December 1821. Hand-coloured engraving on paper. Gift of Dr and Mrs Gerald Labiner, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (www.lacma.org). identity. Britain’s expanding spaces for conflict, trade and colonisation, even within its islands, also allowed it to nourish a national self-image with fresh eyes against new revelations of the foreign and exotic (Smith, quoted in Geczy 2013, 16). As Romanticism in Britain emerged from reflections on the nation’s past, and timeless classicism gave way to its oppositional time-bound Gothicism, tensions between ideas of ‘nature’ and the artifice required to achieve those ideas on the daily body underlay many Regency garment aesthetics. Nature was a frequently used word in fashion periodicals in the late eighteenth century, part of the discourse around classical ideals in dress and how they drew on the body’s ‘natural’ form. But at the same time Regency fashion’s naturalism created a new style, authentic to itself in the quest for a notional authenticity derived from earlier periods.

Performing History As Regency dressers cherry-picked fashion inspiration from historical modes, so has Regency dress itself become part of an Othered style repertoire for late twentieth and early twenty-first-century people to draw upon. The Regency is now itself a source

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of romantic nostalgia created by chronological distance and the glamorisation of the period enhanced by enormous numbers of subsequent neo-Regency texts, especially historical and romance novels, and Austen-based screen adaptations. Although modern historic-style dress often searches for the illusion of ‘authenticity’, as did Regency historicism, any aesthetic expression of the past is inescapably tempered through that of the present. Clothing, reliant on contemporary bodies to bring it to life on actors or through re-enactment, is no exception. Modern versions of ‘Regency’ clothing are often as ahistorical and fantastical as the styles themselves were in relationship to the previous periods inspiring them. In 1805, Sir Walter Scott asked: If my WAVERLEY had been entitled ‘A Tale of the Times,’ wouldst thou not, gentle reader, have demanded from me a dashing sketch of the fashionable world, a few anecdotes of private scandal thinly veiled, and if lusciously painted, so much the better? a heroine from Grosvenor Square, and a hero from the Barouche Club or the Four-in-hand, with a set of subordinate characters from the elegantes of Queen Anne Street East, or the dashing heroes of the Bow Street Office? (Scott 1985, 34) This is precisely the milieu Austen’s work also never addresses directly. Fashionable life only rarely intrudes into her character’s lives. Scott instead outlines the social groups brought more vividly to life in most neo-Regency historical and romance novels from the twentieth century, of whom Georgette Heyer can be considered the progenitor. Heyer published her first historical romance in 1935, establishing the specific genre. The Regency romances were her most prolific and she published twenty-four novels set in the era, between 1935 and 1972. Heyer researched copiously and filled her novels with scene-setting details of Regency clothes, manners, transport and interiors which Austen had less need to describe in reflecting a world already shared by her contemporary readers. Heyer’s historical novels establish their period authenticity through these inclusions of a modern eye’s view of the past, masquerading as a reflection of the contemporary view. For many readers, Heyer’s twentieth-century neo-Regency viewpoint overlays or precedes their encounters with Austen’s literature. Heyer is explicitly a romance novelist, and this quality can brush off retroactively. There is often a popular perception that Austen writes of the aristocracy, as Heyer explicitly does, rather than of where its lower reaches interact with the more restrained gentry class. It can also be argued many screen Austen adaptations take their plot from her but their treatment of light, bright romance from Heyer and her successors, conflating their different styles and contexts into a single historical-romantic vision lacking Austen’s ironic self-awareness and substituting manners for her moral sense. These visual productions have had the most impact on modern perceptions and romanticisations of Regency dress. Jane Austen’s works have been adapted for screen since the landmark 1940 production of Pride and Prejudice, then films and mini-series dotted the twentieth-century cultural landscape.1 Table 27.1 charts these adaptations, but does not include further works inspired by (Clueless; Bridget Jones’s Diary) or burlesquing Austen (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies; Austenland), or based on her life (Miss Austen Regrets, Becoming Jane).2 However, the mid-1990s productions truly cemented Austen’s place in the adaptive canon and created an influential set

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Table 27.1  Screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s work Year

Title

Medium

1940

Pride and Prejudice

film

1948

Emma

film

1949

Pride and Prejudice

film

1950

Sense and Sensibility

film

1952

Pride and Prejudice

TV series

1954

Emma

film

1958

Pride and Prejudice

TV series

1960

Persuasion

TV series

1960

Emma

TV series

1960

Emma

film

1967

Pride and Prejudice

TV series

1971

Persuasion

TV series

1971

Sense and Sensibility

TV series

1972

Emma

TV series

1979

Pride and Prejudice

TV series

1981

Sense and Sensibility

TV series

1983

Mansfield Park

TV series

1986

Northanger Abbey

TV film

1995

Persuasion

film

1995

Sense and Sensibility

film

1995

Pride and Prejudice

TV series

1996

Emma

film

1996

Emma

TV film

1999

Mansfield Park

film

2004

Northanger Abbey

TV film

2005

Pride and Prejudice

film

2007

Persuasion

TV film

2007

Northanger Abbey

TV film

2007

Mansfield Park

TV film

2008

Sense and Sensibility

TV series

2009

Emma

TV series

2016

Love and Friendship

film

2020

Emma

film

2020

Sanditon

TV series

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of neo-Regency texts in themselves. The BBC’s 1995 six-part television Pride and Prejudice is generally considered the pinnacle of adaptation and fandom. Screen adaptations exist in an external present because they are infinitely repeatable, always the same slice of time, like classical monuments without centuries’ decay. Their costumes therefore crystallise a timeless ‘Regency’ that becomes a referential text in itself, a classic become classical and used constantly as inspiration. Screen adaptations provide their own view of Regency dress mediated by the stylistic choices of costume designers, dressers and hair stylists and then become references for other adaptations. They are an idea constantly inspiring new neo-Regency dress variations, further infused with the romance and glamour associated with cinema and television. The BBC Pride and Prejudice is a Castle of Otranto or Waverley for the twenty-first century. These new texts become especially relevant with the growth of costuming and re-enactment communities since the 1990s, and cosplay’s widening scope⁠ in the last decade. People who dress up in Regency or neo-Regency clothing, for personal fun, conventions, festivals, competitions and more are an ever-increasing community with an ever-increasing marketplace to fulfil their desires. I use ‘re-enactor’ henceforth to mean any person who wears historic styles of dress in imitation of Regency historic dress along an accuracy spectrum from a piece of mass-produced modern fashionable clothing in the right style, to a hand-stitched accurate copy of an historic object. Re-enactors’ bodies supply the life, the spirit to materialised ideas of what the clothing looked like, or more importantly, the wearer’s idea of what the clothing looked like and how it affects their feelings about and relationship with the past. They are often seeking to recreate not only the Regency period or Lizzy Bennet as a character, but Jennifer Ehle playing Lizzy Bennet or Kate Winslet’s Marianne Dashwood. For example, Twitter user @MnastyNYC asked her readers in Los Angeles where she could buy ‘a regency[sic] dress ca. Jane from Pride & Prejudice 2005’ (pron 2019). The adaptation has itself become a time reference, authenticating the purchase of fantasy clothing to replicate romantic nostalgia and yearning through the triple cultural layers of cinematic interpretation, the Regency period and Austen’s texts. The modern influence of intertextual, fictional yet historically set performances on clothing interpreting visions of the past has a strong parallel with the Regency period. Screen texts are the same kind of authority on the Regency that novels, plays and operas became on the Renaissance and baroque eras, of which Mary Queen of Scots (1542–87) is a good example. Mary Stuart was a popular late eighteenth-century cultural figure when Austen wrote her juvenile work The History of England (Austen 2006). She was inspired by John Whitaker’s three-volume history Mary Queen of Scots Vindicated (1787), complementing the play Maria Stuarda (Alfieri 1778) and Mary, Queen of Scots; An Historical Tragedy, Or, Dramatic Poem (1792) by Mary Deverell. Many stage dramatisations, notably by Schiller (Maria Stuart, 1800), had brought the tragic queen to greater popular consciousness. His verse-play further inspired Scott’s novel The Abbott (1820). There were eight European operas written between 1812 and 1844 about the queen, and between 1820 and 1892, the Royal Academy displayed fifty-six new scenes from her life (Wild 2019, 183). Mary Stuart’s popularity and crosscultural influences continued strong throughout the nineteenth century (Wild 2019). Regency dressers didn’t want to dress as the actual Mary Queen of Scots seen in her contemporary portraits. They wanted to imitate the tragic romantic heroine built up

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Figure 27.5  Costume for Maria Stuart, Costumes des Trauerspiels von Schiller: Maria Stuart: Vorgestellt auf dem Gesellschaftstheater des Grafen Clam Gallas im Monath März 1816 zum Besten des Hospitals der barmherzigen Brüder zu Prag. 24 colorirte Blätter, nach den original Handzeichnungen der Gräfin von Schönborn gebohrene Freyinn von Kerpen. Heinrich Friedrich Müller, 1816.

in the intervening centuries, the one romanticised by stage and fancy-dress costumes and fiction illustrations (fig. 27.5). As early as 1742, Horace Walpole ‘complained of the “dozens of ugly Queens of Scots” at costumed entertainments’ (Wild 2019, 185). Mackrell notes the same effect in France where stage costumes influenced the adoption of le style troubadour (1998, 37). By 1808 the Mary Queen of Scots or Marie Stuart cap was generally fashionable, dipping to a peak at the centre front like the stage costume, and the Gothic historicist dress elements increasing from after around 1814 often referenced Marian costume (fig. 27.6). The same past-in-modern-dress impulse is manifested in Cassandra Austen’s watercolour illustrations to her sister’s History showing ‘Mary Stuart’ and other notable monarchs from British history in largely contemporary dress for c. 1790 when they were painted. A veil on her hair and something like a ruff around her neck are the only indicators towards the queen’s historical clothing.3 Murphy believes Austen’s impassioned defence of Mary ‘goes even further toward blurring all boundaries of history, fiction, and life’ (2016, 70), a view equally applicable to Romantic trends in dress in the next few decades, reinforcing Nigro’s idea of a ‘jumble’.

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Figure 27.6  Fashion plate, ‘Parisian Carriage Dress’, London, December 1820. Hand-coloured engraving on paper. Gift of Dr and Mrs Gerald Labiner, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (www.lacma.org).

Romantic about the Regency The frequent depiction of the Stuarts through fancy-dress costume ‘suggests people were not concerned with faithful re-enactment but sought to use these figures and what they knew of them through contemporary retellings of their lives to convey messages about themselves’ (Wild 2019, 186). People now have the same impulse towards Regency dress, clothing based on it, and the adaptations and re-visionings of Jane Austen’s works. Modern neo-Regency dress provides a vehicle for fantasies of identity construction and a romanticisation of the past through multilayered cultural texts. The rise in Regency romanticism coincides precisely with the rise of the Internet. The digital platform has transformed the world over the same 1795/1995–1820/2020

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trans-century period as the long Regency world encompassed a shift towards permanent transformation through industrial revolution. Both transcentury periods experienced a reaction to the speed of life by turning to older modes for aesthetic influences. In the 2010s and 20s, these are movements such as slow fashion, modest dressing and the return of large-sleeved, long-skirted romantic prairie and vintage-style dresses, culminating in Regencycore (see below). As ever more things became available to consume so people in both periods craved uniqueness, a romantic, escapist response to the alienation of modernity increased but also alleviated by technology, be it print media or digital. In the eighteenth century, catalogues of exotic, foreign and ‘eastern’ dress were used as source books by masquerade dressmakers, suggesting the prevailing emphasis on the Oriental and the primitive . . . One hoping to pass for an Arabian sultana or a Turkish janissary could find the necessary visual information in such catalogues, as well as a measure of pseudo-anthropological detail suggesting ways to act one’s unfamiliar part to perfection. (Castle quoted in Mayer 2002, 287) This costume popularity, which further fed into normal fashion, coincided with the era of unprecedented overseas expansion. The Internet and digital communities fulfil the same expansive role now, reinforced by cheap international travel. The twentyfirst century’s costume books full of inspiring, romanticised, Othered aesthetics are the blogs, Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest boards of dress and costume aficionados, with a similar range of accuracy and source attribution as their print forebears (some blogs are run by semi-professional costumers or historical fiction or romance writers and contain excellent research). Hence re-enactors use a conglomeration of historical and pseudo-historical sources for ‘ways to act one’s unfamiliar part’. Internet digital communities are where re-enactors can share ways to make neoRegency dresses and seek a dream of the past, to varying degrees of ‘authenticity’. Significations of ‘Regency’ through style markers such as the neckline, waistline, sleeves, skirt and material are the same places Regency dressers sought to add elements of R/ romantic, Othered dress to their gowns. The style is often only surface detail. Many modern women dressing up do not replace their brassiere with a corset, as most Regency women would not have dreamed of wearing a corsetless medieval gown, or loose Persian trousers. Even if a re-enactor reproduces a particular fashion plate (fig. 27.1), that plate is itself a fashion fantasy in its own time, an aspirational look or ‘contemporary retelling’, rather than necessarily what was worn. To temper the romantic impulse in dress through contemporary clothing norms keeps the impulse a dream, and glamorous aspiration rather than living history-style immersion. The nostalgic fantasy that neo-Regency dressing lends the modern world also helps the wearer appreciate that modern world, with its hot running water and Wi-Fi. Smith and Stannard (2016) undertook a netnography of makers’ views on neoRegency costuming through blogs. They distinguish between historic dress – ‘Regency dress authentic to the actual historic garments worn in the past’ – and a historic style of dress which ‘imitates historic dress but is not an exact copy’ (289). They discovered ‘the beauty and attractiveness of a garment’, or the ‘aesthetic needs includ[ing] art elements, design principles, and the body/garment relationship’ were most commonly explored by these designers, still with an ‘overarching desire for authenticity’ (289). Their

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markers for authenticity were fluid and flexible. While previous researchers determined that construction accuracy, methods of construction and material accuracy were the three necessary elements for considering a costume authentic, makers themselves felt ‘the presence of at least one historically accurate element compensated for the absence of the others’ (293). These elements are found in ‘general Regency attributes and secondary sources’ including images of gowns posted online, and other re-enactors’ work. Inspiration from films and television is less common in this group (292–3). Note too the subtlety of difference between ‘accurate’ (more quantifiable) and ‘authentic’ (more qualifiable) and how the former contributes to create the larger latter. ‘Authenticity’ as a concept validated by one historically accurate element was perceived as strong enough to survive ‘frankensteining’, the process of combining multiple garment patterns, and a curiously appropriate period nod to Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. After changing ‘the line, proportions, and overall design [. . .] [makers] still viewed their gowns as authentic’ (Smith and Stannard 2016, 293). This shows how the preconceptions or mythos of Regency dress can override the reality of the garment being made and ‘authenticity’ can sometimes be envisioned as a truth to the purposes of a project. In the same way, many viewers – even those with dress history knowledge – expressed distaste for or uneasiness with the lower waistlines in the 2005 Pride and Prejudice, sometimes saying they are not accurate or authentic, or are ugly.4 The film is set in the late 1790s and the costumes reflect that, rather than the novel’s 1812 timeline as filmed in the 1995 adaptation. The difference between expectation and realisation creates a dissonance for viewers that demonstrates the strength of romantic neoRegency Austen dress in affecting perceptions of slightly earlier-styled screen fashion, which is accurate to its ostensible setting, but not to viewers’ preconceptions. This idea links back into Regency concepts of nature. Their ‘natural’ did not mean common nature, but the ‘general and permanent principles of visible objects . . . not modified by fashion or local habits’ (Honor 1972, 5). In the twenty-first century we can consider ‘Regency’ dress as also comprising ‘general and permanent principles of objects’, no longer modified by fashion as they are now codified by their place in the past – immutable, unchangeable, but infinitely varied; the cultural rendered natural. In their discussion of designing historical styles of dress, Smith and Stannard describe ‘Regency gowns’ as comprising ‘a tubular silhouette with a long skirt; a round, low neckline; an empire waistline; short, puffed, or tubular sleeves [. . .] The gowns were often made of soft and subtle fabrics with white being an especially fashionable color’ (2016, 290–1), which is generally true. I suggest for modern wearers the essence of Regency dress is found in any white or pale-coloured dress with an ‘empire’ waistline, judging by social media perspectives. Twitter user @VntgBridgeStyle, for example, bought a ‘new white maxi dress’ in May 2020 so she ‘could modify it for an asyet-determined Regency dress #JaneAusten event’. The accompanying pictures show a scoop-necked, long-sleeved white jersey dress with an under-bust seam and slight pleating to a long straight skirt. It is a thoroughly modern garment, but the signification of white and high waistline is strong enough for it to read as Regency for the purchaser, and for her to delight in that signification. Gezcy describes Orientalist clothing as being ‘sympathetic to the body . . . informal, liberating’ (2013, 50), and its mass appeal as being ‘of a piece with the appeal [. . .] to naturalness’. Jersey is a stretch fabric which outlines the wearers’ contours and in garments is, like Regency dress, clothing not only sympathetic to the body but

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determined by the body. The knitted, clinging textile outlines and hugs the female body with more faithfulness than the clinging muslin deemed figure-hugging earlier. ‘Elastic’ body stockings and petticoats were available during the Regency and relatively closefitting, but worn under clothing, and without the genuine stretch of twentieth-century inventions such as elastane. Although not even the ‘historic style of dress’, and almost opposite to ‘Regency dress authentic to the actual historic garments worn in the past’ many re-enactors are concerned with attempting to make, could it be that this dress expresses equally authentically the supposed ideas of natural dress Regency fashion chased? Redefining relationships between nature and the individual was after all a core part of Romanticism. The irony is that Austen herself, apparent wellspring of Regency romance, was quite an unromantic author. To puncture Romanticism and romance or at least see it with an ironic gaze appears to be her aim. Observe Northanger Abbey’s loving burlesque of Gothic fiction and Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe’s commensurate attention to fashion’s details. As Catherine is guided by Henry Tilney to a more rational outlook, she also leaves the influences of her two previous clothes-obsessed mentors, Isabella and Mrs Allen. A Gothic missive found in a chest turns out to be a prosaic washing list detailing soiled underlinens. The same focus on underwear – clothing’s mundane necessity – dampens any interest the highly romantic Marianne Dashwood might take in Colonel Brandon when she first meets her future husband (Sense and Sensibility, I, viii). His mention of common but unglamorous flannel waistcoats evokes an infirm middle age for the young woman overly full of sensibility. Prosaic flannel underwear is not acceptable to Austen’s most romantic heroines and likewise is not part of romantic screen visions of Austenian Regency dress. While her work centres the marriage plot, it is also clear-eyed about the broader contexts of love and wedlock. Austen’s genius, however, lies partly in her ability to pass off as natural what is created through art – quite a Romantic skill. Critics who lived through the same times as Austen wrote about ‘considered her true to life, natural, accurate and observant’ (Davidson 2019a, 14–15). Her naturalism lies more in the way characters interact and society is depicted than in material details, which are scarce in the fiction. Screen adaptations take this absence and fill in the gaps with interpretations of Regency dress then validated by their connection with ‘the “heritage” Austen [. . .] presenting Regency fashions as part of the display of period objects authenticating a narrative space’ (Davidson 2019a, 16). As Roger Sales says, ‘Regency England becomes a timeless, mythological place called Austenshire’ (1994, 221), and Austen’s ‘“authorship” in the twenty-first century rests on and is transfigured by a rapidly evolving and mutually informed nexus of co-readings between text and screen’ (Wootton 2018, 536). Austen’s precision in mapping one version of the Regency and making it appear real and natural conversely makes her work an endless source for romantic escapism and imaginative fantasy, which clothes are essential in creating. Austenshire’s cultural gravitational field is so strong her work is often attributed with qualities it does not have, as Wild talks of the Stuart dynasty being ‘remembered romantically rather than realistically. Memories of it, made malleable through time, were shaped creatively, carefully, always consciously, to serve the needs of people in the present’ (2019, 180). Such is the case with the 2020 Netflix series Bridgerton, based on the romance novels by Julia Quinn (2000–13). Bridgerton’s fantasy Regency world is more Georgette Heyer than Jane Austen, romping around a fictional version

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of London aristocracy and high society – the ‘dashing sketch of the fashionable world’ Scott described (1985, 34), tempered through characterisation and narrative tropes created by thousands of post-Heyer Regency romance genre novels and very much serving modern needs. Regency romance is itself a version of the Arcadianism popular in Georgian taste which sustained idyllic visions of a golden age set apart from contemporary fashionable consciousness and contrasting with increasing urbanised (or digitised) modernity (Davidson 2019a, 36). ‘Heyershire’ romance Regency is equally Arcadian, setting up a world of dashing dukes and frivolous high-born women, where the middle and working classes – 95 per cent of the population – figure only peripherally. These two competing realistic and romantic Regencies are beautifully juxtaposed in the 2013 film Austenland, based on Sharon Hale’s 2007 book, following the adventures of an Austen-obsessed single woman at an immersive fantasy Regency experience in an English stately home. However, Austen is still held up as the standard to which Bridgerton’s Heyershire world-building is reacting. ‘“Austen”, [. . .] has come to signify her literary works and the cultural stories she has become’, as Wootton describes (2018, 546). Costume designer Ellen Mirojnick said she knew the production ‘was not going to be like a Jane Austen adaptation’ (Seth 2020) – but why would it be? Austen wrote about middle-class people in mostly country settings in faithful detail; Bridgerton is a romantic fantasy of aristocratic London society based on modern writing. While Seth breathlessly praises Mirojnick for ‘transforming familiar Regency-era silhouettes into something fresh and fantastical’ (2020), the costumes themselves are extravagant mostly by comparison with Austen adaptions as a research standard, rather than the eccentric, colourful, fantastical flourishes historical Regency dress often included. Austenshire’s aesthetic landscape created by the screen filters the perceptions of those looking back at Regency fashions. In another interview, Mirojnick explicitly posits Austen as the ‘look’ she was rebelling against: what was the fashion of 1813[?] The fabrications were muslin, which is kind of a beige, white fabric. Sometimes it could be thin; sometimes it could be a little bit thicker. There were brocades, but they were all very soft, pale, and beige. They wore bonnets. They wore shawls in a different way. There was not as much intricacy as we layered on. Just read Jane Austen, truthfully, is the best way to describe it. . . . Jane Austen was the reality of 1813. (Hampton 2020) This generalisation excludes the colourful inventive riot 1810s high society fashion could be, and reveals Mirojnick’s conflation of the novels and their adaptations, as Austen’s writing only rarely mentions dress directly and never describes what her heroines are wearing (Davidson 2019a, 44–6). The adaptations have become as established as the novels themselves, cultural stories in their own right. Bridgerton positions itself as anti-Austen, but the opposition is to neo-Regency screen Austen texts; to the catalogues for romantic dress and costume inspiration they have become as much as any eighteenth-century taxonomy of exotic garb. Mirojnick still added an extra Romantic twist unintentionally tying back to Regency historical nostalgia fashions. Like the 1740s costumes in the second season

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of Outlander (2016), Bridgerton’s costumes incorporate references to the work of couturier Christian Dior from the 1950s and 60s (Seth 2020). Dior’s greatest fashion contribution was 1947’s New Look, a return to traditionally feminine silhouettes emphasising a small waist, sloping shoulders, and large full skirt. He in turn was inspired by 1850s and 60s fashions (fig. 27.2), when Romantic gowns reached their greatest circumference thanks to the crinoline cage. Bridgerton’s costumes therefore have a double layer of historic nostalgia informing their twenty-first-century Regency romanticisation. The mid-nineteenth-century styles were the literal and conceptual material apotheosis of Romantic taste in dress – a direct opposition to the narrow, straight column dresses of classical styles c. 1800. Mirojnick also chose scooped necklines over straight ones as being more cleavage revealing and ‘sexy, fun and far more accessible than your average restrained period drama’ (Seth 2020) (any glance over Regency portraits shows how revealing straight necklines could be). A key marker of romantic or romanticised fashion, it appears, is that it contains curves. The popularity of Bridgerton – apparently Netflix’s most watched series at the time (Solsman 2021) – prompted a 2021 fashion trend dubbed ‘Regencycore’ on social media, ‘taking style notes or appropriating sartorial themes from the regency [sic] era. Think, corsets, detailed collars, structured lace, bows, pearls and more’ (Steiber 2021). Online fashion aggregator Lyst reported ‘that since the show’s premiere, online searches for corsets . . . have surged 123 per cent. Pearl and feather headbands have seen a 49 per cent increase, and empire-waist dresses, the defining silhouette of the era, have risen 93 per cent in popularity’ (Back 2021). The twenty-first century’s mass manufacturing, glut of consumable fashion and endless digital connectivity enable this real-world dressing – or fantasies of identity construction, as it is not evident whether consumers are actually wearing these searches or purchases – to distribute a romanticised Regency dress globally, at a speed never before achievable. This widely consumed interpretation of the past, based on a very modern neo-Regency text, has the same fantasy relationship to the historical Regency as, say, the Regency notion of the Gothic held to the late Middle Ages. Both are ostensibly based on research, which lends legitimacy, but the accuracy is less important than the individual aesthetic imaginative possibilities the past invokes. Therefore, our relationship to the past is still to a large degree Romantic. While Steiber offers that Regencycore ‘may feel like a recent fad – but it’s certainly not. It is one of those timeless trends that regularly takes centre stage’, her referents are drawn from 1990s and later fashion. Fashion journalists writing on Regencycore happily merge eighteenth- and nineteenth-century styles into a chronological mash-up echoing Regency dress’s jumble of historicist elements. It is true that since its 1900s inception, the empire line has appeared as the 1960s babydoll dress (named after a 1956 film), and morphed into the romantic neo-Victorian dresses of the 1970s. The 1990s Austen adaptations coincided with a 1960s fashion revival to repopularise the high waistline in a Regency/Sixties fusion fashion. Regencycore was already building with the 2020 film release of Emma. (probably the most accurately costumed Austen adaptation to date), and fashion offerings including Alexa Chung’s mid-2020 collection An English Summer, inspired by Austen novels, with garment names including Woodhouse, Dashwood and Netherfield. Each succeeding iteration adds another layer to the cultural neo-Regency, and further embeds its clothing mythos.

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Conclusion In using dress to satisfy an individual, romantic yearning for a relationship with a perceived past, modern viewers and readers replicate similar impulses to those expressed through fashion during Jane Austen’s Regency. To do this, they often turn not to Austen’s textual works, but to new texts created of, about and in relationship with her works, neo-Regency fictions forming sources which equal and can eclipse the original novels. Other texts inspired first by Austen such as the Regency romance subgenre complement and colour modern perceptions of the Regency past and therefore how people dressed then. The past becomes a source for a romantic exotic fantasy. Its perceived inadequacies (washing facilities, health care) and inferiorities of civilisation (treatment of women and minorities) are valorised yet compensated by being run through the mill of the modern gaze, while frequently being misunderstood, as the tight-lacing corset scene which opens Bridgerton demonstrates. The Regency past is now Othered, romanticised, critiqued and ‘improved’ through acts of colonialisation through imagination. Many of the Orientalist styles Regency fashion embraced ‘survived on the myth that [they] hailed from an imperviously pure source, anchored in a series of stereotypes made through the familiarity wrought by repetition’ (Geczy 2013, 16). Such has the Regency itself become for modern dressers, with primacy given to Austen and Austenshire texts, and to a wealth of Heyershire romance texts as sources for romantic Otherness. All costuming is an interpretation of the past which inherently partakes of the present – precisely as Regency dress did. The Regency ‘natural’ was an antonym of ‘unnatural’, ostensibly classical versus Gothic, but each impulse and manifestation of style in dress was equally a Romantic vision. However, while people began to relate themselves imaginatively to the past, Austen looked realistically at what people were at the present moment. In the twentyfirst century, this tension is perhaps between accurate (‘natural’) reproductions and inaccurate (‘unnatural’) fancy dress. Re-enactors’ neo-Regency dress can be as prosaic, detailed and factual as Austen, or as giddy, pretty and fantastical as Bridgerton, but no matter how exactly realised it is all still inherently costume, a materialised or visualised individual expression of a past we can never experience directly because time has moved on, no matter how people strive to get close to an ‘authenticity’ which is unattainable (Davidson 2019b, 16–18). Although the Regency’s ‘jumble of period styles’ is partly due ‘to a lack of knowledge and of access to historical visual materials’ (Nigro 2010), twenty-first-century neoRegency attire has access to a digital glut of historical visual materials, but still emerges with a similar jumble. Do Regency romantics want complete embodied immersion? Are they cosplaying textual or screen Austen characters, or seeking a more generic Heyershire experience? Do they want to use Regency dress as a vehicle for imagination, themselves clad in the past, or do they prefer a template to work to, a look to be matched? Is it a way of being satisfied with the present, to immerse oneself in the past but be able to modify, or take it off? The answers are irrelevant. The point is in both periods it is less accuracy and knowledge being sought in these clothes with historical elements, but fantasy and emotion according to individual Romantic or romantic desire. The archetypes, or character forms of Lizzy Bennet, Emma Woodhouse and the rest of Austen’s characters function the same way Regency fashion sought inspiration

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in archetypes of the Roman goddess Juno, historical Mary Queen of Scots, or an idealised ballet dancer. Austen’s works, and all that spring from them become a timeless, immutable set of referents of a Regency past which simultaneously existed as it was, exists in romanticised variations, and is constantly recreated by everyone who puts on an empire-waisted dress to satisfy a craving for, as Lou Reed put it, ‘silks and linens of yesterday’s rags’ here in the present future amongst ‘all tomorrow’s parties’.

Notes   1. For a filmography to 2004 see Macdonald and Macdonald (2003, 260–5).   2. At the time of writing there are new films of Persuasion (Netflix) and a modern version of Pride and Prejudice called Fire Island (Hulu) in production.   3. Some scholars speculate this is a portrait of Austen herself, as other family members are recognisable in the portrait series.   4. The scope of these opinions has been gathered over years of online and in-person discussion.

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Rauser, Amelia F. 2020. The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s. London: Yale UP. Sales, Roger. 1994. Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England. London: Routledge. Scott, Sir Walter. 1985 [1814]. Waverley. London: Penguin. Seth, Radhika. 2020. ‘The “Bridgerton” Bonnet-Ban and Every Intricate Detail Behind Its Gaudy, Decadent Costumes’. British Vogue, 24 December, (last accessed 22 April 2021). Smith, Dina C. and Casey R. Stannard. 2016. ‘Negotiating Personal Needs and Authenticity: Exploring Design Decisions of Reenactors’ Regency Gowns’. Clothing and Textiles Research Journal 34 (4) (October): 287–302. Solsman, Joan E. 2021. ‘Bridgerton Is Netflix’s Most Popular Show yet (According to Netflix)’. CNET, 28 January, (last accessed 6 April 2021). Steiber, Mia. 2021. ‘How to Wear “Regencycore” – the 18th-Century-Inspired Fashion Trend’. RUSSH, 17 February, (last accessed 23 March 2021). Wild, Benjamin L. 2019. ‘Romantic Recreations: Remembering Stuart Monarchy in NineteenthCentury Fancy Dress Entertainments’. In Remembering Queens and Kings of Early Modern England and France: Reputation, Reinterpretation, and Reincarnation, edited by Estelle Paranque, Queenship and Power, 179–96. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Wilson, Elizabeth. 2007. ‘A Note on Glamour’. Fashion Theory 11 (1) (March): 95–108. Wootton, Sarah. 2018. ‘Revisiting Jane Austen as a Romantic Author in Literary Biopics’. Women’s Writing: The Elizabethan to Victorian Period 25 (4): 536–48.

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Notes on Contributors

Susanna Avery-Quash, PhD, FSA, is Senior Research Curator (History of Collecting) at the National Gallery, London. She leads on activities associated with its research strands, ‘Buying, Collecting and Display’ and ‘Art and Religion’, including postgraduate teaching, conferences and publications. Her research focuses on the history of the National Gallery, and the history of collecting and the art market. Recent co-edited publications include: The Georgian London Town House (2019), Leonardo in Britain (2019), London and the Emergence of a European Art Market, 1780–1820 (2019). She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and holds Honorary Research Fellowships at Birkbeck, University of London, and the University of Buckingham. She is a trustee of The Francis Haskell Memorial Fund; a board member of The Society for the History of Collecting and of TIAMSA; and a Specialist Volunteer for the National Trust. Jennie Batchelor is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Kent. She has published widely on eighteenth-century women’s writing, material culture, gender, sexuality and the body, and women’s periodicals. Her most recent books include  Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690s–1820s, co-edited with Manushag N. Powell (Edinburgh UP, 2018) and Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750–1830 (2010). She also co-devised (with Alison Larkin) the popular history/craft book Jane Austen Embroidery (2020), which reprints and contextualises fifteen needlework projects from the Lady’s Magazine for modern stitchers. Her book The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) and the Making of Literary History is published with Edinburgh UP in 2022.  Katharina Boehm teaches English Literature at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. She is currently finishing a book on antiquarian practices and fiction in the long eighteenth century. Her first monograph, Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood: Popular Medicine, Child Health, and Victorian Culture was published with Palgrave Macmillan’s Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture Series in 2013. Her articles have appeared in Word & Image, SEL, Studies in the Novel, Victorian Review and Textual Practice. Charlotte Boyce is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Her research centres on nineteenth-century and neo-Victorian literature and culture, with a specific focus on the history of celebrity, and food cultures/ practices of consumption. She has co-authored monographs on Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle (2013) and A History of Food in Literature from the Fourteenth

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Century to the Present (2017), and published articles in journals including Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Poetry and The Yearbook of English Studies. She currently leads an interdisciplinary research group on ‘Celebrity, Citizenship and Status’ and is working on a co-edited volume on celebrity in the long nineteenth century. Thora Brylowe is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the author of Romantic Art in Practice: Cultural Work and the Sister Arts, 1760–1820 (2018), which examines printers, authors, editors, painters and engravers, who worked with and against each other in and around London. She is currently writing a book about the making and uses of paper in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Alison Chapman is Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Canada, specialising in nineteenth-century literature and culture. She is the author of Networking the Nation: British and American Women Poets and Italy, 1840–1870 (2015) and The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti (2000), the co-author of A Rossetti Family Chronology (2007), and the editor or co-editor of several collections of essays including A Companion to Victorian Poetry (2002) and Victorian Women Poets (2000). Currently she is the Principal Investigator of the SSHRC-funded Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project, and completing a monograph on nineteenth-century poetry, place and form. Mary-Ann Constantine is a Professor at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies based in Aberystwyth. She studies the literature and history of Romantic-period Wales and Brittany, and has a particular interest in travel writing and in the cultural politics of the 1790s. With Dafydd Johnston she was general editor of the ten-volume series Wales and the French Revolution (2012–15). Other publications include The Truth Against the World: Iolo Morganwg and Romantic Forgery (2007) and (with Nigel Leask) Enlightenment Travel and British Identities: Thomas Pennant’s Tours in Scotland and Wales (2017). She has most recently led a four-year AHRC-funded project, Curious Travellers: Thomas Pennant and the Welsh and Scottish Tour 1760–1820, and is involved in a European-funded project, Ports, Past and Present. She is writing a book on eighteenth-century Welsh Tours. Joan Coutu is Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Waterloo, Ontario. Her research concentrates on the built environment (monuments, sculpture, houses, landscape design and town planning) in eighteenth-century Britain and early twentieth-century Canada, with a particular focus on perceptions of time in articulating space, power and social differentiation. In addition to several essays, Coutu has published two sole-authored books Persuasion and Propaganda: Monuments and the Eighteenth-century British Empire (2006) and Then and Now: Collecting and Classicism in Eighteenth-century England (2015), as well as a co-edited volume of essays,  Politics and the English Country House, 1688–1800 (2022).  Hilary Davidson is Associate Professor in Fashion and Textile Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York and an honorary associate at the University of Sydney. She was curator of fashion and decorative arts at the Museum of London and has lectured, broadcast and taught across a wide range of dress and textile history

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expertise. Her reconstruction of Jane Austen’s pelisse coat (Costume, 2015) led to an extensive study of British Regency dress, published as Dress in the Age of Jane Austen (2019). Her next book Jane Austen’s Wardrobe is forthcoming in 2023. Laura Engel is a Professor in the English Department at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, where she specialises in eighteenth-century literature, theatre, gender studies and material culture. She is the author of Women, Performance, and the Material of Memory: The Archival Tourist (2019), Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making (2011) and co-editor of Stage Mothers: Women, Work and the Theater 1660–1830 (2015). She recently co-curated an exhibition entitled ‘Artful Nature: Fashion and Theatricality’ at the Lewis Walpole Library and is working on a digital book project, The Art of the Actress in the Eighteenth Century. Peter Funnell is an independent art historian and curator. He studied at University College London and Oxford University. A year-long fellowship at Yale University led to his working and living in the United States in the mid-1980s. He joined the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 1990 where he was Senior Curator and Head of Research and led major projects that included directing the research of 10,000 portrait illustrations for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He specialises in nineteenth-century portraiture and the representation of masculinity, British art theory and the London art world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the history of museum display. Katie Garner is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Romantic Women Writers and Arthurian Legend: The Quest for Knowledge (2017) and various articles and chapters on aspects of nineteenthcentury Arthuriana. With Nicholas Roe, she is the co-editor of John Keats and Romantic Scotland (2022). Her current project is a study of Romantic myths of the sea. James Grande is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture at King’s College London. He is the author of William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England: Radicalism and the Fourth Estate, 1792–1835 (2014) and co-editor of The Opinions of William Cobbett (2013), William Cobbett, Romanticism and the Enlightenment: Contexts and Legacy (2015) and William Hazlitt: The Spirit of Controversy and Other Essays (2021). His current monograph project is entitled Articulate Sounds: Music, Dissent, and Literary Culture, 1789–1840. He is a trustee of Keats-Shelley House, Rome and editor of the Keats-Shelley Review. Ian Haywood is Professor of English at Roehampton University, London. He has written extensively on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British radicalism and its impact on literary and visual culture. His publications include The Revolution in Popular Literature (2004), Bloody Romanticism (2006), Romanticism and Caricature (2013), Spain in British Romanticism (2018; co-edited with Diego Saglia), Romanticism and Illustration (2019; co-edited with Mary Shannon and Susan Matthews), and The Rise of Victorian Caricature (2020). His next monograph project is Frankenstein and Romantic Visual Culture (contracted for 2025). He was President of the British Association for Romantic Studies 2015–19, and co-ordinates the Romantic Illustration Network, (last accessed 3 March 2022).

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Jillian Heydt-Stevenson is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, with primary scholarly interests in British and French Romanticism. She is the author of Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History (2005), and co-editor of Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Histories of British Fiction (2008). She has recently finished a forthcoming monograph, Matters of Belonging: Connecting Things in 18th- and 19th-Century French and British Literature, and is currently completing another, provisionally entitled Palmyra and London: Cultural Interactions between East and West, 1753–1853. Maureen McCue is former Senior Lecturer in nineteenth-century British Literature at Bangor University (UK). She is the author of British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793–1840 (2014), which was shortlisted for the British Association of Romantic Studies First Book Prize (2015). She has published essays on Romantic periodicals, the development of the National Gallery in London, AngloItalian relations, and illustrations. Her current project, funded in part by a British Academy/ Leverhulme Small Research Grant, examines how the rich ecology of women’s visual lives determined the period’s wider print culture. Heather McPherson is Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is the author of Art and Celebrity in the Age of Reynolds and Siddons (2017) and The Modern Portrait in Nineteenth-Century France (2001). Her research focuses on portraiture and intersections between the visual and performing arts. She has published articles and essays on theatrical celebrity, caricature and cultural politics, the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, theatrical riots, and Sarah Siddons, in particular. Samantha Matthews is Associate Professor in Nineteenth Century Literature in the Department of English, University of Bristol. She has broad interdisciplinary interests in the literary, visual and material cultures of the long nineteenth century, particularly non-canonical poetry and book history. Poetical Remains: Poets’ Graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century (2004) considers the productive relations between dead poets and their literal and literary ‘remains’. Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture: Poetry, Manuscript, Print, 1780–1850 (2020) represents her long-standing interest in manuscript albums and scribal culture’s persistence into the age of mass print. She is editing Charles Lamb’s poetry for Oxford’s Complete Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. Susan Matthews has published widely on William Blake, gender and visual culture in the Romantic period. She is the author of Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness (2011), and editor, with Ian Haywood and Mary L. Shannon, of Romanticism and Illustration (2019). Formerly a Reader in English Literature at University of Roehampton she now holds an associate research fellowship in the School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London. Martin Myrone is Head of Grants, Fellowships and Networks at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and Convenor of the British Art Network. The Network, supported by the Paul Mellon Centre, Tate and Arts Council England, brings together curators, researchers and academics based around the UK and internationally. Before joining the Paul Mellon Centre in 2020, Martin spent over twenty years in

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curatorial roles at Tate, London, latterly as Senior Curator, pre-1800 British Art. His many exhibitions at Tate Britain have included Gothic Nightmares (2006), John Martin (2011), William Blake (2019) and Hogarth and Europe (2021). His research and publications have focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art, with a special interest in artistic identity and artists’ labour, class, cultural opportunity and gender. His many published works include Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art 1750–1810 (2005) and Making the Modern Artist: Culture, Class and Art-Educational Opportunity in Romantic Britain (2020), both published by the Paul Mellon Centre. Alison O’Byrne is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. She has wide-ranging interests in representations of London in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and has published on topics including the construction of Westminster Bridge, spectatorship in the eighteenth-century city, walking in early nineteenth-century London, and representations of London in the 1830s. She has co-edited a round table on John Tallis’s London Street Views (1838–40) for the Journal of Victorian Culture with Jon Stobart and is currently completing a book on representations of walking in London in the long eighteenth century. Peter Otto is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the University of Melbourne, Executive Director of the Research Unit in ‘Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Contemporary Culture’, and a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He teaches and researches in the literatures and cultures of modernity, from Romanticism to the new media of today – activities informed by his interest in histories of imagination, virtual reality and entertainment technologies. His publications include Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity and the Emergence of Virtual Reality (2011); Innovations in Encompassing Large Scenes (Romantic Circles, 2013); and 21st Century Oxford Authors: William Blake (2018). He is currently completing a book, funded by the Australian Research Council, on ‘Architectures of Imagination: Bodies, Buildings, Fictions, and Worlds’. Hila Shachar is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Film at De Montfort University, UK. Her recent book, Screening the Author: The Literary Biopic (2019), examines the screen adaptation of the figure of the author and biographies of well-known writers, including Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Virginia Woolf, John Keats, Jane Austen, the Brontës and others. Her previous book, Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature (2012), was featured in The New York Times and nominated for the 2012 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. Her recent publications also include articles on contemporary French cinema and the graphic novel, screening the French Resistance and the Holocaust, and recent Brontë screen and fan adaptations. She is currently working on a new research project examining the recent development of American, European and Australian ‘auteur’ cinema, with a particular focus on the role of women directors in the industry. Sophie Thomas is Professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is the author of Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (2008), and of numerous articles and chapters that address the cross-currents between literature,

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material culture and visual culture in the Romantic period. She is currently completing a book on objects, collections and museums at the turn of the nineteenth century – The Romantic Museum, 1770–1830: Matter, Memory, and the Poetics of Things – and beginning a new, funded programme of research on Romanticism, museums and the poetics of sculpture. James Watt is Professor of English in the Department of English and Related Literature and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. He is the author of British Orientalisms, 1759–1835 (2019), and is currently working on a book that explores popular and especially comic Orientalism over the same period. Jason Whittaker is Head of the School of English and Journalism at the University of Lincoln. He has written extensively on the reception of William Blake, as well as aspects of digital media and journalism. His most recent books include Divine Images: The Life and Works of William Blake (2021) and Jerusalem: Blake, Parry and the Fight for Englishness (2022), and he is currently working on a new monograph, You’ve Got What We Want: A History of Big Tech versus Big Journalism. Kacie L. Wills holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Riverside. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Illinois College. In her teaching and research, she aims to emphasise comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to textual and archival material from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wills has recently been awarded a Keats-Shelley Association of America Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr. Research Grant and a Huntington Library Short-term Dibner Fellowship in the History of Science. She is co-editor of the compendium, Women and the Art and Science of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2020). Her work can be seen in English Studies and Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities. Sarah Zimmerman is Professor of English at Fordham University. Romanticism, Lyricism, and History (1999) and The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain (2019) reflect her interest in the histories of Romantic-era literary media, including their audiences. Her essays have also focused on the period’s contributions to a history of private life and, most recently, environmental studies.

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Index

Figures are shown by a page reference in bold. Abbott, Lemuel Francis, 158, 210, 211 Abrams, M. H., 237 Ackermann, Rudolph The Microcosm of London, 259–60, 259, 264, 266 Repository of Arts, 285, 349–52, 350, 429, 430 sales of albums and scrapbooks, 430, 440 ‘The Terror of Booksellers’, 314 Adam, Robert, 117, 118, 119, 169 Adams, John 3, 265 aesthetics the Burkean beautiful, 487, 494–6, 498 community of feelings, 191 culture of visuality, 1–2 depictions of the female form, 340–3, 393–4, 394, 487, 494–8 the ‘Elgin’ Marbles debate, 124–6 of engravings, 26, 27–30 the Gothic aesthetic, 40–1, 44, 45, 47, 54 ideal beauty in classical sculpture, 114–15 ‘The March of Morality’ (Heath), 341–3, 341 the scrap aesthetic, 430–1, 432 ut pictura poesis tradition, 221, 237 see also picturesque; sublime albums see scrapbooks/albums Alcock, Edward, 1–2 Alison, Archibald, 141, 281 Alken, Henry Thomas, 186 Angerstein, John Julius art collection, 171, 178, 336–7 loans of paintings, 173 the new national collection, 133–5, 178, 336–7 Pall Mall townhouse, 133–5, 171, 178, 179, 190, 336 personal wealth, 208 Anti-Jacobin Review, 208, 316–19, 317 Antiquarian Repertory, 31

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antiquarianism The Antiquities of England and Wales (Grose), 30–1, 31 art as ethnographic source material, 35–7 caricatures of antiquaries, 24, 25 collection of ancient airs, 238, 240–1 The Hindu Pantheon, 35–6, 36 native British antiquities, 23, 34–5, 58–9 panoramas and dioramas, 32–3 popular illustrated publications, 31–4 in the Romantic era, 23–4, 30–1 SAL’s large-scale historical prints, 23, 24 theatrical recreations of the past, 32, 33–4, 221 the transmission of knowledge through engravings, 23, 24, 26–30, 27, 31–2 travel and observation of antiquities, 58–9 ‘Veneration’ (Rowlandson), 24, 25 Vetusta Monumenta print series, 24–30 and the visual arts, 4, 23, 24, 30–1, 34 visual documentation of medieval architecture, 34–5 see also Society of Antiquaries of London (SAL) architecture Burke’s aesthetics of, 116 classicising, 115 Gothic architecture, 43, 47, 49 Orientalism in, 5, 96, 100–1 Palladian theory, 115–16 Plato’s dualism of material-immaterial, 116 public lecture rooms, 256–7, 259–60, 266–7 Royal Pavilion at Brighton, 5, 96, 100–3, 102 Sezincote House, Gloucestershire, 100, 101 visual documentation of medieval architecture, 34–5 Wentworth Woodhouse, 115–17 see also country houses; Edinburgh; London; urban planning

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530 index art galleries of artists’ studios, 172 calls for a national collection, 174, 175, 178, 336 donations of private art collection, 176–8 in Europe, 170, 171, 175, 176, 190 evolution of, 166, 190 government acquisition policies, 166–7 guides to, 336 loans from private collections, 173 in London town houses, 170–2, 172 permanent public art galleries, 174, 176 public access to, 171–3 semi-public display of private collections, 167, 168–73, 184 Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries of England (Hazlitt), 336–7 temporary display spaces, 167 Vauxhall Gardens, 167, 184, 285 see also National Gallery artists allusions to in novels, 300–4 amateur/professional women artists, 374, 375, 376 artistic rivalry, 188, 191–2, 195 artistic training, 196–7 commercial factors, 188, 195, 196, 197–8 figure of the Romantic artist, 189, 242 London population of, 184 Minerva and female artistic agency, 378–9 portrait painters, 205 professionalisation of, 197–8 shift to book illustration work, 359–60 women artists, 205–6, 393 women artists’s self-representations, 306–9, 307, 308, 376, 395 see also illustration; portraiture Ashmole, Elias, 176 Austen, Jane Emma. (2020 film), 488, 495–6, 496, 519 film and the ‘Austen’ brand, 495–6 The History of England, 512, 513 naturalism, 517 Northanger Abbey, 41, 42–3, 64, 295, 296, 517 Persuasion, 337–8, 339 Regency fashion and Austen adaptations, 486, 502–3, 510–12, 516, 517, 518, 519, 520–1 Sense and Sensibility, 351–2, 517 Baartman, Sara (also Sarah or Saartjie), 101, 102, 340, 342–3 Banks, Joseph exchanges with the Māori, 86 illustrations from the Cook voyages, 58, 62, 77–8

7786_McCue & Thomas.indd 530

science’s role in Empire, 79, 85 Banks, Thomas, 11, 11, 400 Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 70–1 Barchas, Janine, 16–17 Baring, Francia, 208 Barker, Robert, 138, 272, 276–8, 279 Barker, Thomas Edward, 282 Barry, James, 174 Bartolozzi, Francesco, 85, 385, 386 Basire, James, 26–8, 27, 30 Baxter, Thomas, 153, 161 Beach, Thomas, 224 Beauclerk, Elizabeth, 85 Beauclerk, Lady Diana Britomart as a Minerva figure, 374, 376, 377, 378–9, 380–2, 381, 384, 385 collaboration with Wedgwood, 376, 382, 387 depiction of Hellenore, 382–4, 383 echoes of Angelica Kauffman’s work, 377, 382, 383–4, 387 friendship with Walpole, 374, 376, 379 illustrations for ‘Lenore’ (Bürger), 375, 387–8, 388 illustrations for The Mysterious Mother (Walpole), 376 invisibility as an artist, 375, 387 invocation of the Gothic, 379–80, 380 marketing of her own work, 374, 385–7 personal life, 375–6, 377 portrait of her daughters, 385–6, 385, 386 representations of the female figure, 374, 375 Una and the Redcrosse Knight, 379–80, 380 use of watercolour, 379 visual archive of self-representation, 376 watercolours of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, 374, 375, 376, 377, 379–85, 387, 388 Beaumont, George, 4, 175, 176, 178–9 Beckford, William, 98–100 Beechey, William, 204, 205, 206, 207, 216 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 237 Bentham, Jeremy, 287–8 Bernard, Thomas, 175 Berwick, John, 452 Berwick, Thomas, 452 Blair, Robert, 52–4, 53 Blake, William artistic figure of, 197–8, 242 audible visions, 246–52 biblical hermeneutics, 249–50 connection with Dante, 482 deathbed singing, 241 digitised collections, 16 Europe: a Prophecy, 358 illustrations for ‘Lenore’ (Bürger), 375, 387

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index 531 illustrations for The Grave (Blair), 52–4, 53 illustrations for Young’s Night Thoughts, 357–8, 358 Illustrations of the Book of Job, 248–9, 250, 251 influence on comics and the graphic novel, 479–83 Jerusalem, 243, 245, 247, 249 ‘London’, 242, 247, 248 Milton a Poem, 243, 244, 245 music, poetry and painting in the prophetic books, 243–52 music and the creative process, 238–42 opposition between melody and harmony, 245–6 poetry, painting and music as visual arts, 237–8 popular, communal music culture, 238, 240–1 Songs of Innocence, 238–9, 239, 242 Songs of Innocence and Experience, 243 William Blake, Taxi Driver (Riordan), 483, 484 Blake Archive, 16 Blundell, Henry, 118, 122–3 Boucher, François, 302, 303 Bourdieu, Pierre, 113 Bourgeois, Francis, 176 Bouton, Charles-Marie, 282, 283 Bowyer, Robert, 192 Boydell, John on the British School, 197 images of Nelson’s death, 159 literary paintings, 173–4 Shakespeare Gallery, 10–11, 173, 192, 194, 194, 196, 223, 232, 233, 285, 360, 364, 398, 400–1 the Vetusta Monumenta print series, 26 British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom annual art exhibitions, 186, 195 art collection, 175 donations to the National Gallery, 178 foundation of, 2 Interior of the British Institution Old Master Exhibition, Summer 1832 (Woolmer), 187 Jane Austen’s visit to, 17 posthumous exhibitions, 173 British Museum, 2, 126, 141, 166, 190 Britton, John, 32–3, 136–7, 348, 349 Brontë, Charlotte, 492 Brooks, Shirley, 456–9, 457, 458 Brothers, Richard, 472–3 Bryan, Michael, 170 Bürger, Gottfried August, 375, 387–8 Bürger, William, 42, 43

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Burke, Edmund the Burkean beautiful, 487, 494–6, 498 on the Gothic aesthetic, 40–1, 44, 54 influence on the Royal Academy, 191 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 40, 116, 487 Reflections of the Revolution in France, 315, 317 on the sublime, 191, 487 Burke, Thomas, 398–400, 399, 401 Burney, Frances, 377 Burton, Robert, 24 Butterfield, Jane, 413–15, 414 Byron, George Gordon, Lord bust by Bertel Thorwaldsen, 215 The Byron Gallery, 363 Byron’s Beauties, 363–4, 364 caricature in ‘Rival Candidates for the Vacant Bays’, 320 caricatures of the Southey-Byron spat, 323–4, 326–7 control over his profile and image, 212–14 Don Juan, 60, 100, 104, 497 ‘Fare Thee Well’, 476–8, 477 Lord Byron (Phillips), 213, 214, 214 Lord Byron (Westall), 213–14, 213 ‘A Noble Poet – Scratching up His Ideas’, 326, 327 portrait miniatures, 215 references in comics, 483 Sardanapalus, 99–100 Vision of Judgement, 320, 324, 326 Camera Obscura, 138 Campion, Jane, 487, 488–9 Capon, William, 32, 221 caricatures allusions in, 472 anti-Jacobin cartoons, 476 of antiquaries, 24, 25 caricatures of the Poet Laureateship, 320, 322, 324–6 Charles Townley with a Group of Connoisseurs (Cosway), 121 ‘The Distrest Poet’(Hogarth), 313–14, 315 ‘The Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Painting in the Year 1771’, 344–5, 345 the figure of the poet, 313–14, 315, 322–3, 322, 326, 327 ‘The Great Unknown and the Great Captain Cutting Up Napoleon the Great’ (Cruikshank), 328–31, 330 ‘The Great Unknown Lately Discovered in Ireland’ (Cruikshank), 328, 329 illustrated satirical pamphlets, 324

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532 index caricatures (cont.) influences on comic books and graphic novels, 471 Jacobinism and sedition, 315–19 ‘The March of Morality’, 341–3, 341 mass market for, 476 ‘The Moving Panorama – or Spring Garden Rout’ (Williams), 273–5, 273 of the Poet Laureateship, 320–2, 324–6 ‘A Poet Mounted on the Court Pegasus (Williams), 322–3, 322 Pope’s motif of scribbling-mania, 314–15 in print shop windows, 339 ‘Rival Candidates for the Vacant Bays’, 320–3, 321 of the Romantic era, 313, 471–8 satires of the literary portrait, 313–14 of Scott, 327–31 A Slap at Slop, 15, 16, 324–6 of Southey, 320 of the Southey-Byron spat, 323–4, 326–7 ‘Tales of Wonder!’ (Gillray), 42–3, 42 transition to cartoons, 471, 478 visual satire, 313, 315 ‘William Holland’s Print Room’ (Newton), 343–6 see also cartoons; Cruikshank, George; Gillray, James; Rowlandson, Thomas Carracci, Annibale, 402, 403 Carter, John, 32, 34–5 cartoons ‘golden age’ of comics, 479 political commentary and, 478 in the Romantic era, 471 term, 471 transition to, 471, 478 see also caricatures; comics Catherine the Great of Russia, 167, 211, 344 celebrity culture the Byronic look, 213–14 collectables, 149–50, 160–1 literary celebrity, 306 portraits in women’s magazines, 413 portraiture, 6, 149–50, 160–1, 192, 203, 209–17 reproductive engravings, 204 of Sarah Siddons, 216 the theatre and, 215, 220 Chalon, A. E., 173, 174 Chantrey, Francis, 212 Cherry, Andrew, 107 class access to the print shop window, 339, 340 the country house and, 113, 126–7 Marx and The Communist Manifesto, 286, 287

7786_McCue & Thomas.indd 532

middle-class accumulative practices, 149–50 Nelson’s cross-class appeal, 151, 153–5, 156, 159, 162 print collections, 352–3 re-invention of the aristocracy, 208 classical sculpture the Apollo Belvedere, 114, 123, 125 at Appuldurcombe, 123 aristocratic habitus through, 113, 115–18, 126–7, 168 Barberini Venus, 118 Burke on, 116 buying practices, 118, 119 at Chatsworth, 123, 124, 126, 336 contemporary originals, 114, 115, 123–4, 169 the ‘Elgin’ Marbles, 6, 105, 124–6, 141 exhibition spaces, 169 at Kedleston Hall, 117–18, 117 Lecture on Sculpture by Sir Richard Westmacott, 261 marblemania for originals, 114, 118, 123 at Newby Hall, 117, 118, 119, 122–3 paintings of collections, 120, 121–2, 122 at Petworth, 124, 126, 336 in public museums, 178 scholarship on, 121 standards of ideal beauty, 6, 114–15 taste and connoisseurship, 6, 113, 115–16, 126 Townley’s collection, 114, 118–22, 120, 166 Venus de’ Medici, 114, 116, 118, 123, 125, 169, 342 at Wentworth Woodhouse, 114–17, 115, 123 at Woburn Abbey, 123–4, 126, 211 see also Townley, Charles Cleghorn, George, 142–3 Cockerell, Charles R., 140 Cockney School, 96, 105–6 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor at Davy’s lectures, 269 on the Gothic, 42, 45, 47 in ‘New Morality’ (Gillray), 316–19, 317 on original artworks vs prints, 336 Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 479, 483 role in music in the arts, 237 Shakespeare lectures, 256, 268–9 collections/collecting art collections of small museums, 169–70 of the British monarchy, 167, 167, 176 connoisseurial identity of collectors, 348–9 curiosity cabinets, 169, 176, 190 items associated with celebrity, 149–50, 160–1 loans from private collections, 173 in London town houses, 114, 119–22, 120, 122, 168, 170–2

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index 533 middle-class accumulative practices, 149–50 of national airs and melodies, 238, 240–1 print collections, 346–9, 352–3 public access to, 2 of the Royal Academy, 174–5 semi-public display of private art collections, 167, 168–73, 184 women as print collectors, 346–8, 349–50 see also classical sculpture; commemorative goods; Townley, Charles Colman the younger, George, 96–7, 107 colonialism, 5, 18, 78 Colston, Edward, 18 comics adaptations of books, 479 ‘golden age’ of, 479 Her Infernal Descent, 482–3 references to Dante, 482–3 references to William Blake, 480–3 Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge), 479, 483 William Blake, Taxi Driver, 483, 484 Zenith, 480–1 commemoration cultural expression of patriotism, 6 naming practices, 133, 138 of the Napoleonic Wars, 132–3 see also monuments commemorative goods Cambrian Pottery jug, 147, 151, 158 classical Nelsonia, 152–5 Coalport porcelain plate, 147, 153, 161 commemorative Nelsonia, 146–8, 151–2, 160–2 cross-class appeal, 151, 153–5, 156, 159, 162 for domestic display, 148, 149, 151, 155 earthenware mugs, 153–5, 154 elite/popular binary, 148–9 female customers, 151, 155 ‘The Funeral Procession of Lord Nelson’ (Craig), 146–8, 147 glass-pictures, 155, 159, 160 Herculaneum’s jugs and mugs, 157 heroic masculinity in, 149, 150–1, 154, 155, 156–60 national sacrifice in, 149, 153–4, 155 Nelson’s material body, 152–3, 158–9, 160 commercial factors artistic training, 195, 196 the British School and, 192–3, 194, 197 commodification of country houses, 486 commodification of prints, 346–50, 347, 400–1 development of Regent Street, 131–2 portraiture, 204

7786_McCue & Thomas.indd 533

professionalisation of authorship, 314 scrapbooks/albums and, 429–30, 433–4 Cook voyages dancing in Ra‘iatea, 88 Eurocentric understandings of the Pacific, 77–8, 79, 89–90 Māori community protest at the 250th anniversary, 18 travel and observation of antiquities, 58 visual mediation of scientific knowledge, 77–9, 82 visual representations of Indigeneity, 77, 80–5 in women’s magazines, 415–16 ‘A Young Woman of Otaheita’, 415–17, 416 see also Mai; Tupaia Coppola, Sofia Lost in Translation, 488, 498–9, 498 The Virgin Suicides, 487, 488, 491–2, 493 Cosway, Maria, 394 Cosway, Richard, 121, 394 country houses Appuldurcombe, 123 art collections of, 114, 168, 170 Chatsworth, 123, 124, 126, 336 within the class hierarchy, 113, 126–7 commodification of and tourism, 486 exhibiting paintings, 121–2 Kedleston Hall, 117–18, 117, 168 Newby Hall, 117, 118, 119, 122–3 Petworth, 124, 126, 336 scheduled openings to the public, 123 Wentworth Woodhouse, 114–17, 115, 123, 211 Woburn Abbey, 123–4, 126, 211 see also classical sculpture Cowper, William, 360–2, 361, 362, 365–6 Craig, William Marshall, 146–8, 147 Crotch, William, 264–5 Cruikshank, George art of caricature, 473, 476 book illustration, 476 caricature style in illustrated poetry, 453 ‘The Court of Brighton a la Chinese!!’, 96, 101–3, 102 ‘Fare Thee Well’, 476–8, 477 illustrated satirical pamphlets, 324 imagination, 357 ‘The JOSS’, 103, 103 ‘Law versus Humanity or a Parody on British Liberty’, 472 ‘A New Vision’, 320, 324, 325 ‘Pursuits of Literature’, 314 ‘A Shilling Well Laid Out’, 2, 3 A Slap at Slop and the Bridge-Street Gang, 324–6 ‘Victory of Peterloo’, 15, 16

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534 index Cruikshank, Isaac, 2, 3, 476 Cruikshank, Robert ‘The Great Unknown and the Great Captain Cutting Up Napoleon the Great’, 328–31, 330 ‘The Great Unknown Lately Discovered in Ireland’, 328, 329 cultural contexts cultural patriotism following the Napoleonic Wars, 130–1, 132–5, 140–1 cultural patriotism in urban planning, 130–1, 132–5, 136–7, 138, 141 martial material culture, 148, 150, 152 visual mediation of scientific knowledge, 77–9, 82 visual representations of Indigeneity, 77, 80–5 Cumberland, Richard, 232 Curzon, Nathaniel, 117 Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé, 282 Daniell, Thomas, 98, 100, 101 Daniell, William, 98, 100 Dante Alighieri, 44, 482 Davy, Humphry, 255, 256, 257, 263, 264, 267, 269 De Quincey, Thomas, 106 Delaval, Sophia Anne, 1 Derby, William, 441 Desenfans, Noël, 176 Devis, Arthur William, 152 Dibdin, Charles, 96–7 Dighton, Robert, 405, 409, 410, 420, 421 Dior, Christian, 519 Downman, John, 193 Drake, Nathan, 44–5 Drury Lane theatre, 220, 221, 478 Dryden, John, 392–3 Dulwich Picture Gallery, 173, 176, 177, 190 Dyer, Edmund, 17, 313, 314 Earle, John, 24 East India Company, 18, 35, 95, 96, 106, 107, 108 Edinburgh Calton Hill development, 6, 130, 136, 137–9, 137, 141 cultural patriotism and, 130, 131, 136–7, 138, 141 debates on commemoration and national identity, 135–6, 143–4 Edinburgh from Calton Hill (Turner), 139–40, 139 Greek Revival designs, 138, 140–1, 143, 144 the National Monument, 130, 131, 140–3, 142, 144

7786_McCue & Thomas.indd 534

New Town development, 130, 137 picturesque representations of, 137, 138–9, 140 View of Edinburgh and the Surrounding Country from the Calton Hill (panorama), 138, 276, 285 Edwards, Richard, 357, 358 Egan, Pierce, 2 ekphrasis, 3–4, 391–2 Elmes, James, 135 enargeia, 3–4 Englefield, Henry, 34 engraving book illustration, 359, 404 Boydell Shakespeare engravings, 401 of British landscapes, 62, 63 Bronze Age object engraving, 26–8, 27 figures in, 30 The Hindu Pantheon, 35–6, 36 in The Lady’s Magazine, 409–10 new technologies of, 369–70 reproductions of portraits, 204 Royal Academy’s omission of, 337, 359–60 Sandal Castle engraving, 28–30, 29 sister-arts formulation, 399–400 and the transmission of antiquarian knowledge, 23, 24, 26–30, 31–2 Vetusta Monumenta print series, 24–30 Victorian wood engraving, 451, 452–3, 455–6 visual sources for, 28–9 see also illustration; print shops Ennis, Garth, 482 Evelyn, John, 471 exhibitions annual art exhibitions, 186, 188–9 around Britain, 186–7 artistic rivalry, 191–2, 195 the British School and, 191–7 ‘Bullock’s Museum, 22, Piccadilly’, 285, 286 commercial displays of living people, 342 cultural impact of, 3 digital recreations, 16–17 ‘The Exhibition of the Royal Academy, 1787’ (Martini), 185, 346 exhibition practices of the Society of Antiquaries, 27–8 ‘Exhibition Somerset House: Tom and Bob’ (Alken), 186 exhibition spaces, 272 exhibitions culture, 188–9, 285 the experience society, 285–6 impact on artistic practices, 192, 195, 203 Interior of the British Institution Old Master Exhibition, Summer 1832 (Woolmer), 187 literary galleries, 285 literary paintings, 173–4

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index 535 newspaper review culture, 190, 204–5 the print shop window, 338–41, 338 public access to, 190 retrospective exhibitions, 189 of the Romantic era, 186, 187–8, 189 at the Royal Academy, 186, 192, 195 of the Scottish Academy, 191 selling exhibitions, 173 the 1790 Royal Academy exhibition, 201–3 as social events, 345, 346 the spectators gaze, 224 temporalities of, 189 What Jane Saw, 16–17 Faraday, Michael, 255 fashion Bridgerton’s costumes, 517–19, 520 Christian Dior, 519 cosplay and re-enactment, 512, 514–15 expressions of the Other and Orientalism, 506, 507, 515 fancy-dress costumes of Mary Queen of Scots, 512–14, 513 fashion plates, 504, 509, 514 fashion plates in women’s magazines, 411, 411, 420–3, 422, 424 fashion vs wisdom tensions in women’s journalism, 408–10, 421–4 Georgette Heyer novels, 510, 517–18, 520 the Greco-Roman in Romantic dress, 506–7 the historical novel and, 508–9 historicism in, 506–9, 520–1 modern neo-Regency dress, 512, 514–21 perception of ‘refinement’, 505 politics of women’s dress, 416–17 Regency fashion and Austen adaptations, 502–3, 510–12, 516, 517, 518, 519, 520–1 Regency fashion as contemporary romantic nostalgia, 509–13 Regency women’s dress, 503–6, 504 Regencycore, 519 Romantic fashion, 505–6, 505 specialist fashion magazines, 506 timeline of women’s fashion, 505 the turban, 507, 508 ‘vandyke’ style, 508, 509 film the ‘Austen’ brand, 495–6 Bright Star, 487, 488–9, 489 costume dramas, 486–7 depictions of the female form, 494–8 Emma., 488, 495–6, 496, 519 female subjectivities, 487, 488, 490–3, 497 intertextuality with paintings of women, 496–9 Jane Eyre, 488, 492, 493 Little Women, 488, 499–500

7786_McCue & Thomas.indd 535

Lost in Translation, 488, 498–9, 498 Mary Shelley, 487, 488–91, 497 the picturesque mode, 487 representations of Romantic authors, 486–7 Romantic ideologies and, 486 Romantic individuality and creativity, 486, 487, 488, 490–1, 492–3 symbolism of the colour blue, 489–90, 491–4, 493, 497 utilisation of the beautiful, 494 The Virgin Suicides, 487, 488, 491–2, 493, 498 Fitzwilliam, Richard, 7th Viscount, 178 Fitzwilliam, William Fitzwilliam, 4th Earl, 210, 211 Flaxman, John, 124, 125–6, 133, 152–3 Foundling Hospital, 168–9, 168, 175 Fox, Charles James, 209, 210, 211, 211, 216, 472, 474, 476 Friedrich, Caspar David, 492 Fukunaga, Cary, 492 Fuseli, Henry The Cave of Despair, 48 commercial success, 197 Dido, 193 the dramatic as a category of painting, 222 exhibitions, 188 images of The Faerie Queene, 374 ‘Kate is Craz’d’, 362, 362 Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers, 222–3, 223 ‘The Milton Gallery’, 285 The Nightmare, 41, 192, 497 Percival Delivering Belisane from the Enchantments of Urma, 358 Shakespearean influences, 222 translation of J. J. Winckelmann, 118, 121 Gainsborough, Thomas death of, 189, 205 donations to the Foundling Hospital, 167 exhibitions, 188 Mrs Thomas Graham, 203 on the Royal Academy, 192 use of watercolour, 379 Watering Place, 165 Gamer, Michael, 43 Gandy, Joseph Michael, 133, 134 Garrick, David, 165, 220, 221 George IV, 96, 100–4, 142, 208, 209, 275–6 see also Prince Regent Gerwig, Greta, 499 Gibbes, Phebe, 302–4 Gillray, James art of caricature, 472–3, 475 ‘The Friend of Humanity and the Knife Grinder, In Imitation of Southey’s Sapphics’, 319

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536 index Gillray, James (cont.) images of public lectures, 255, 256–7, 260 ‘A Lecture on pneumatics at the Royal Institution, London’, 257, 258, 259 ‘Midas’, 323 ‘New Morality’, 316–19, 317, 320 parody of Matthew Peters, 472 ‘The Prophet of the Hebrews’, 472–3, 472 ‘Scientific Researches!’, 257 ‘Smelling Out a Rat: -or- the atheisticalrevolutionist disturbed in his midnight “calculations” ’, 315, 316 ‘Tales of Wonder!’, 42–3, 42 Gilpin, William Observations on the River Wye, 63–5 the picturesque, 17, 59–60, 64 ‘Tintern Abbey’, 65 use of a Claude glass, 17 Godfrey, Richard, 31, 31 Godwin, William, 207 Gothic art objects in the Gothic novel, 43, 51–2, 53–4 body and soul interplay, 52–4 in Diana Beauclerk’s work, 379–80, 380 the Gothic aesthetic, 40–1, 44, 45, 47, 54 Gothic architecture, 43, 47, 49 Gothic terrorist fiction, 41–3 The Grave (Blair), 52–4, 53 ‘Graveyard poetry’, 52–4 interaction of visual and textual forms, 4, 44–6, 48, 49, 51–2, 55–6 in medieval literature, 46–51 in phantasmagoria shows, 284–5 pictorial depictions of Gothic terror, 40–1, 44, 48, 49, 50 the poetic form, 44–5 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (Percy), 48–51, 50 skull, hourglass and bat triptych, 40 Tate Britain exhibition (2006), 17 textual authenticity, 51 and the theatrical arts, 32, 43 Vathek (Beckford), 98–100 and the visual arts, 41–4, 54–5 Gough, Richard on Antiquarian engraving, 26, 28 art as ethnographic source material, 35 the arts and the transmission of antiquarian knowledge, 23, 24 on British antiquities, 23, 34, 58 Griffith, Moses ‘An image [of a Hoopoe bird]’, 61 on Pennant’s tours, 58, 61–2 ‘Women at the Quern and Luaghad with a view of Talyskir, on the Isle of Skye’, 62

7786_McCue & Thomas.indd 536

Groom, Nick, 51 Grose, Francis, 30–1, 31 Grub Street, 314 Gwynn, John, 131 Hadfield, Maria, 394 Hallett, William, 166 Hamilton, Emma La Penserosa, 207, 216 on Nelson commemorative good, 147, 153 as a ‘Shakespeare Gallery’ model, 232, 233–4 Hamilton, Gavin, 119, 120, 123 Hamilton, Sir William, 36–7, 121 Hancarville, Pierre-François Hugues d’, 121 Handel, George Frederick, 167 Haughton, Moses, 35 Hawkesworth, John, 78, 79 Hazlitt, William criticism of Southey’s Poet Laureateship, 320 on the ‘Elgin’ Marbles, 125 encomium on Poussin’s landscapes, 300–1 on illustrations of Scott’s works, 365 on John Kemble, 227 literature as painting, 295 on Mrs Siddons, 216 on original artworks vs prints, 336–7, 354 print collection, 337 on print shops, 335–6 Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries of England, 336–7 theatrical criticism, 220 Heath, William ‘The Flushing Phantasmagoria or Kings Conjurors Amuseing John Bull’, 8, 9 ‘The March of Morality’, 341–3, 341 Hemans, Felicia, 4 Henderson, John, 232 Heyer, Georgette, 510, 517–18, 520 Hill, David Octavius, 138 Hodges, William, 79, 87, 88, 98 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 237 Hogarth, William Analysis of Beauty, 342 art of caricature, 472, 475 ‘The Distrest Poet’, 313–14, 315 donations to the Foundling Hospital, 167 engravings, 337 Hogg, Alexander, 31–2 Hogg, James, 54, 55 Holland, William, 343–6, 344 Holman Hunt, William, 196 Hone, William illustrated satirical pamphlets, 324 ‘The Joss and his Folly’, 103, 103 ‘Law versus Humanity or a Parody on British Liberty’, 472

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index 537 ‘A New Vision’, 320 A Slap at Slop and the Bridge-Street Gang, 15, 16, 324–6 Hope, John, 265 Hoppner, John, 204, 206–7, 208, 216, 260 Horne Tooke, John, 212 Horner, Thomas, 272, 287, 288 Hugues, Pierre-François, 36–7 Hull, Edward Once a Week series, 465, 466 scrap-beggar iconography, 436–8, 437, 439, 441–2 Hunt, Leigh on Blue Beard (Colman), 97 imprisonment for libel, 100 ‘Pocket-Books and Keepsakes’, 452 on print ownership, 352–3 Regency Orientalism, 96, 105 The Story of Rimini, 105 ‘To Thomas Stothard. R.A.’, 360 use of the scrap-beggar motif, 444 Hutton, Catherine, 68–70, 69 illusion automata, 283, 284 magic lanterns, 8, 283, 284 modernity and the interplay of the real, actual and virtual realms, 272, 276, 281, 285–90 panoramic illusions, 272 peep shows, 283–4 phantasmagoria shows, 8, 284–5 technologies of, 272 transparent pictures, 283 see also panoramas/dioramas illustrated poetry ‘Ascent of Snowdon’ (Turner), 460, 461 Blake’s illustrations for ‘Lenore’ (Bürger), 375, 387 Blake’s illustrations for The Grave (Blair), 52–4, 53 Blake’s illustrations for Young’s Night Thoughts, 357–8, 358 The Byron Gallery, 363 Byron’s Beauties, 363–4, 364 Cowper’s works, 360–2, 361, 362, 365–6 Cruikshank’s caricature style, 453 ‘Fare Thee Well’ (Byron), 476–8, 477 in Good Words, 455, 456, 459–60, 461, 464 ‘The Great St. Bernard’ (Rogers), 460, 461–3, 462, 463 Italy (Rogers), 367, 450, 453–5, 454, 460–4, 462, 463 in literary annuals, 451–3 ‘Magenta’ (Taylor), 459 material practices, 451–2 in mid-Victorian magazines, 455–67

7786_McCue & Thomas.indd 537

for the mise-en-page, 450, 451, 452–3, 455–6, 464–7 in Once a Week, 456–9, 457, 458, 464, 465, 466 ‘Once a Week’ (Brooks), 456–9, 457, 458 periodical poetry, 455 Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge), 479, 483 scholarship on, 451 Scott’s works, 356, 364–5, 365, 366–9, 368 tourism inspired by, 366, 367–9 Turner’s poetry illustrations, 356, 366–9, 368 of the Victorian era, 450–1 visual iconography and rhythms, 450–1, 452–3, 455, 464–7 volume of, 450–1 woodcuts, 451, 452–3, 455–6 see also Blake, William illustration Abbotsford Edition of the Waverley Novels, 363 artists’s transition to, 359–60, 404 of Dickens’s works, 476 embellished editions, 359–60 Europe: a Prophecy (Blake), 358 history painting and, 358–60 illustrated satirical pamphlets, 324 imagination and mental images, 357, 370, 404 in literary annuals, 450, 451–2 from the literary galleries, 359 in The Mysteries of Udolpho (Radcliffe), 304–6, 305 new audiences for, 370 in novels, 304–6, 305 the observation/illustration relationship, 60–1, 63 in the Penny Magazine, 370 popular illustrated antiquarian publications, 31–4 Quarterly Review’s history of the illustrated book, 351, 356, 359, 360, 363–4, 366–7, 369 in the Romantic era, 356–7 in Romantic periodicals, 410–11 in A Sentimental Journey, 357, 370–1 term, 356, 404 by Thomas Stothard, 360–1, 361, 365–6, 367 Tupaia’s illustrations from the Cook voyages, 77–8, 86–90 in Victorian visual culture, 450–1 as virtual tourism, 366, 367–9 by William Blake, 52–4, 53, 248–9, 250, 251, 357–8, 358, 375 of women, 360–2, 361, 362, 364 word-image relationship, 357, 399–400 see also Beauclerk, Lady Diana

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538 index Jacobinism, 315–19 Jeffrey, Francis, 105 Jenkins, Thomas, 118, 119, 123 John Bull figure, 8 Johnson, Samuel, 62 Johnston, John, 476–8 Kauffmann, Angelica in The Academicians of the Royal Academy (Zoffany), 393–4, 394 Angelica’s Ladies Library, 401–2 Armida in Vain Endeavors with her Entreaties to Prevent Rinaldo’s Departure, 382 ‘The Artist in the Character of Design Listening to the Inspiration of Poetry’, 395, 396, 398–9, 399 echoed in Diana Beauclerk’s work, 377, 382, 383–4, 387 engraving skills and the print market, 400, 401 Epistle to Angelica Kauffman (Keate), 397–8 figure of Minerva, 378 history paintings, 395, 403 images of The Faerie Queene, 374 Judgment of Paris, 395 Portrait of Lady with a Sculpture of Minerva, 378 as a portrait painter, 395 power of the sister arts, 393, 395–7, 396, 402–3, 402 professional status, 377–8, 393, 394–5, 401–3 in Royal Academicians in General Assembly, 1795 (Singleton), 404–5, 405 at the Royal Academy, 206, 375, 393–4, 394, 404–5, 405 Self-portrait of the Artist Hesitating between the Arts of Music and Painting, 402–4, 402 self-portraits, 378, 395 use of classical iconography, 378 works for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, 401 Keate, George, 397–8 Keate, Georgianna, 398 Keats, John Bright Star (film), 487, 488–9, 489 on the ‘Elgin’ Marbles, 126 Keats at Wentworth Place (Dyer), 313, 314 Keats’s House museum, 17 references in comics, 483 Severn’s portrait of, 17, 313 ‘Tintern Abbey’, 247 on women’s intellect, 432 Kemble, John Phillip acting style, 220 Coleridge’s impressions of, 268 at Drury Lane theatre, 32, 221 John Philip Kemble as Cato (Lawrence), 216, 225, 226–7, 226, 229, 231

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John Philip Kemble as Macbeth and Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth (Beach), 224, 225 Kemble as Coriolanus, 225 Lawrence’s half-history portraits of, 216, 224–7 Knight, Charles, 370 Knox, John, 138 Koster, Simon de, 153, 155 Lady’s Magazine, The annual frontispieces, 408, 409, 409, 421 ‘The Assault’, 419, 420 the Cook voyages, 415–16 embellishments, 409–10 fashion plates, 411, 420–3, 424 fashion vs wisdom tensions, 408–10, 421–4 interrogation of gender norms, 410, 414–15, 416, 417, 419–20 Jane Butterfield’s trial, 413–15, 414 ‘London Walking and Evening Dress’, 422, 422 Minerva and female agency, 378–9, 408, 409 ‘Monument to the Memory of Chatterton’, 412–13, 412 moral instruction, 417–19 ‘Oriental Revenge’, 417–19, 418 the politics of women’s dress, 416–17 scientific serials, 423–4 ‘Two Ladies in the newest Dress . . . at Ranelagh’, 411, 415, 422 use of engravings, 409–10, 412 word-image relationship, 412–13 ‘A Young Woman of Otaheita’, 415–17, 416 Lamb, Caroline, 215 Lamb, Charles Blank Verse, 319 cockney Orientalism, 96, 106 in ‘New Morality’ (Gillray), 318, 319 ‘Old China’, 106, 107–8 ‘The Scrap Book’, 445–6 on Stothard’s paintings, 360 theatrical criticism, 220 Landon, Letitia, 496 landscape gardening, 47, 65 landscapes aesthetics/figures in, 30 Claude glasses, 1–2, 17–18, 65 geological underscapes, 71, 72 the Grand Tour’s influence on, 5, 58 picturesque mode of appreciation, 59–60, 63–7 The Watering Place (Rubens), 165 wider audiences for, 63 Landseer, John, 267–8, 472, 473 Lane, Theodore, 338

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index 539 Larevellière-Lépeaux, Louis Marie, 316–18 Lawrence, Thomas at the 1790 Royal Academy exhibition, 202 celebrity portraiture, 192 commercial contexts to portrait painting, 204 Elizabeth Farren, Later Countess of Derby, 202–3, 202 exhibitions, 188 friendship with William Godwin, 207–8 half-history portraits of John Kemble, 216, 224–7 Isabella Wolff, 229–31, 230 John Philip Kemble as Cato, 225, 226–7, 226, 229, 231 later career, 208–9 mental health struggles, 207 originality of, 207 patronage, 208–9 portrait of Walter Scott, 212 as a portrait painter, 168, 202, 203, 209 portraits of George IV, 208–9 presidency of the Royal Academy, 171, 202, 208 Princess Sophia, 209, 210 private art collection, 173, 175 pupils, 196 Queen Charlotte, 202 relationship with the Siddons family, 207, 216–17, 225–6 reproductive engravings, 204 Sarah Siddons, 217, 227–9, 228, 231 Sarah Siddons? as Mrs Haller in ‘The Stranger’, 217, 217 theatrical portraiture, 216–17, 220–1, 224 unfinished depiction of Emilia, Lady Cahir, 231 lectures see public lectures Legrand, Scott Pierre, 153 Leonardo da Vinci, 471–2 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 222, 234 Leveson-Gower, George, 171 Lewis, Matthew caricature in ‘Rival Candidates for the Vacant Bays’, 322 The Monk, 42, 43 Timour the Tartar, 96, 98, 99–100, 101, 107 literary annuals, 451–2 literary galleries Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, 10–11, 173, 192, 194, 194, 196, 223, 232, 233, 285, 360, 364, 398, 400–1 Dido (Fuseli), 193 The Ghost of Clytemnestra Awakening the Furies (Dowman), 193 links with printmaking, 359

7786_McCue & Thomas.indd 539

Macklin’s ‘Gallery of the Poets’, 10, 192, 285, 400, 401, 404 print industry and, 11–12, 400 literary magazines Good Words, 456, 459–60, 461, 464 multiple seriality of, 450–1 Once a Week, 456–9, 457, 458, 465, 466 reader practices, 352 literary portraiture author-heroine portraits, 306–9, 307, 308, 395, 399 frontispiece portraits, 203–4, 214, 306 ideal of the Romantic genius, 313 Keats at Wentworth Place (Dyer), 313, 314 Madame de Staël as Corinne (Massot), 308–9, 308 Portrait of Madame de Staël as Corinne on Cape Misenum (Vigée-Lebrun), 307–8, 307 satirised in caricatures, 313–14 Severn’s portrait of Keats, 17, 313 Lloyd, Charles, 319 London the built environment and metropolitan status, 130, 131–2, 143–4, 272 commercial wealth, 131–2 cultural patriotism and, 130–1, 132–5 exhibition culture, 285 ‘London’ (Blake), 242, 247, 248 Marble Arch, 133, 134 Marylebone development, 131–2, 135 monuments to the Napoleonic Wars, 132–3 pick pockets, 339, 340, 341 population of artists, 184–5 Regent Street, 131–2, 132 St Paul’s Cathedral, 132–3, 288 Trafalgar Square, 130, 133, 135 urban improvement, 240 Vauxhall Gardens, 167, 184, 285 see also National Gallery Lorrain, Claude, 296, 297, 300 Loutherbourg, Philippe Jacques de at Beckford’s Christmas party, 98–9 at Drury Lane, 221, 283 Eidophusikon, 221, 282–3, 282 The Magic of Orosmanes (Dibdin), 97 A man of New Zealand, 84, 85, 87 Omiah. A Native of the Sandwich Islands (de Loutherbourg), 83–5, 83 Lyttelton, Charles, 27 MacKay, Alex, 17 Macklin, Thomas, 10–11, 173, 192, 285, 400, 401, 404 magazines see Lady’s Magazine, The; literary magazines; women’s magazines

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540 index Mai A man of New Zealand (de Loutherbourg), 84, 85, 87 Omai; or a trip around the world, 77, 82–5, 87 Omiah. A Native of the Sandwich Islands (de Loutherbourg), 83–5, 83 perspective on European culture, 86 Portrait of Omai (Reynolds), 77, 79–80, 80, 82, 83, 85, 87, 90 the tapa, 79, 82 tattoos and Indigenous identities, 85, 86 visual representations of Indigeneity, 77, 80–5 al-Mansour, Haifaa, 487, 488, 497–8 Martini, Pietro Antonio, 185, 346, 348 Marx, Karl, 286, 287 Mary Queen of Scots, 512–14, 513 Massot, Firmin, 308–9, 308 Matheson, C. S., 17 Mendicity Society, 433 Millais, John Everett, 459 Mitchell, Robert, 276–7, 277 Mitchell, W. J. T., 295, 391, 392, 480 modernity interplay of the real, actual and virtual realms, 272, 276, 281, 285–90 in portraiture, 203 in the Romantic era, 272, 286 Montfaucon, Bernard de, 23 monuments on Calton Hill, Edinburgh, 130, 136, 137, 138 the Committee of Taste, 133 Edinburgh’s National Monument, 6, 130, 131, 140–3, 144 Monument to Nelson (Flaxman), 152–3 ‘Monument to the Memory of Chatterton’, 412–13, 412 to the Napoleonic Wars, 132–3 Vetusta Monumenta print series, 24–30 Moor, Edward, 35–6 Moore, Alan, 480, 481, 482 Moore, Thomas caricature in ‘Rival Candidates for the Vacant Bays’, 320–2 Lalla Rookh, 96, 104–5 public lectures, 264 Morrison, Grant, 480–1 Moser, Mary, 206, 375, 393, 404, 405 Murry, Ann, 423–4 museums art collections of small museums, 169–70 Fitzwilliam Museum, 178 public access to the visual arts, 2 see also art galleries; exhibitions

7786_McCue & Thomas.indd 540

music antiquarian collection of ancient airs, 238, 240–1 audiovisuality of public lectures, 256, 264–5 ballad sheets, 242, 243 and Blake’s creative process, 238–42, 251–2 music, poetry and painting in Blake’s prophetic books, 243–52 opposition between melody and harmony in Blake, 245–6 in the Romantic era, 237 as a science, 244–5 Myrone, Martin, 44, 45 Napoleonic Wars, 124, 130–1, 132–5, 140–1 Nash, John, 100, 101, 131–2, 133, 134, 135 National Gallery acquisitions policy, 178–81 Angerstein’s collection for, 133–5, 336–7 annual art exhibitions, 186, 195 foundation of, 2, 133–5, 173, 175–6, 178, 190, 336 governance, 181 The National Gallery and Nelson’s Column (Shepherd), 180 The National Gallery when at Mr Angerstein’s House, Pall Mall (Mackenzie), 179 at No. 100, Pall Mall, 133–5, 171, 178, 179, 190, 336 Nelson, Horatio Apotheosis of Nelson (Legrand), 153 classical Nelsonia, 152–5 control over his profile and image, 150 cross-cultural appeal of, 151–2, 156, 159 de Koster’s image, 153, 155 The Death of Nelson (Devis), 152 funeral, 146 ‘The Funeral Procession of Lord Nelson’ (Craig), 146–8, 147 images of his material body, 152–3, 154, 158–9, 160 Lord Nelson’s Defeat of the French at the Nile (panorama), 278, 279–80, 279 Monument to Nelson (Flaxman), 152–3 Nelson’s material body, 152–3, 158–9, 160 Orme’s image, 156 portraits, 150, 158 Romantic-Heroic Nelson, 156–60 Stanzas on Lord Nelson’s Death and Victory, 159 see also commemorative goods newsheets adverts for public lectures, 264 Figaro in London, 340, 341, 343, 451 newspaper review culture, 190, 204–5, 206, 207, 224

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index 541 The Political House that Jack Built, 16 A Slap at Slop and the Bridge-Street Gang, 15, 16 Newton, Richard ‘Promenade in the State Side of Newgate’, 344 ‘William Holland’s Print Room’, 343–6, 344 Nollekens, Joseph, 209–10, 211 novels allusions to artists, 300–4 artistic prose techniques, 296–8 author-heroine portraits, 306–9, 307, 308, 395, 399 and the creation of an internal gallery, 295, 296 the historical novel, 508 illustrations in, 304–6, 305 visual-verbal intertextuality, 295–300 Opie, John, 174, 206 Orientalism antiquarian proto-ethnographic research, 35–7 in architecture, 5, 96, 100–1 Blue-Beard, or Female Curiosity! (Colman), 96–7, 107 cockney Orientalism, 96, 105–6 Confessions of an English Opium- Eater (De Quincey), 106 elite/ popular binary, 96, 99, 107 elite self-fashioning, 5, 98–101, 103 Lalla Rookh (Moore), 96, 104–5 ‘Old China’ (Lamb), 106, 107–8 ‘Oriental Revenge’ (magazine fiction), 417–19, 418 popular theatrical productions, 5, 96–8, 107 in Regency fashion, 506, 507, 515 Regency Orientalism, 5, 96, 101–5 representations of China, 106, 107–8 Romantic exoticism, 95 Royal Pavilion at Brighton, 100–3, 102 sexual power-dynamics of Oriental despotism, 99–100 Sezincote House, Gloucestershire, 100, 101 The Story of Rimini (Hunt), 105 Timour the Tartar (Lewis), 96, 98, 99–100, 107 The Travellers (Cherry), 107 Vathek (Beckford), 98–100 visual and literary techniques of representation, 95–6 Orme, Daniel, 156 Orme, Edward, 146–7, 155 Paine, Thomas, 344, 476 painting Anecdotes of Painting (Walpole), 34 of classical sculpture collections, 120, 121–2, 122

7786_McCue & Thomas.indd 541

exhibiting paintings of country houses, 121–2 figure of the Romantic artist, 189, 242 loans from private collections, 173 Old Masters art market, 170, 184 pictorial depictions of Gothic terror, 40–1, 44, 48, 49, 50 public display of great art, 165–6 relationship between the visual and performing arts, 220–2 selling exhibitions, 173 semi-public display of private collections, 167, 168–73, 184 set design and staging, 221 as a sister art, 391–3, 395–7 the temptations of St Anthony, 40, 41 time and space in, 222–4, 231, 233–4 ut pictura poesis tradition, 221, 237 visual-verbal intertextuality in novels, 295–300 Panopticon penitentiary, 287–8, 288 panoramas/dioramas advertisement, 274 of antiquities, 32–3 the audience’s viewpoint, 278–81 Barker’s first permanent display, 272, 276 the ‘Colosseum’, 272, 288–9, 289 dioramas, 32, 272, 283 ‘Eidophusikon; or, Various Imitations of Natural Phenomena, represented by Moving Pictures’ (Loutherbourg), 282–3, 282 first permanent panorama-rotunda, 272, 276–7, 277 imaginaries of the East, 95 as immersive journalism, 277–8 interplay of the real, actual and virtual realms, 275, 281, 285–6 invention, 138 literary lineages of, 284–5 Lord Nelson’s Defeat of the French at the Nile, 278, 279–80, 279 ‘The Moving Panorama – or Spring Garden Rout’ (Williams), 273–5, 273 moving panoramas at the Great Room, 273–6, 274, 278 national-identity formation and, 278, 280–1 orientation devices, 279–80, 279 peristrephic panoramas, 275, 282 realism of, 277–8 ‘The Storming of Seringapatam’, 95 technological developments from, 283–4 View of Edinburgh and the Surrounding Country from the Calton Hill, 138, 276, 285 View of London from the Roof of the Albion Mills, 276, 280 View of the Fleet, 277–8 see also illusion

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542 index Parkinson, Sydney, 78, 79, 86, 87, 88–9 Payne Knight, Richard, 121, 126 Peel, Robert, 209, 212 Pennant, Thomas importance of the observation/illustration relationship, 60–1, 63 Tours, 58, 60, 61–2, 68 Penny Magazine, 370, 371, 451 Percy, Thomas, 48–9, 50 Peterloo Massacre, 15–16, 320 Philipsthal, Paul, 284 Phillips, Thomas, 213, 214, 214 picturesque in antiquarian prints, 28–30, 31, 32 the Brighton Pavilion and, 101 Claude glasses and, 1, 17–18 in film, 487 in Gilpin’s travel writing, 59–60, 64 as a literary narrative technique, 10, 296, 298–300, 454 in print culture, 338, 339, 352 representations of Edinburgh, 137, 138–9, 140 representations of the Scottish landscape, 367 Romantic aesthetic of, 1, 4, 59–60, 63–7, 70, 137, 138, 338, 339, 352, 434 Scott on, 298–300 in travel writing, 15, 17, 59–60, 63–7, 68, 70, 454 Pierino da Vinci, 44 Pitt, William, 208, 209, 210, 323 Playfair, William Henry, 137–8, 140 Pococke, Richard, 27 poetry ‘The Artist in the Character of Design Listening to the Inspiration of Poetry’, 395, 396, 398–9, 399 caricatures of the figure of the poet, 313–14, 315, 322–3, 322, 326, 327 caricatures of the Poet Laureateship, 320, 322, 324–6 ekphrasis, 3–4, 391–2 ‘Graveyard poetry’, 52–4 Macklin’s ‘Gallery of the Poets’, 10–11, 192, 285, 400, 401, 404 music, poetry and painting in Blake’s prophetic books, 243–52 the poetic form and the Gothic, 44–5 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (Percy), 48–51, 50 as a sister art, 391–3, 395–7 see also Blake, William; Byron, Lord; illustrated poetry; Scott, Walter politics illusion and commentary on, 8 Jacobinism, 315–19

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the landed aristocracy’s position in, 116–17 liberal individualism, 190–1 prints and the potential for political unrest, 339 Pope, Alexander, 314–15 popular spectacles, 6 Porter, Robert Ker, 95 portraiture celebrity portraiture, 6, 149–50, 160–1, 192, 203, 209–17 commercial contexts to portrait painting, 204 frontispiece portraits, 203–4, 306 in the Gothic novel, 43, 51–2 of Indigenous leaders, 80–2, 81, 85 by John Hoppner, 204, 206–7, 208, 216 literary portraiture, 313 of Lord Byron, 212–14 materiality in, 203, 209 miniatures, 215 modernity and, 203 Nelson portraiture, 150, 158 newspaper review culture, 190, 204–5, 206, 207, 224 oil portraits, 204–9 portrait prints, 149 portrait sculpture, 209–12, 215 reproductive engravings, 204 at the Royal Academy exhibitions, 204–5 the 1790 Royal Academy exhibition, 201–3 theatrical portraiture, 215–17, 220–1, 224–34 throughout the UK, 205 by William Beechey, 204, 205, 206, 207, 216 of William Pitt, 208, 209, 210 in women’s magazines, 413 see also Lawrence, Thomas; literary portraiture; Reynolds, Joshua Poussin, Nicolas The Empire of Flora, 297, 300, 301–2 Hazlitt on, 300–1 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 197 Prince Regent caricatures, 101–4, 320, 322, 476 ‘The Court of Brighton a la Chinese!!’ (Cruikshank), 96, 101–3, 102 ‘The Joss and his Folly’ (Hone), 103, 103 Leigh Hunt’s libel of, 100 Marylebone development, 131–2 Regency Orientalism, 96 Regent Street, 131–2, 132, 133, 136 Royal Pavilion at Brighton, 5, 96, 100–3, 102 see also George IV print culture commodification of prints, 346–50, 347, 400–1 design of the mise-en-page, 450 display of prints, 398–9, 401

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index 543 the female form in prints, 340–3 images of public lectures, 255, 256–7, 260 as a marker of taste and class, 348–9, 352–3 popular illustrated antiquarian publications, 31–4 print collections, 346–9, 352–3 in the Romantic era, 353 scrapbooks and, 429–30, 433–4 and the transmission of antiquarian knowledge, 23, 24, 26–30 the visual arts in, 2, 3 word-image relationship, 398–9 see also engraving print shops access to the interior, 343–4, 348 Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, 349–50 culture of the print shop window, 338–41, 338, 348 Hazlitt on, 335–6 ‘Honi. Soi. Qui. Mal. Y. Pense: The Caricature Shop of G. Humphrey, 27 St. James’s Street, London’, 338 original artworks vs prints discourses, 336, 348, 353–4 parallels with exhibition spaces, 344–6, 348 in Persuasion (Austen), 337–8, 339 potential for political unrest, 339 range of, 335 in the Romantic era, 335–7, 353 ‘William Holland’s Print Room’ (Newton), 343–6, 344 women’s access to visual culture, 349–52 public lectures audiences for, 255–6, 257–9 audiovisuality of, 256, 264–7 on botany, 265, 266 Coleridge’s Shakespeare lectures, 256, 268–9 Davy’s live chemistry demonstrations, 255, 257, 263, 264 London Institution, 260, 261 in Microcosm of London (Ackermann), 259–60, 259, 264, 266 as multisensory experiences, 256, 265–8, 269 performativity of, 255 prints of, 255, 256–7, 260 rooms for, 256–7, 259–60, 266–7 the Royal Institution, 255, 256, 257, 258, 260, 264–6 ‘Scientific Researches!’ (Gillray), 257 Surrey Institution, 255, 256–9, 258, 260 use of specimens, 264 Pugin, Auguste Charles ‘Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, 101 Strand’, 349–51, 350 contributions to Microcosm (Ackermann), 259–60, 259

7786_McCue & Thomas.indd 543

images of public lectures, 255, 256–7, 260 ‘Royal Pavilion, Brighton’, 102 Punch, 357, 471, 473, 478 Purcell, Edward, 437, 438–40 Pye, Henry, 320 Quarterly Review, 351, 356, 359, 360, 363, 366–7, 369 Radcliffe, Ann Gaston de Blondeville, 33 illustrations in The Mysteries of Udolpho, 304–6, 305 mediation of antiquarian knowledge, 33 The Mysteries of Udolpho, 43, 54–5, 295 Raimbach, Abraham, 359–60 Ramberg, Johann Heinrich, 185, 346, 348 Raphael, 337 RÊVE (Romantic Europe: the Virtual Exhibition), 17 Reynolds, Joshua celebrity portraiture, 203 Count Ugolino and his Children, 44, 45 death of, 189 Discourses on Art, 115, 169, 191, 220, 245, 337, 395 Grand Manner martial portraits, 115 images of heroic masculinity, 152 images of The Faerie Queene, 374 large historical paintings, 192 Mrs Billington as St Cecilia, 201, 201, 202–3 Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse, 215–16, 221, 227, 231 on original artworks vs prints, 336 portrait of Elizabeth Beauclerk, 375 portrait of Lawrence Sterne, 203, 204, 215 Portrait of Omai, 77, 79–80, 80, 82, 83, 85, 87, 90 posthumous exhibitions, 17, 189 presidency of the Royal Academy, 169, 173, 191, 201, 203 private art collection, 173, 174 pupils, 196 reproductive engravings, 204 theatrical portraiture, 220–1 Riordan, John, 483, 484 Roch, Sampson Towgood, 508 Rockingham, Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of, 114–17, 123 Rogers, Samuel, 367, 453–5, 454, 460–4, 462, 463 Romanticism culture of visuality, 1–4, 256 digital recreations of the period, 16–17 figure of the Romantic artist, 189, 242 remediation of, 13–14

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544 index Romney, George Siddonian Recollections, 232–3, 233 theatrical portraiture, 220, 231–4 Rosa, Salvator, 296, 300 Roscoe, William, 170 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 245–6 Rowlandson, Thomas ‘Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, 101 Strand’, 349–51, 350 art of caricature, 64, 473–4 ‘Bookseller and Author’, 314 ‘A chemical lecture at the Surrey Institution’, 257–9, 258 ‘Connoisseurs – or Portrait Collectors!!!’, 348, 349 contributions to Microcosm (Ackermann), 259–60, 259 ‘Dinners Drest in the Neatest Manner’, 475, 475, 476 images of public lectures, 255, 256–7, 260 ‘An Imperial stride!’, 344 ‘New Invented Elastic Breeches’, 475–6 social commentary, 113 ‘Veneration’, 24, 25 Royal Academy of Arts The Academicians of the Royal Academy (Zoffany), 393–4, 394 Angelica Kauffmann’s membership, 206, 375, 393–4, 394, 404–5, 405 annual art exhibitions, 186, 192, 195, 344–5 art collection, 174–5 artistic training, 196 ban on engravers, 337, 359–60 establishment of, 170, 184, 188 ‘The Exhibition of the Royal Academy, 1787’ (Martini), 185, 346 ‘The Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Painting in the Year 1771’ (Brandoin), 344–5, 345 ‘Exhibition Somerset House: Tom and Bob’ (Alken), 186 foundation of, 191–2, 203 lecture theatre, 260–2, 261 Leda and the Swan, 175 original artworks vs prints, 353–4 Rome from the Vatican (Reynolds), 165, 165 Royal Academicians in General Assembly, 1795 (Singleton), 404–5, 405 support for a national collection, 173, 174, 175 visual aids for lectures, 262–3 women artists, 205–6 women members, 377–8 Rubens Hercules et Omphale, 302, 303 The Watering Place, 165 Ryland, William Wynne, 398, 400

7786_McCue & Thomas.indd 544

Salmon, Richard, 434–6, 435 Sandby, Paul, 62, 63, 131 Sanders, George, 213, 215 Schnebbelie, Jacob, 34–5 Scott, Walter Abbotsford Edition of the Waverley Novels, 363 The Abbott, 512 account of Calton Hill, 138–40 allusions to artists, 300–2 The Antiquary, 24 artistic prose techniques, 298 busts of, 212 caricatures, 327–31 on George IV’s coronation, 275–6 ‘The Great Unknown and the Great Captain Cutting Up Napoleon the Great’ (Cruikshank), 328–31, 330 ‘The Great Unknown Lately Discovered in Ireland’ (Cruikshank), 328, 329 historical novels, 508 illustrations of the works of, 364–5, 365, 366–7 involvement with Edinburgh’s National Monument, 142 The Lady of the Lake, 364–5, 365, 366, 367, 369 Lay of the Last Minstrel, 33, 364, 365, 366 mediation of antiquarian knowledge, 33 on modernity, 287 the picturesque or sublime mode, 298–300 the Poet Laureateship, 320, 327 portraits of, 212 Quentin Durward, 370 on Scottish national identity, 135–6 tourism inspired by, 366, 367–9 Turner’s illustrations, 356, 366–9, 368 visual-verbal intertextuality, 298–300 Waverley, 135–6, 298–302, 327, 510 scrapbooks/albums ‘The Adventures of an Album’, 442–4 artistic practices of, 430, 431 begging dog motif, 442, 444 commodification of prints and, 429–30, 433–4 female scrap-beggar images, 436–42, 437 female-focused artistic practices, 429, 430, 431, 433, 434–6 ‘The Gatherer’, 442, 443 the gypsy-beggar figure, 437, 438–40, 441–2 Hull’s scrap-beggar images, 436–8, 437, 439, 441–2 interactive nature of, 429 Purcell’s scrap-beggar images, 437, 438–9, 440 scholarship on, 447 the scrap aesthetic, 430–1, 432

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index 545 the scrap beggar in print, 442–6 ‘The Scrap Book’ (Lamb), 445–6 the scrap-beggar as a child, 440–2 the scrap-beggar trope, 429–30, 430, 431, 432–3, 434–47, 437 self-reflexivity of, 434–6 ‘Specimens of Art’ (Salmon), 434–6, 435 ‘A Thing of Shreds and Patches’, 436, 437 sculpture by Nollekens, 209–10, 211 portrait sculpture, 209–12, 215 see also classical sculpture Severin, John, 482 Severn, Joseph, 17, 313 Shakespeare, William Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, 10–11, 173, 192, 194, 194, 196, 223, 232, 233, 285, 360, 364, 398, 400–1 Coleridge’s lectures on, 256, 268–9 in Fuseli’s works, 222 Henry VI, Part 3, 30 King Lear, 269 links with the Gothic, 32, 43, 51 scenery and stage illusion, 32, 256 the scrap-beggar and allusions to, 436, 438 ‘Shakespeare Attended by Painting and Poetry’ (Banks), 11, 11, 400 Shakespeare Gallery, 231–2 Shelley, Mary Frankenstein, 41, 42, 60, 486, 487 The Last Man, 295, 296 Mary Shelley (film), 487, 488–91, 497 Shelley, Percy, 15, 42 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 490 Shepherd, Thomas Hosmer ‘Buildings on the East Side of Regent Street’, 132 ‘Bullock’s Museum, 22, Piccadilly’, 285, 286 documentation of London’s development, 135 ‘The Marble Arch’, 134 The National Gallery and Nelson’s Column, 180 ‘The Quadrant, and Part of Regent Street’, 136 Sheridan, Thomas, 232 Short, Maria Theresa, 138 Siddons, Sarah celebrity status, 220 Coleridge’s impressions of, 268 control over her profile and image, 215–16 John Philip Kemble as Macbeth and Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth (Beach), 224, 225 Lawrence’s portraits of, 216–17, 227, 229 Lawrence’s relationship with, 207, 216–17, 225–6

7786_McCue & Thomas.indd 545

Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth (Fuseli), 222–3, 223 Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse (Reynolds), 215–16, 221, 227, 231 Romney’s portrait, 232 Sarah Siddons? as Mrs Haller in ‘The Stranger’ (Lawrence), 217, 217 Sarah Siddons (Lawrence), 217, 227–9, 228, 231 Sarah Siddons with the Emblems of Tragedy (Beechey), 216 Siddonian Recollections (Romney), 232–3, 233 Singleton, Henry, 404–5, 405 sister arts Angelica Kauffmann’s use of, 393, 395–7, 396, 402–3, 402 commercial potential of print, 400–1 consolidation of professional credibility, 398–400 ekphrasis, 3–4, 391–2 history of, 391–3 poetry and painting, 391–3, 395–7 within print culture, 398–400, 404 scholarship on, 391–2 ‘Shakespeare Attended by Painting and Poetry’ (Banks), 11, 11, 400 Slade, Thomas Moore, 170 Smith, Adam, 190, 191 Smith, Horace, 433 Smith, James Edward, 265 Smith, John Thomas, 238 Smith, John Warwick, 66 Smith, William, 71, 72 Soane, John, 260, 262–3 Society of Antiquaries of London (SAL) art collection, 166 Asiatic Society of Bengal and the SAL, 35 Bronze Age object engraving, 26–8, 27 exhibition practices, 27–8 large-scale historical prints, 23, 24 Sandal Castle engraving, 28–30, 29 Vetusta Monumenta print series, 24–30 visual sources for engravings, 28–30 Society of Dilettanti, 166 Somerville, William, 452 Southey, Robert on albums and scrapbooks, 432 caricatures, 318, 319, 322–4 epic poems, 95 Poet Laureateship, 320, 322, 324–6 ‘A Poet Mounted on the Court Pegasus’ (Williams), 322–3, 322 Vision of Judgement, 323–4 Wat Tyler, 322

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546 index Spenser, Edmund aspects of Elizabeth I in The Faerie Queene, 376 depictions of Spencer’s female characters, 374–5 The Faerie Queene, 46, 47–8, 374 Una in The Faerie Queene, 374–5, 376–7 see also Beauclerk, Lady Diana St Paul’s Cathedral, 166 Staël, Madame de, 307–9, 307, 308, 507 Sterne, Lawrence frontispiece portrait, 203–4, 306 imagination and mental images, 357, 370–1 A Sentimental Journey, 357, 370 Tristram Shandy, 472 Stothard, Thomas illustrations for Cowper’s works, 360–2, 361, 365–6 illustrations for Italy (Rogers), 367, 453, 454 ‘Kate is Craz’d’, 361, 362 reputation as an illustrator, 360, 367 Strutt, Joseph, 35 Stubbs, George, 192 Stukeley, William, 28 sublime Burke on, 40, 41, 191, 487 embodied responses to, 59 as a gendered concept, 487, 488–90, 494 in music, 237 sublime subjectivity in the visual arts, 492 symbolism of the colour blue in film, 488–94, 497 women’s domestic labour as, 488–9, 489 Teniers the Younger, David, 40, 41 Teulon, Harriet Mary, 460 theatre antiquarianism and recreations of the past, 32, 33–4, 221 Blue-Beard, or Female Curiosity! (Colman), 96–7, 107 celebrity culture, 215, 220 entertainment technologies, 284 George Romney’s association with, 231–2 The Magic of Orosmanes (Dibdin), 96–7 Omai; or a trip around the world, 77, 82–5, 87 pantomime, 220 popular political engagement through, 96 popular representations of the East, 96–8, 99–100, 107 relationship between the visual and performing arts, 220–2, 268–9 set design and staging, 32, 43, 220, 221 Skelt’s Scenes in Timour the Tartar, 98, 99, 101

7786_McCue & Thomas.indd 546

stage sets, 283 styles of acting, 220 theatrical portraiture, 215–17, 220–1, 224–34 time and space in, 222–4, 231, 233–4 Timour the Tartar (Lewis), 96, 98, 99–100, 107 see also Kemble, John Phillip; Shakespeare, William; Siddons, Sarah Thelwall, John, 264 Thicknesse, Philip, 412–13 Thomas, David (Dafydd Ddu Eryri), 71 Thornton, Robert John, 423–4 Timbs, John, 2 Town and Country, 413 Townley, Charles Charles Townley and His Friends in the Towneley Gallery, 33 Park Street, Westminster (Zoffany), 121, 122 Charles Townley with a Group of Connoisseurs (Cosway), 121 classical sculpture collection, 114, 118–20 collection in the British Museum, 166 paintings of his collections, 121–2 studies of sculpture, 121 The Townley Collection in the Dining Room at 7 Park Street (Chambers), 120 travel and tourism country houses, 486 domestic tourism, 5, 123 embodied responses of the travelling ‘self’, 5, 59, 60, 67–70 geological underscapes, 71, 72 the Grand Tour, 5, 58, 70–1, 114, 140, 169 heritage industry, 33, 486 illustration as virtual tourism, 366, 367–9 inspired by Scott’s poetry, 366, 367–9 material culture, 65 panoramas as virtual-reality tourism, 278 significant sites of Home Tours, 63, 64, 67–8 vision and the visionary, 67–9 in women’s magazines, 412–13, 415–16 travel writing from the Cook voyages, 78 empirical observation, 58–9, 60–3, 70 the Home Tour, 63, 70 Hutton’s tours of North Wales, 68–70, 69 influence on literary texts, 60 limitations of the tourist gaze, 71 Observations on the River Wye (Gilpin), 63–5 the picturesque mode, 59–60, 63–7, 68, 70 popularity of, 63 The Prelude (Wordsworth), 67–8 Tours (Pennant), 58, 60–3, 61, 62 travel and observation of British antiquities, 58–9

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index 547 Tregear, G. S., 442 Tupaia ‘Arioi dancer in Ra‘iatea’, 88–90, 89 illustrations from the Cook voyages, 77–8, 86–90 Maori Trading a Crayfish with Joseph Banks, 86–8, 87 tattoos and Indigenous identities, 86–7 visual mediation of the British perception of the Pacific, 86 Turner, Charles, 460, 461 Turner, J. M. W. artistic rivalry, 195 Edinburgh from Calton Hill, 139–40, 139 exhibitions, 188 illustrations for Italy (Rogers), 367, 462, 463 illustrations for Scott’s poetry, 356, 366–9, 368 Lecture Diagram, 262–3, 263 lecture theatre of the Royal Academy, 260, 262 ‘Nant Peris’, 66, 70 The North Gallery at Night, 124, 125 North Wales sketchbooks, 67, 70 The Opening of the Wallhalla, 166 presidency of the Royal Academy, 262 public display of great art, 165–6 Rome from the Vatican, 165 urban planning the city as artefact, 135 debates on commerce and the arts, 130, 131, 135, 143–4 and national identity, 6, 130, 131, 143–4 see also Edinburgh; London Verelst, John, 80–2, 81, 85 Vertue, George, 28–30, 29, 34 Vigée-Lebrun, Élisabeth, 307–8, 307 Vivares, Francis, 28 Walpole, Horace Beauclerk’s illustrations for The Mysterious Mother, 376 on cartoons, 471 The Castle of Otranto, 43–4, 51–2 on costumes of Mary Queen of Scots, 513 friendship with Diana Beauclerk, 374, 376, 379 on the Royal Academy’s annual exhibitions, 192 sale of his collection, 166–7 social commentary, 113 Strawberry Hill, 374, 376, 377, 379, 382, 384 Webber, John, 415 Weddell, William, 118 Wedgwood, Josiah, 70–1, 150, 376, 382, 387

7786_McCue & Thomas.indd 547

Weeton, Ellen, 67 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of, 133 Wellington, Duke of, 212 West, Benjamin The Cave of Despair, 48, 48 ‘Death of Wolfe’, 159, 189 images of The Faerie Queene, 374 large-scale religious paintings, 189, 204 presidency of the Royal Academy, 204 semi-public display of private collections, 173 West, Jane, 30 Westall, Richard, 213, 213, 364–5, 365, 366 Wheatley, Francis, 194 Wilkie, David, 188 Williams, Charles ‘The Moving Panorama – or Spring Garden Rout’, 273–5, 273 ‘A Noble Poet – Scratching up His Ideas’, 324, 326, 327 ‘A Poet Mounted on the Court Pegasus’, 322–3, 322 Wilson, Louise Ann, 17 Wilson, Richard, 58, 59, 63, 115 Wilson, Thomas, 28 Wilton, Joseph, 115 Winckelmann, J. J., 118, 121, 123 Wolff, Isabella, 229–31 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 60, 67 women access to visual culture, 349–52 amateur/professional women artists, 374, 375, 376 Austen as metaphor for the domestic feminine, 495–6 Byron’s Beauties, 363–4, 364 commemorative goods market, 151, 155 depictions of the female form, 340–3, 393–4, 394, 487, 494–8 domestic labour, 488–9 female scrap-beggar images, 436–42, 437 in Fuseli’s illustrations, 362, 362 the ‘Hottentot Venus’, 101, 102, 340, 342–3 Minerva and female agency, 378–9, 408, 409 the politics of women’s dress, 416–17 as print collectors, 346–8, 349–50 at public lectures, 255 in Stothard’s illustrations, 360–2, 361, 364 see also Beauclerk, Lady Diana; fashion; Lady’s Magazine, The; Siddons, Sarah women’s magazines fashion plates, 411, 420–3, 422, 424, 504, 506, 509, 514 La Belle Assemblée, 413, 421, 422, 504 Lady’s Monthly Museum, 421, 422, 432 portraits of women, 413 scholarship on, 410–11, 424

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548 index women’s magazines (cont.) specialist fashion magazines, 420–1, 506 travel writing, 412–13, 415–16 Woolmer, Alfred Joseph, 187 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 17, 67 Wordsworth, William ‘Happy Warrior’, 158 ‘Lines written above Tintern Abbey’, 65 Lyrical Ballads, 319 on modernity, 272, 286 on the panorama, 280 The Prelude, 60, 67–8, 256, 272, 286, 287 ‘The World is Too Much With Us’, 149

7786_McCue & Thomas.indd 548

Worsley, Richard, 123 Wright of Derby, Joseph, 49, 50, 192 Wyatville, Jeffrey, 124 Yeowell, Steve, 480–1 Young, Edward, 52, 357–8, 358 Zoffany, Johann The Academicians of the Royal Academy, 393–4, 394 Charles Townley and His Friends in the Towneley Gallery, 33 Park Street, Westminster, 121, 122 theatrical portraiture, 224

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